It’s pretty odd, isn’t it? In our age in which all sorts of things having to do with our private parts are shouted from TikTok and blared from the YouTube channel, we really don’t talk about the mystery of the Circumcision of Christ.
Yet, for a millennium or so, the Octave or eighth day of Christmas, January 1 was celebrated in the Latin Rite as the Feast of the Circumcision. It still is on the older Latin Rite calendar, the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox calendars, and even the calendars of Anglicans and Lutherans. Today, the feast on the modern Latin Rite calendar clearly recalls the Circumcision, but the feast itself is known as the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, in continuity with the name of the feast in ancient Rome. It is indeed a mystery that has intrigued Christians throughout history. What is mysterious about it?
To answer this question, we need to remember that when we refer to this event as a “mystery,” we are referring to a theological mystery and not a whodunit mystery. Theological mysteries are events in which the divine light is so bright that we can’t completely see or understand all the goodness that God has made available to us. One might object that labeling this event, which is described laconically in one single verse of the Gospel, as full of divine light is over-egging the spiritual Christmas pudding.
That’s not how the Tradition has seen it. For the Catholic, every episode in the life of Jesus is itself mysterious because what happens to or is done by Jesus is done by a divine person with a full human nature. God himself, we can say, was an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a boy, a man. That’s why the Catholic Tradition developed the way of speaking called communicatio idiomatum, or communication of properties, whereby we can talk about Christ’s human properties and experiences as if they belonged to his divine nature and his divine properties as if they belonged to his human nature. We can refer to Jesus’ omnipotence and we can refer to God’s suffering and God’s hands. If you have ever heard or read somebody say, “Zounds,” you have heard a shortened form of “by God’s wounds!”
Every aspect of Christ’s life has significance that is infinite even if, in the case of His circumcision, the biblical narrative is spare. All we are told is recounted in Luke 2:21: “And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”
It doesn’t say who did the circumcising, but most scholars are pretty sure that it would have been Joseph. Though later Jewish practice was to have the circumcision done publicly in a synagogue, at the time of Christ’s birth, a boy was usually circumcised by his father in the family dwelling. That it would have been Joseph was significant, for as Matthew’s Gospel records, it is His foster father through whom our Lord’s descent from both King David and Abraham is traced. Jesus of Nazareth is a true child of the covenant with Abraham, whose submission to the commands of that covenant are enacted by one who is also a son of David (another person to whom a covenant was given).
Yet, it may be significant that Luke doesn’t say who circumcised the Lord, for the practice was that the father who circumcised was also the one who gave the name to the boy. In this case, as we read, the name had been given by the child’s true Father through the angel Gabriel.
Thus, we have three aspects of the mystery already. The first is that Jesus was not merely divine or merely human, but possessed of both the fullness of divinity and of human nature. St. Thomas Aquinas says the first reason for Christ to be circumcised was “to prove the reality of His human nature, in contradiction to the Manicheans, who said that He had an imaginary body: and in contradiction to Apollinarius, who said that Christ’s body was consubstantial with His Godhead; and in contradiction to Valentine, who said that Christ brought His body from heaven.” He took on human nature in every aspect except sin. He was, like all of us, sexual, yet because He neither was subject to the weakness and disintegration of original sin nor did he ever choose against the Father’s will for Him, His sexual nature did not cause the problems it causes for us.
Second, the eternal Son and Word of the Father, begotten before all ages, did not merely take human nature, however, as wonderful as that is. He took human nature as a child of Abraham and Israel. In his circumcision, His life was marked out as a life of obedience to God through the covenants given to Abraham and to Israel through Moses. He was and is a true son of Abraham and Israel, who allowed Himself to be bound by commandments that were not strictly necessary morally to show us what true obedience is.
And, third, in His being named according to the angel’s command, His life was marked out as a life of obedience to His Father in a more direct way. If fully human, He was and is also the true and only begotten Son of the Father, taking His name and His mission directly from Him. His name, “Jesus,” means “God saves.” It is the same as that of Joshua, who led the children of Israel into the Promised Land of Canaan. That name signals that He is the new and true Joshua, who leads the new and true Israel, all those who follow Him, into the ultimate Promised Land of God’s never-ending presence.
It is this aspect of the mystery that is connected to the concrete details of the action. Circumcision involves blood, and blood symbolizes life. Why were Christians so fascinated by Christ’s circumcision for so much of history? Because He who came to shed His blood on the cross in order to save us began the sacrifice at the very beginning of His career. His sacrifice was not limited to His taking up the Cross. Instead, it was an offering of His entire life from beginning to end.
That’s why there are so many icons and paintings of the Circumcision of the Lord throughout Christian history. Many of them place the event in the Temple. Even if that isn’t the way it happened, this artistic choice conveys the theological truth about His entire life being a sacrifice. Christ lived and bled for us from the beginning.
A kontakion (or Byzantine liturgical hymn) sung in the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox liturgy on the Feast attributes sanctifying power to that act:
The Lord of all submits to circumcision, and in His love cuts off the failings of mortals. He gives the world salvation….
Similarly, the poet John Milton conveys the wonder of this feast in his poem “Upon the Circumcision.” The marvel is that even Christ’s bleeding as an infant is for our healing.
He, who with all Heaven’s heraldry whilere [a while ago]
Entered the world, now bleeds to give us ease;
Alas, how soon our sin
Sore doth begin
His Infancy to seize!
Circumcision of the flesh is not necessary for Christians today. Christ’s obedience to the old covenants was part of His mission to fulfill them. Today, all can enter the Covenant of Jesus Christ, Son of David, Abraham, and, most importantly, God the Father, through Baptism.
St. Paul writes to the Colossians about how this Baptism is the true circumcision of the heart, the internal and complete transformation that is wrought by God. “In him also,” St. Paul writes, “you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ;and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col 2:11-12). As he writes in chapter three of the letter, we too can now live a new life of complete obedience to the Father, one in which we give thanks in all things and do “everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (3:17).
And it’s all thanks to the sacrificial life of Jesus Christ, whose obedience was perpetual and whose blood was shed from the very beginning for our salvation. Let’s not overlook the Circumcision of the Lord anymore.
(Note: Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Servant.)
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Excellent reflections, Mr. Deavel.
This fine article on a now-neglected Feast of the Circumcision omits one salient aspect: to be circumcised necessarily means that that the Christ Child – the Messiah – was a male child. That, too, was by the the Father’s design and will. Christ’s “maleness” is also part of the Incarnational Mystery.
Late medieval and Renaissance art often makes a point of exhibiting the genitalia of the bare-naked Christ Child as a demonstration that he was an actual human male. Some of these paintings were touched up with discreet drapery later, just as happened to Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel.
Thank God they were.
An excellent observation, Sandra. If one searches on line for late Medieval and Renaissance images of the Holy Family and/or the Virgin with the Christ Child and St. John the Baptist, one will find exactly what you’re alluding to.
I get it that Paul wanted do lower the barrier to new adult males in converting to the Faith. However, Jesus was circumcised, which theologically makes no sense. Since He came to fulfill the laws and covenants including the Abrahamic covenant of Circumcision. Where a man’s original sin, although still applied, is covered along with his children under the Abrahamic Covenant which was made between God and man looking forward to the Lamb of Gods sacrifice. But Christ obeyed all things so was circumcised, and as He is the model so did my father, myself and my sons.
Circumcision & spanking are two conversations that seldom lead to charity but there are in fact legit health reasons behind circumcision beyond the religious origin.
“Overlooked” or suppressed? It didn’t exclude itself from the Novel Liturgical Calendar.