Not Made with Hands

HOLY NAME

Psalm 103 • Psalm 148
Gen. 17:1-12a,15-16 • Col. 2:6-12 • John 16:23b-30

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me... circumcision in accordance with Jewish ceremonial laws? The circumcision of Christ was sanitized out of the Great Litany in the 1979 Prayer Book, replaced by "submission to the Law,” but in The Fingerprints of God, Robert Farrar Capon objects to this substitution: “The original word was carrying freight I’m not willing to jettison.” The circumcision of Jesus is not dispensable because it makes us uncomfortable for being inherently phallic and/or ethically questionable as far as bodily autonomy is concerned. It is the Old Covenant of blood shed from the infant body of the Incarnate God whose blood would be shed again 33 years later to establish the New Covenant.

Our “spiritual circumcision” or “circumcision not made with hands,” depending on your translation of today’s reading from Colossians, is a revelation “of the universal dispensation by which the Catholic Mystery himself dwells among us. Because he is the eternal Beloved—the Icon of God, the One by whom all things are made and in whom all things consist—what happens to him happens to everybody, and what happens to everybody happens in him.” The church does not bring Christ to a Christ-less world just as we don’t circumcise everyone with the relevant body part. We bear witness to the pre-existent fact of Christ’s dwelling in every single person—our scalpel-less inclusion in the everlasting covenant between God and all people.

Written by Kathryn Haydon

Kathryn studies rice quality and disease as a PhD candidate in Plant Science at the University of Arkansas and will be taking a break from writing Morning Reflections while she writes her dissertation in anticipation of graduating in Summer 2021.