Today marks the likely anniversary of Jesus’ circumcision if he was born on December 25. He probably wasn’t, but as long as Christians maintain the tradition of observing his birthday on Christmas, they should remember his bris eight days later.
The Catholic Church used to. From some point in the Middle Ages until 1960, January 1 in the Roman calendar was designated “the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord and the Octave of the Nativity.” In 1960, that title was trimmed to “the Octave of the Nativity.” In 1969, it became “the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God,” even though, as Maureen Mullarkey has pointed out, about 30 days of the calendar were already dedicated to Mary in some fashion or other. Catholics are in no danger of forgetting the importance of the Theotokos.
For the most part, what they have already forgotten is the importance of what the annual, ritual observance of their Lord’s circumcision once served to remind them of: that Jesus is a Jewish man. They might feel that stressing either part of that identity, Jewish and male, would be an impediment to Christianity’s universal mission, but Christ is not “cosmic,” as Maureen remarks. And he’s not Catholic, or a Christian of any conventional description. He’s Jewish. And he belongs to the category of Jews whose anatomy enabled them to be circumcised. Women saints have had visions in which they were united in mystical marriage with Jesus. Men may be more drawn to meditate on the Twelve, his closest friends, an elite fraternity with whom he formed a powerful bond.
Maureen notes that hostility to circumcision in post-Christian Europe — only a shadow of that hostility is evident in the United States, but it may be growing — predates the concern of Europeans over Muslim presence on their continent. In the Catholic Church, it had long been a pious tradition to see Jesus’ circumcision, the first shedding of his blood, as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion, but by the middle of the 20th century the idea of blood sacrifice had stopped being acceptable to most Westerners, although they might have remained comfortably numb to stock phrases about Jesus’ dying for their sins. In the 1960s the Church also began to tone down its rhetoric about the Mass as a sacrifice that, if you thought about it, jumped out at you as a clear allusion to the Temple sacrifice that Jesus knew in Jerusalem.
An Evangelical friend from Uganda once told me that one reason Africa has been so receptive to Christianity is that for many Africans the concept of blood sacrifice is not so strange. To an extent that others cannot, they can still hear and appreciate the teaching that Jesus bled to save our souls from damnation. For most Westerners anymore, the statement that he did sounds merely formulaic and abstract, in part because we want it to.