John Milton’s Upon the Circumcision

The familiar Christmas passage in Luke 2 ends at verse 20: “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” In 1642, John Milton published a poem that takes as its subject the events of the next verse: “And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus.” Don’t look for a reenactment of verse 21 at any live nativity scenes this year, but Milton was right to find significance in it. In fact, we’ll hear a reading of the twenty-eight line poem at this year’s Christmas Eve service.

Why?  Because Upon The Circumcision properly, and worshipfully, locates within this early event in Christ’s life the seed of his atoning work on the cross. Milton presents the pain of Christ’s circumcision as a mini-crucifixion, a foreshadowing of the final passion at Golgotha, that causes the very angels who only eight days earlier had sung a song of triumph to the shepherds to now mourn and wince. Already, Christ “bleeds to give us ease” the poem reads. There is a “and so it begins” quality to this presentation of the circumcision of Jesus, as if the walk to Calvary begins here; as if our joy, so newly minted on the shepherds’ hill, must, already, be turned to tears. It portrays his mortal life as one in which the propitiatory spilling of blood exists in a gestalt, inchoate, form from the beginning, even at eight-days old in Simeon’s arms. He is the suffering servant already. He is sympathetic to our griefs, even now.

As the preeminent poet of the Protestant tradition, Milton was eager to lay creative claim to those scenes from Jesus’s life that had not already been covered extensively by the Roman Catholic tradition. It is for this reason that Milton largely avoided the crucifixion and (with the exception of the Nativity Ode) the actual birth of Christ. Instead, we see extensive treatments of the first three chapters of Genesis in Paradise Lost and the temptation of Jesus in the desert in Paradise Regained. Upon The Circumcision is of a piece with the latter in its portrayal of a relatively obscure moment in Jesus’ life out of which Milton teases the threads of the profoundest gospel truths.

Poets, like Milton, who, for reasons either personal or cultural, have turned their attention sympathetically to Christianity occupy a curious place in the Christian’s life. These poems are not Scripture, of course; and you won’t find them in the Religious Lit section of the bookstore, but, like the very best of the Church’s hymns, they have the power to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Like a night out on the town with your wife, they keep things fresh. Milton and George Herbert and Edward Taylor and John Donne and Henry Vaughan and Gerard Manley Hopkins and all the rest pull us off the paths of habit that are spiritual minds ordinarily walk. We readily accept the fact that our doctors know best how to care for our bodies; mechanics, our cars; and accountants, our finances. Occasional public readings from this tradition, like what we have planned for Christmas Eve, acts as a similar acknowledgment that imaginative engagement with spiritual truths is an area of our life requiring guidance. The majesty of redemption is too great, too large, too lovely, to be filtered only through our own thoughts. Lets get some help.