SECOND SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS

January 2, 2022

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N. J.

Matthew 2:1-12

Some years ago, I was talking to a former parishioner of the church where I was then serving as Rector. This man had been brought up in the church—the son of several generations of prominent members of this well-known Anglo-Catholic parish—but he’d fallen away and stopped attending in his adult years. Apart from customary family attendance at Christmas and Easter, he didn’t come to church anymore. Explaining why, he commented bluntly that while the Christian Gospel was a “nice story,” it wasn’t anything that people in the contemporary world could any longer find credible or take seriously.

What intrigued me then, and still does now, was his characterization of the Gospel as a “nice story.” That’s not quite how I would describe it. But, on reflection, perhaps we can understand how people who come to church twice a year, as well as to the occasional wedding or funeral, might get the impression that all we have to offer them is just a nice story.

Come on Easter Sunday morning without having attended on Palm Sunday or Good Friday, and you hear the proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection without the prior unpleasantness of his Crucifixion. Likewise, come to church on Christmas Eve, and you hear the joyous angelic announcement to the shepherds: "Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."

But if you don’t come back on the subsequent days of the Christmas season to hear what happens next, you might be excused for thinking that what you’ve heard is nothing more than a nice story. In today’s Gospel, however, hints of the dark events about to take place overshadow Matthew’s account of the wise men bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to worship the newborn King.

In fear for his reign and indeed his life, King Herod secretly summons the wise men and asks them to come back and tell him when they’ve found the child, so that he too may come and worship him. But the wise men are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and they depart to their own country by another way. Then, in the verses immediately following today’s Gospel, Joseph is similarly warned in a dream to take Jesus and Mary and to flee into Egypt, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.

Realizing that the wise men have tricked him, Herod then sends his troops to kill all the male children under two years of age in the vicinity of Bethlehem. So, Matthew writes in some of the most poignant words in all the New Testament: “Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.’”

I’m really looking forward to the Epiphany Pageant next Sunday. I don’t know what the practice is here at St. Uriel’s, but in most Christmas or Epiphany pageants that I’ve seen, the climactic moment has always been the arrival of the three kings to honor the newborn Christ child with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In my last parish, this was a stunning spectacle that always rounded off the pageant with a magnificent flourish.

However, in some parts of the country, or so I’m told, some pageants used not to end there, but instead followed the pattern of the medieval mystery plays in continuing right through the slaughter of the Holy Innocents and the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. (Apparently, the kids playing the roles of Herod’s soldiers and their young victims really got into it!) Whatever we might think of the effect of such gruesome play-acting on impressionable young minds—and I’m certainly not encouraging it—one thing we can say for sure is that anyone witnessing such a pageant would be free of any illusion that this is a nice story. It’s instead a story that lays bare, with stark realism, the cruelty of human life in a fallen world.

Still, if Jesus comes to save us, then he must become incarnate in precisely such a world as this. If the Christmas message is to speak to us as something more than just a nice story, it must be able to offer hope in a world of suicide bombings, of children kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, of whole ethnic populations displaced by massacres and the burning of their villages, of migrants forced to flee their homelands to find safety and security in new lands.

The most basic affirmation of the Christian faith is that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That is, God saves us not by waving a magic wand to make all the word’s troubles disappear. Rather he does something infinitely more radical and profound: he comes down from heaven to share in our human life, in all its pain and suffering, so that no matter what we may have to face in this life, we need never be alone. Jesus is there for us, and with us; he knows what we’re going through, because he’s gone through worse himself. And he offers us the hope that because he thus shares with us in all the joys and sorrows of our human life on earth, so he’ll bring us to share with him in his divine life in heaven.

King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, remind us that Jesus is born not into a fairytale land of angels, shepherds, and exotic sages from faraway places, but rather into the same world we see depicted every day on the network news. The Son of God becomes incarnate amidst all this stark cruelty. Our Lord knows what it’s like to be a migrant, for he started his earthly life as a migrant himself. He’s no stranger to the violence of the powerful, which almost succeeded in extinguishing his human life as soon as he was born, and which ultimately succeeded in ending his earthly career on a cross outside Jerusalem thirty some years later. (But that, as we know, is not the end of the story!)

All this and more is entailed in the Christian affirmation that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And no, it’s not a nice story. But it is very Good News! A nice story cannot change lives, let alone transform the world. The Good News can—and does. So, we make it our business as the Church to continue sharing this Good News in this New Year of the Lord’s grace and favor that has now dawned upon us.