SECOND SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS

January 5, 2024

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

 

 

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 the parish—but he’d fallen away and stopped attending in his adult years. Apart from Christmas and Easter, he didn’t come to church anymore. Explaining why, he commented that the Christian Gospel was a “nice story,” but not anything that contemporary people could 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, and maybe to the occasional wedding or funeral, might get the impression that all we have to offer them is just a nice story.

 

Come to church on Easter 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. Come to church on Christmas Eve, and you’ll hear the joyous angelic proclamation 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 all you’ve heard is a nice story.

 

Today’s Gospel, however, relates the series of dark events that overshadow Matthew’s account of the wise men or magi 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 warned in a dream not to return to Herod, the magi depart to their own country by another way. Then Joseph is similarly warned in a dream to take Jesus and Mary and flee into Egypt, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.

Realizing that the wise men have tricked him, Herod 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 what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

 

Some of the parishes I’ve previously served hold an annual children’s Christmas pageant that’s one of the high points of the Church year. In most such 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 one of my parishes, this was a stunning spectacle that rounded off the pageant with a magnificent flourish.

 

However, I’m told that in some parts of the country, some pageants used not to end there, but instead followed the pattern of medieval mystery plays in continuing the story through the slaughter of the 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 may 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 life in a fallen world.

 

Still, in order to save us, Jesus must become incarnate in precisely such a world. If the Incarnation of the Son of God is to speak to us as something more than just a nice story, then it must be able to offer hope in a world of suicide bombings, of children kidnapped and forced to become child soldiers, of ethnic populations displaced by massacres, 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, with all its pain and grief, so that no matter what we may have to face in this life, we need never be alone. Jesus is always there for us, and with us; he knows what we’re going through, for he’s gone through worse himself. And he offers us the hope that because he 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 the unending bliss of his divine life in heaven.

The slaughter of the innocents, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, remind us that Jesus is born not into a fairytale world of angels, shepherds, and exotic sages from faraway lands, but rather into the same world we see depicted every day on the news. The Son of God becomes incarnate amidst the stark cruelty of this very world we inhabit. 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 thirty some years later. But that, as we know, was not the end of the story!

 

All this 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 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.