Readings:
- 1st Sunday of Christmas: Matthew 2:13-end
- Holy Innocents: Matthew 2:13-18
Sermon:
I wonder what the aftermath of Christmas is feeling like for you? Even if it’s proving a bit of a letdown, it’s almost certainly not going to be anywhere near as bad as it is for the residents of Bethlehem after that first Christmas. Whether your church is using the readings for the first Sunday after Christmas, or those for Holy Innocents’ day, the gospel reading covers much the same territory. This is where the Christmas story changes from a U rating to an 18.
According to Matthew, “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.” Historically, it’s perfectly plausible. Herod was quite capable of acts of violence in defence of his throne: at various points in his reign he had his wife, his mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, and two of his sons executed. The emperor Augustus, knowing the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, is supposed to have quipped that “It’s better to be Herod’s pig than his son!”
So it might well have happened. But Matthew and Luke tell such different stories, that many scholars think they’re more likely to be telling stories around the tradition they both share, to bring out the meaning of Jesus’ birth for their first listeners and readers. That common tradition might go something like this. “Jesus’ birth was announced by an angel. He was conceived from a virgin named Mary, who was engaged to Joseph. He was born in Bethlehem, a descendant of David.”
Both Matthew and Luke know that Jesus comes from Nazareth, and work out different ways of reconciling the tradition of his birth in Bethlehem to his life in Nazareth, as they develop their stories to help people understand Jesus’ significance. Luke has the story start in Nazareth and tells a story of a (highly unlikely) census that gets them to Bethlehem. Matthew, the gospel we’re mainly following this year, seems to have the family home in Bethlehem, and gets the family to Nazareth as a place out of the king’s reach, and only after an unspecified period as asylum-seekers in Egypt.
For me that means that Matthew’s story – while still perfectly possible – is more about him portraying Jesus as reliving the experience of Israel’s history, and identifying with God’s people. He undergoes exile (like the people who were carried off after the destruction of Jerusalem in 597 BC). Matthew underlines that point by using a prophecy from Jeremiah that was originally about that destruction “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation” and relating it to Herod’s baby massacre. But Jesus also undergoes the foundational experience of the exodus. Just like the people Moses led, he comes up out of Egypt into the promised land. And Matthew also underlines that point by applying to Jesus a quotation from Hosea that was originally about the people of Israel: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
Matthew, then, wants his listeners, wants us, to understand that the story he is beginning to tell is a story of how God is with us in the real world of our history. Jesus – who he names – using yet another prophecy – as Emmanuel (a Hebrew name meaning God with us) is the who and the how of God’s presence in the world. And as this grim and tragic story makes clear, he does not make all things safe and hunky-dory, but comes into a world of tragedy and terror as well as love and rejoicing. If God, through Joseph’s dreams, allows Jesus to escape this tragedy, it is only so that he will be able to take up his cross.
The love and the joy of Christmas celebrates something very real and important. But this brutal story of the massacre of Bethlehem’s infants reminds us that horror and evil can rise up and claim people’s lives at any time. The story that Mattthew is beginning here, however, is the story of how that love will take on the horror and the evil, and defeat it by letting it do its worst to him. It is a story of how Jesus is God-with-us – in the worst as well as the ordinary and the best. Christmas is -literally, a story about belief in this down-to-earth God.
Questions
- What helps you deal with and respond to the disturbing and difficult nature of today’s gospel story?
- Does it help you to know that there’s room in the pages of the Bible to include the dark side of life?
- How important is it to you that in Jesus God joins us in the pain, hurt and grief of human life to bring us to joy?