God With Us [Christmas II]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

God with us

It is still Christmas.  But the plot has twisted, has grown twisted.  The angels did not declare the terror that would come so early in the life of the baby Christ.  The shepherds did not offer this news to his parents.  Mary did not treasure in her heart the hard destiny of her newborn son. 

It was supposed to be a time of celebration; Mary and Joseph were new parents; their baby was healthy, thanks be to God; Mary's life was preserved through the pain and anxiety of child-birth.  The struggles were supposed to be those common to new parents: enduring sleepless nights, coaxing a successful and productive latch, helping mom recover from the physical trauma of child-birth, enduring whatever postpartum symptoms might occur in the weeks following.  It was supposed to be the normal new normal.

Certainly, Joseph, a common laborer, a man from a village in the hills, would never have anticipated that his baby son would gain the attention of a king.  Jesus slept in a feed trough; he was the son of simple peasants.  Certainly, Joseph would have never considered that little child a threat to the local despot or to the empire.  Jesus had no words to make into revolutionary speeches, no strength to hold a sword, no followers to form an army.  Certainly Joseph did not expect to be the parent and guardian of an infant political refugee.  And yet, with his young family, Joseph finds himself fleeing from the wrath of a king he does not know, on the the long road to Egypt.  Like his namesake and forefather, Joseph and his family found asylum in the same nation from which the children of Joseph long ago escaped through the Red Sea.

And once again, like they had before, the strange instructions came from the divine realm.  I wonder which heavenly message was more difficult to believe: this one or the time an angel told him his virgin fiancee was with child?  I suppose after the first declaration proved true, the second was made more believable.  He was well-practiced, and well-traveled, by the time yet another angelic dictum sent him back home to Israel.

This story falls hard into Jesus' birth narrative.  After all, this is the story the angels called “good news of great joy for all the people.”  And yet, before Jesus is even able to string together a single sentence of good news, terrible violence breaks into the Christmas story.  In the verses omitted from today's Gospel reading, Herod's soldiers kill all the baby boys in the region – destroying young lives and devastating families, murdering the future of his people.  Herod preferred to slaughter salvation rather than risk his power and legacy.  That was the ruler's response to the good news of great joy.    

This story falls hard into Jesus' birth narrative because it tempers our romantic sentimentality with a harsh reminder; this story is a microcosm of God's long-suffering love affair with humankind – a series of heartbreaks that stretches back to the very first human creatures. God loves and we rebel. God draws near and we push away.  God gets under our skin and a death warrant is decreed.

And what amazes me is that God did not just call the whole thing off.  Because that would have made sense.  It would have been justified.  But instead, God loves us through our violence and anger and rage and doubt and resistance – like a parent hugging a toddler through a tantrum. 

It is as if it was just a part of Incarnation – another way in which Jesus came to know the pain and struggle of human existence – a necessary evil borne by the same God who bears our griefs, and carries our sorrows. For the first time, God lived in exile. For the first time, God felt the threat of terror. For the first time, not the last, but the first, God experienced the pursuit of death. As a threatened, hunted, hated little child, Jesus invited the refugee experience into the heart of God so that no little refugee child would ever again have to journey alone, no precious child of God would ever walk that harsh road on his or her own. The Incarnation means that God too has been threatened and unwanted and exiled and away from home. The Incarnation means God walks the road too.

This story falls hard into Jesus' birth narrative to show us that the beauty of the Incarnation is unsullied by even the worst expresses of evil. God's light shines brightest in the darkness, scatters the darkness, overcomes the darkness.  Walter Brueggemann reflects on this in his poem, Christmas…the Very Next Day:

Had we the chance, we would have rushed to Bethlehem
to see this thing that had come to pass.

Had we been a day later,
we would have found the manger empty
and the family departed.

We would have learned that they fled to Egypt,
warned that the baby was endangered,
sought by the establishment of the day
that understood how his very life
threatened the way things are.

We would have paused at the empty stall
and pondered how this baby
from the very beginning was under threat.

The powers understood that his grace threatened all our coercions;
they understood that his truth challenged all our lies;
they understood that his power to heal nullified our many pathologies;
they understood that his power to forgive vetoed the power of guilt
and the drama of debt among us.

From day one they pursued him,
and schemed and conspired
until finally…on a grey Friday…
they got him!

No wonder the family fled, in order to give him time for his life.

We could still pause at the empty barn –
and ponder that all our babies are born under threat, all the
vulnerable who stand at risk before predators,
our babies who face the slow erosion of consumerism,
our babies who face the reach of sexual exploitation,
our babies who face the call to war,
placed as we say, “in harm’s way,”
our babies, elsewhere in the world,
who know of cold steel against soft arms
and distended bellies from lack of food;
our babies everywhere who are caught in the fearful display of ruthless adult power.

We ponder how peculiar this baby at Bethlehem is,
summoned to save the world,
and yet we know, how like every child, this one also was at risk.

The manger is empty a day later…
the father warned in a dream.
Our world is so at risk, and yet we seek after and wait for
this child named “Emmanuel.”
Come be with us, you who are called “God with us.”[1]

It is still Christmas.  And though the violent still rage, and though the powerful still hunger, and though children are still at risk, the news is still good, the joy is still great, the light still shines in the darkness: God is still with us.  

---

[1]   Prayers for a Privileged People, 73-4.