The Second Sunday after Christmas, January 3rd, 2010
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black, preaching
Jeremiah 31: 7-14
Psalm 84: 1-8
Ephesians 1: 3-6, 15-19a
Matthew 2: 13-15, 19-23
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN.
The Christmas order of readings is usually this: Christmas Eve and Christmas: Luke's Christmas birth narrative, then the Sunday after that "In the beginning was the word, " then the next Sunday the Magi, counting as the Epiphany, and so the following Sunday is the baptism of Jesus. These are all elevated slightly mystical readings, which have metaphor and mystery, and a kind of hyper-churchiness to them. Moreover, because few churches are daily Mass churches any more, we miss the saints' days following Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents. Since, in this year, there is an opportunity to hear the flight into Egypt, it seems worth thinking about this whole week, and so I included the missing three verses to the Gospel, to include the Holy Innocents.
Today's Gospel tells a more narrative, historical, and personal account of the early days of Jesus' life. It is not lyrical or theological like John's Gospel, nor is the worrisome story about Jesus staying behind at the Temple, and showing what was to come, a person hearing God clearly and being much involved with the Temple to his parents' stress and his own danger.
The church has designated the week after the Nativity with three martyrdoms. First is St. Stephen. Remember that stephanos means crown, so the person so designated won an eternal crown in his witness to Jesus Christ before he was stoned to death. He was reported to have said something like, "Which one of the Prophets did your fathers not persecute, and they killed the ones who prophesied the coming of the Just One, of whom now, too, you have become betrayers and murderers." (Acts 7:52) Dying, Stephen also said he saw Jesus the Son standing at the right hand of God the Father. The lore about St. Stephen says all of this and that he died @ 34/35 AD. However, James the Just, who was reported to have died in similar circumstances, saying roughly the same thing, died @ 62. A theory has been put forward that Stephen, "crown" in English, was actually a codename for James the Just, the long-time leader of the Jerusalem church who was put to trial by Sanhedrin and stoned in about 62 AD, almost 30 years later than Stephen. Thus, the story about Stephen's trial and stoning would have been a description, or at least a dramatization, of the last moments of James the Just, which the author of the Acts deliberately or unknowingly inserted into a chronologically incorrect place, simultaneously creating a new martyr for the early church. The fact that Stephen appears from nowhere, is sentenced to death in an emotional public trial by the Romans, and is then altogether forgotten as if nothing happened is somewhat telling, but both his and James' trials also share a great many similarities. In shape of story, in last words saying each saw two persons of the Trinity-the only two such reports in the literature-, in accusers, in means of death, and in the winning of the eternal crown of glory, St Stephen and James the Just are the same, so they are likely to be the same person. The martyrdom of St. Stephen though has been on the calendar right after Christmas to make the point that people have always been ready to go to their deaths proclaiming Christ.
The next saint after Christmas is St. John the Evangelist, responsible for so much of the written theology about Jesus in the Gospels. He was not martyred, but rather lived a long, long life. He was remembered as saying that such a long life was indeed its own cross of martyrdom in living, given that other followers of Jesus were allowed to go to paradise young, proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord. John instead lived out a long life proclaiming Jesus, but having to wait years, until his life was accepted into death and life with Jesus.
Finally in this week, comes the observance of the Holy Innocents, those children whom Herod had murdered in searching for the child prophesied to grow to be "king of the Jews," and so posing a threat to him, he imagined.
In the late 16th century, William Byrd wrote a lullaby to the slaughtered innocent children saying:
Lulla, la lulla, lulla lullaby.
My sweet little baby, what meanest thou to cry?
Be still, my blessed babe, though cause thou hast to mourn,
Whose blood most innocent to shed the cruel king hath sworn.
And lo, alas, behold what slaughter he doth make,
Shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Savior, for thy sake
A King is born, they say, which King this king would kill.
Oh woe, and woeful heavy day, when wretches have their will...
A 20th Century poet, Amy Whitting, curses Herod for his wickedness calling out a variety of curses:
May you have no rest, May you wake at night with a cry
Chilled by a nightmare you can't dispel
May the bogeyman be thirty inches high
And immortal. These are your children. Guard them well./
May they weary you till death appears to be
brighter than the walking doll or the tin drum"(...and so on.)
The omitted verses of the Gospel, and these poem excerpts show clearly why Joseph raced his family to Egypt, to what is thought to be in Cairo- at least that's a principle cave site claiming to be the one to which the family fled, and now an ornate ikon-covered church. Joseph was instructed to stay away until after Herod's death. However, even when Herod's son Archelaus was ruling, it still was not safe to go to Judea. Archelaus was eventually banished for his acts of cruelty and slaughter, after the Jews had complained to Augustus. Before then Joseph had correctly thought it not safe to return to Judea, and so went on to Nazareth. This makes a reasonable if not prove-able reason for Jesus to have been raised in Nazareth. Since Jesus was sometimes called a Nazarene, there had to be built-in explanation for why Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was called a Nazarene.
These passages from Matthew show that Jesus was at real risk, and that the dangers to him, were not simply a disagreement of religious belief and practice. Herod was evil and did awful things, and his son followed him in that wickedness. Tempting, as it is to omit the hearing of these stories, it is more useful to hear them. Jesus was not living in a gentle, benign "green pasture." He was born into the "valley of the shadow of death," and he was at risk from genuinely wicked rulers throughout his life. While it may be easier to hear the attack on Jesus in Jerusalem later as both a targeted and isolated one, for his challenges to the religious authorities of his day, Jesus also simply lived in a place with some evil leaders, as did his contemporaries. Life was neither a Hallmark card, nor a Helen Steiner Rice inspirational poem for Jesus.
His world was a dangerous one, and his family did its best to protect him in a world of high risk. The leaders were quixotic and did seemingly random and wicked deeds. He did not emerge in the Temple at age 12, poking a hole in a tender, well-tended chrysalis. He'd lived a rough life already, and a worse one was eventually going to enmesh him.
In fact, his world wasn't so different from ours. Suicide bombings, armed insurgencies, and wars turn out to be comparable threats both to groups and individuals. It's hard not to notice that some of the pointed violence has always been against Jews, but other groups also have been systematically targeted, whether women, girl children, and kids in general, gay/lesbian people, and groups of other peoples continually aimed at and murdered. For me it makes the life and work of Jesus more, not less relevant. He knew and lived out the dangers of people's capacity for real evil, and the concomitant need for expiation and forgiveness. His understanding of humanity's need for forgiveness was based on his exposure to individual's wicked behavior, as well as groups of people going along with evil, or forcing others to obey them to do evil. Few of us have actually been the one to demand someone's head on an actual platter, nor to have been the one do have done the hacking, but we are exposed and familiar with those fellow humans, and are aware that those sorts of sins can easily find us, more easily than we would own up to.
The strength of this Gospel is all its historical details. The real rulers, and the real evils they did, and the real towns and places, help anchor the story of the babe lying in a manger and the visit of Magi into some world we connect to. The art that is so remarkable and creative around so much of the Christmas story, from two thousand years of varied artists, makes it hard to remember the savageness of the world into which Jesus was born. Herod's systematic attempt to wipe out all boys born around the time of the visit from the Magi is as imaginatively cruel an act as a ruler could imagine, yet we can name predecessors and successors to that role. Jesus came into a world not only of sweet crèche scenes, with loving parents, kindly animals, excited shepherds, and adoring Magi, but also of real humans doing a variety of other actions as well, some of them awful. He wasn't needed to pat the lambs particularly urgently, but he did find a world craving God's presence and forgiveness, filled with people's fears and anxieties, and a world top heavy with systematic attacks on the poor and the lonely, the hungry and those at risk. From his earliest memories, he was exposed to the need for preventive actions, and people looking out for him. We all know those needs sometimes and think less of ourselves for those fears. They are always there, whether the fears of no health insurance, or no friends, or being trapped by some other misery which will leave us isolated. Herod is in the wings waiting more often than we know, showing up at odd times.
Jesus could depend on his family. That's our given. We are his family and he is ours. Forces of evil do exist, but the strength of his help overpowers wickedness and other sadnesses that come with human life. He promises that God will do this for us, finding us a house, or a nest to lay our young. Jesus reminds us of God's love for each of us and to demonstrate that we are each the apple of God's eye. He was rescued and saved from Herod to be able choose to rescue and save us, even if we're not as innocent as the Holy Innocents. We are protected to work, being his hands and feet in the world. Jesus was protected from Herod, and will work for us in those circumstances, and the ones of our own making. Jesus knows about evil and understands that as the context of human life, one he enters for our salvation: Good News.
Copyright Katharine C. Black 3 January 2010
