What if every trip you took was mapped out as the crow flies? If you ask me, it’s not much fun having to change planes when traveling anywhere. I’d much prefer a non-stop flight, except that these days, finding a reasonably priced non-stop flight to your destination of choice can be a futile enterprise. Depending on where you’re headed, if you want to avoid spending a fortune on plane fare, the flight path might look something like this: fly from Philadelphia to Dallas, with a three hour layover, and then board another flight (if that flight happens to be on time) and head back in the direction you came from. Finally, you land in Memphis and usually arrive much later than you ever should have, if only you’d not been so cheap in trying to avoid the non-stop flight that was the first option you saw online.
How satisfying it is to chance upon an economical non-stop flight, especially overseas. When you’re on the plane looking at that little TV monitor on the back of the seat in front of you, the flight path from Philadelphia to Istanbul is a beautiful curved line, a gentle parabola. The route may not exactly be as the crow flies, but it seems pretty close to it. You know precisely where you’re going, and you know how long it will take.
The pristine curved line of the international non-stop flight path surely beats the sinuous paths that Google Maps coughs up in its quest to avoid the latest road closure (inevitably on Chestnut Street). It turns out that you can apparently calculate a distance as the crow flies on Google maps. You may not actually be able to travel anywhere as such, but the charted path on a map is visually quite satisfying, in my opinion.
What might not be so satisfying to the efficient, economical, and geometrically precise eye of a modern traveler is the route of the Holy Family from Bethlehem to Nazareth, at least as St. Matthew describes it. Try drawing it on a map. As the crow flies, using the nifty feature on Google Maps, the distance from Bethlehem to Nazareth is about seventy miles. But we know from St. Matthew’s account that Mary and Joseph’s trip with the baby Jesus was much more than seventy miles.
In order to avoid the wrath of Herod, an angel of the Lord directs them via a significant detour to Egypt, a minimum of 200 miles southwest of Bethlehem, as the crow flies. Theologically speaking, this also seems like a curious diversion. After all, it was out of Egypt that God had brought his chosen people by the hand of Moses, from slavery to freedom, from death to life. And now, God seems to be leading the Savior of world back into the land from which beloved Israel had once been so happy to escape.
It’s not clear how long Mary, Joseph, and Jesus sojourned in Egypt, living as fearful refugees escaping the cruel mania of Herod’s paranoia. And although we have the hindsight of crow’s path vision and know that Nazareth was the final destination of the Holy Family, I imagine it was certainly less than clear to the two young parents where they would finally end up with their newborn child.
But I also imagine that as faithful Jews living in exile in Egypt, Mary and Joseph’s eventual call to get up and go to the land of Israel, after Herod’s death, must have been a welcome one. Would that great holy city of Jerusalem be their final destination?
But St. Matthew tells us that the ultimate destination for the Holy Family was not even close to Jerusalem or Bethlehem. Herod’s legacy of cruelty had been bequeathed to his son Archelaus, and so Judea could not be the permanent home for Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child.
Have you ever wondered how Joseph felt, already uprooted from the home in Bethlehem, exiled as a homeless refugee to Egypt, and now being told to travel to Judea, and then being told that there was yet more traveling to do? I would bet that many of us would have been angry, confused, and weary. And yet all we are told about good Joseph is that he listened to the messages he received from God, trusted them, got up, and time and again led his family onward. And St. Matthew clearly implies, that all along, Nazareth was where God had intended for the Holy Family to be, because Jesus was to “be called a Nazorean.” As the crow flies, the journey was really from Bethlehem to Nazareth.
St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth starts with a meandering genealogy and culminates in the Holy Family’s zigzagging travels, and in some sense, it defies the conventional clean version of the Christmas story. The condensed version, suitable for a cute pageant with sheep and angels, is a beautiful narrative of a family experiencing a special birth in Bethlehem, with an unspoken footnote on the Egyptian exile, and then living happily in Nazareth when the coast is clear. But if we literally draw the Holy Family’s route on a map, we find something much more complicated.
For the modern mind, capable of visualizing everything as the crow flies, does it raise questions for you? For starters, was it really necessary to direct the family hundreds of miles off course to Egypt, to a land fraught with traumatic memories of bondage to cruel Pharaoh, only then to uproot them, change plans once again, and ultimately drop them off in Nazareth, where we are told they belonged all along? And in the midst of this serpentine journey with its confusion, ambiguity, and anxiety, there was a massacre of innocent children, which thankfully the Christ child escaped through God’s suggested detours. But the lectionary blithely skipped over that this morning.
How are we to make sense of this? Was there no way for the God of heaven and earth with his infinite mercy and compassion to direct the Holy Family from Bethlehem as the crow flies to safety in Nazareth or even to some other closer location out of Herod’s evil grasp? Was there no way to prevent infanticide and the Holy Family’s troubles along the way and the years of seemingly wasted time on the road? Was there no way for God to ensure that Herod didn’t become such a monster in the first place?
In rebuttal, you might argue that God writes straight with crooked lines, but what does that tell us about God? Is God incapable of writing with straight lines and paving a way as the crow flies? For it could seem that a God who perpetually writes with crooked lines is a master manipulator and the joke is on us.
But for once, instead of metaphorically zooming out on Google Maps, I wonder if it might behoove us to zoom in for a minute, and if we zoom in on the journey of the Holy Family, we might learn a thing or two from Joseph. And by taking a lead from Joseph, we might gain a clearer picture of the God who we trust is with us in the most intimate possible way, who St. Matthew tells us is “God with us.”
Joseph, as St. Matthew portrays him, is the model of pure obedience. And while of course, the blessed mother Mary is as well, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, we zoom in on Joseph. And Joseph has the potential to reveal just how countercultural true obedience is. We in the year 2020, with our fancy modern gadgets and Google Maps and built-in car navigation devices and beautifully curved flight paths have perhaps zoomed out so much on the world in which we live that we have lost sight of what it means to say with conviction that God is with us.
I’m sure that Joseph knew the detour to Egypt was off the crow’s path, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was being led in the end. I’m sure the Holy Family’s years of wandering, like the Israelites in the desert, were confusing and frustrating. And unlike God’s grumbling people in the desert, complaining of hunger while the meat was still stuck in their teeth, all we are told about Joseph suggests that his response to God’s multiple calls was to get up and go and do what God was telling him to do. It seems that Joseph never second-guessed the routes that God was revealing to him, and if he did, he ultimately listened to God.
But to more jaded, skeptical ears that are quick to find fault with God, Joseph seems like a prehistoric fool. If only he’d had the sophistication of Google Maps to see how God was playing with him. If only he’d had enough gumption and sense of self-dignity to stand up for what was most convenient for him instead of being flung around on a map of the Far East. If only he’d been wise enough to second guess Google Maps and follow the path he instinctively knew was best for him. In this way of thinking, obedience reeks of naiveté.
But Joseph, it seems, possessed an unusual spiritual gift of trust and understanding, one zoomed in on the present moment and less on how the crow might fly. And Joseph’s gift of obedience is one we might benefit from reclaiming in an overly critical world. God isn’t deliberately writing with crooked lines when he could have drawn straight ones. God isn’t revealed as powerless because life’s paths are not as the crow flies. God isn’t saving only the Christ Child while causing other innocent newborns to be slaughtered. No, God’s heart is breaking over human sin, even as God weeps over the contemporary massacres of innocents. And God is journeying with us in the tragic detours that are part of the jagged topography of a broken world.
Although he may seem to be hidden at times, God is always with us, in the sojourns in Egypt and in the ceaseless packing up and moving on that happens as part of life. God is there—is here—waiting for us, like Joseph, to discover his voice, gently directing us on our way.
And God is also right with us, refusing to be an old or a modern Herod who bulldozes his way through human history to achieve his objectives. God is not working his purposes out wholesale like a maniacal despot who slaughters everyone in his path. God is much, much more sophisticated and loving and gentle in his providence. And this is where God’s power lies. God is there, leading us and guiding us precisely in the detour roads of uncertainty, befuddlement, and tragedy. And although he may not directly have paved those side roads, he nonetheless travels on them with us. God refuses to lead us as the crow flies, because that is not truly a “God with us” but rather a puppeteer for whom we are the puppets.
I admit that, although I have a modern penchant for beautifully curved flight paths, for non-stop flights, and for second guessing Google Maps, my heart knows, as I hope yours does, too, that flying off the crow’s path is where I most fully discern the presence of God in my life. God is with us, starting at birth in Bethlehem, in all our Egyptian exiles, then by way of Nazareth in the prime of our lives, and ultimately in Jerusalem, in our final hours. And lest we think that our modern hearts can second-guess how God is with us on our winding paths of life, we might learn a thing or two from Joseph.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
5 January 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia