Christmas is a feast of great comfort and joy, but the gospel for this second Sunday after Christmas takes a troubling turn. We’ve heard about the shepherds and the angels, we’ve rejoiced with Mary, and we have adored the baby in the manger, and now we are with Mary and Joseph as they encounter danger and trouble and mysterious warnings. It was no doubt a great effort to journey to Bethlehem, where there was no room for them, to have a baby in a stable, but now when the wise men have left them the greater journey begins. The scriptures spend little time on this journey, telling us only that “Joseph took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.” The length and difficulty of the journey, the experience of remaining—maybe for two years?—in Egypt, the waiting to hear from the angel again: all of this passes unremarked.
Included in the Gospel of Matthew but left out of our lectionary this morning, of course, is the terrible event we call the “Massacre of the Holy Innocents,” a biblical, if perhaps not historical, trauma we commemorated this week at daily Mass. I want to read a couple of the missing verses that describe Herod’s actions and his motivations in that massacre, because I think they set Matthew’s depiction of the holy family, and especially of Joseph, in sharp contrast. This is Matthew 2, verses 16 and 17: “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.” So the wise men visit Mary and Joseph and the baby, and then head home without telling Herod where they had found the infant king, as they understood him to be, and after the wise men leave Joseph has a dream in which an angel warned him to flee with his family. And as Joseph is experiencing this revelation, of human depravity and God’s protective love, Herod too is suffering a revelation. He realizes that there are wise men who are smarter than he is, who have tricked him. And he is filled with hatred and vindictiveness because he does not like to lose. And he is also filled with fear, as we so often are when we are hateful and vindictive, because somewhere out there is a newborn king to threaten his authority. And somewhere out there are three wise men, laughing at him and outwitting him. And they know how fearful he is. And they know that his fake desire to worship Jesus was part of a scheme to kill him.
And so Herod kills all the children in Israel who are two years old or younger, because that’s the time frame the wise visitors have given him for the infant king’s birth. Herod becomes more reckless and more murderous as he feels his power ebbing away from him. Joseph and Mary and the child are caught up in a great web of death and destruction, at the hands of an unstable, paranoid despot, and they can only trust what an angel has spoken to Joseph in the dark.
Caring for a child in a time of darkness and danger. Trust, and a long difficult journey. Waiting in the safest space they can find, waiting for the “all clear.” Mary and Joseph are learning how to be the holy family, and it’s apparently not going to be easy. They are also, more broadly, learning how to cooperate with God’s purposes in history. Note how often Matthew’s gospel breaks in with a narrative voice that tells us how one action or another corresponds with or “fulfils” another part of the scriptures. When Mary and Joseph flee into Egypt we are told that “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’” (Mt. 2:15). The massacre of the children of Israel is said by Matthew to fulfil the haunting words of the Prophet Jeremiah about a voice heard in Ramah that is Rachel weeping for her children (Mt. 2:18). When Joseph realizes that they must not return to Judea but must travel to Nazareth, Matthew’s gospel makes what appears to be a rather puzzling statement about prophets who say “He will be called a Nazorean.” Scholars spend a lot of time debating what that reference is, which is I guess to highlight that Matthew’s gospel account goes to great lengths—literally--to emphasize the fulfilment of God’s purposes in the furtive, dangerous, exhausting battle of endurance that is Jesus’s early childhood.
So this account of the early years of Jesus’s life, this dark story of mysterious whispers and perilous journeys, is also a story of parenthood, and a story about living in danger. With the exception of the frequent travel, which is not safe for us these days, it could be a story of the lives so many families are living: in isolation, in unforeseen danger from a pandemic or from a gun, in a world that seems to resonate more with the whims of unstable human authorities than it does with the purposes of God and the voices of angels. And it’s in that, and this, most unpromising, dangerous, world that Mary and Joseph live into God’s plan, and do their inestimable, invisible, part to bring it to fruition. This morning, Matthew gives us family life, and specifically the hard work of parents, as a map for the accomplishing of redemption. More specifically, Matthew give us Joseph as an anti-Herod, a father in the line of David who undoes our ideas—and undoes Herod’s ideas—about power, safety, importance, and peace.
We know that family life is key not only because Mary and Joseph and Jesus are the central characters in this narrative, but because Herod’s revenge is to massacre Jewish families. He targets childhood because he knows there is something there that he can’t grasp, can’t emulate, can’t control, and he fears its power. We get another hint when we hear that it’s not safe for Joseph to bring Mary and Jesus back to Judea because Herod’s son is now on the throne. On one side, a small family, nominally headed by a humble caretaker, that seeks to do God’s will and learns to hear God’s voice and risks everything to fulfil God’s promises. On the other side, a neurotic, death-dealing patriarch who wants to keep everything for himself and his dynasty. An unstable king who lashes out to destroy birth itself in order to preserve his control over a patriarchal system of inheritance. His son will rule, not the son of some unknown Israelite.
Please believe me when I say that I’m not trying to argue that the nuclear family is the only system of relationship that God likes. What I’m wanting to point out here is that something about the reality of living through God’s plan for the redemption of humanity is family-shaped for us. Specifically, it’s the quiet, humble, unseen, infinitely difficult act of bringing a child safely through a dark time that God uses in this story to defeat death and tyranny. It’s the trust: not only that Jesus is defenseless and dependent upon his parents, but also that Mary and Joseph have each had to trust the other to hear an angel correctly. Each has had no option but to accept what God is doing in the other’s life. They are together for the long haul here, again literally. For a pilgrimage. For a recapitulation of the calling of Israel out of Egypt and the lifting up of a prophet and a grim contest with the bloated tyrannical powers of this world.
Wherever we locate ourselves in the systems of family and marriage in this culture, one sure sign of our cooperation with God’s grace is our ability to lift up the safety and the wellbeing and the spiritual giftedness of children. Gender is not what counts here; we are all parents to the children of the world. We are Josephs.
Pope Francis recently declared that in the Roman Catholic Church this was to be a year of remembering St. Joseph, cherishing his example and his humility and his faith. The Pope spoke so beautifully of the role Joseph might play for us:
Joseph was the man chosen by God to guide the beginnings of the history of redemption. He was the true “miracle” by which God saves the child and his mother. God acted by trusting in Joseph’s creative courage. Arriving in Bethlehem and finding no lodging where Mary could give birth, Joseph took a stable and, as best he could, turned it into a welcoming home for the Son of God come into the world (cf. Lk 2:6-7). Faced with imminent danger from Herod, who wanted to kill the child, Joseph was warned once again in a dream to protect the child, and rose in the middle of the night to prepare the flight into Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-14).*
Rising in the dark with creative courage, prepared to take responsibility for the journey, willing to hear the voice of the angel, fiercely committed to the relationships that define God’s will for him, ready to serve as a protector without jealousy or possessiveness: Joseph is the miracle. You too, as you work in innumerable ways to shield those who need to be shielded, to trust those who need you to believe in them, you are the miracle. You are a parent to the world’s children, and a sibling. You are a caretaker for all that is holy and godlike. God trusts your creative courage. The care you take to preserve all that is holy in this world is the answer to injustice, tyranny, and wanton destruction. Let me say to you what the angel said: do not be afraid. Take the holy child in your arms and make the long dark journey to safety.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
3 January 2021
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia