In the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt, we see God’s grace appearing in the midst of human tyranny. A story for God’s grace in our tyranny.
Fear, love, and the saving of Jesus
Christmas 2A | Matthew 2:13-23
We just heard the second half of this story. Tomorrow night we will hear the first half. Which is a bit of a weird experience. It really is like watching the sequel first. But we are going to make it work.
And I hope we’re still feeling that Christmas glow after 12 days. Maybe you’re ready to get back to work like everybody else did on Boxing Day. Maybe you weren’t feeling this Christmas thing in the first place.
But we have one more day; even if we start taking these greens away before the sun goes down.
One more time to dig into this story of an incarnating God.
So let’s remember the story together.
The gospel’s beginnings
The evangelist begins this gospel we call Matthew with a genealogy—a family tree that runs from Abraham all the way to Jesus. And among these branches are moments when God broke into the world—broke through the gossamer glass between the kin-dom and the world. Moments of women and rebellion and longing in the midst of tyranny.
This seemingly boring list of names ripples with righteous incarnate divinity amid human patriarchal tyrannies.
Then an angel comes to Joseph and invites him not to fear marrying Mary. That the baby she will bear will save their people. And then shortly after that, the narrator tells us Jesus had been born and they named him Jesus to be Emmanuel: Savior and God With Us.
Sometime in the next year or two, some Magi come looking for the baby. They believe he will be the true king of Israel.
Except that there already is a king that is actually on the throne. His name is Herod. And he is already known for paranoia.
Herod freaks out at the news that someone may have more right to his thrown than he does. So he tries to trick the Magi into giving him more intel, but they sneak out the back. So Herod does what tyrant kings do when they’re afraid: they murder those who threaten their power. Just on a bigger scale.
Herod slaughters all the infant boys in and around David’s Royal City.
Thankfully an angel warned the Holy Family. So, to avoid persecution, they escape as refugees to Egypt. They live and work and Jesus grows older as they make a life there. Until one last visitation brings them back to their homeland to resettle in a new place, far from home, in the insignificant town of Nazareth.
Elevated
For Christians, the birth of Jesus is way up here: elevated to among the most important parts of our theology. We call it, The Incarnation. Our way of saying that God takes on humanity, God becomes carnal, the divine moves from out there to be of the same substance among us. And if we’re daring: within us.
And Celtic Christians really upped the Incarnation game with Christmas trees and pinning this feast to the winter solstice. Their descendants and our Anglican predecessors composed our favorite hymns with such rich imagery which beautifully demonstrate the breadth of the theological spirit of the Incarnation.
So obviously the birth of Jesus is huge. Next to that, these other stories are so small.
But the way the evangelist we call Matthew tells it, the birth is in the past, like an afterthought. Something almost normal. It just…happens.
And yet, what doesn’t “just happen” is how the these people respond to it. Magi come from hundreds of miles away to pay homage to someone else’s king. Not there’s. A king who would have no earthly bearing on their lives.
King Herod massacres children.
And the holy family seek refuge in Egypt, so that they might be refugees like their ancestors, like Joseph’s namesake who saved his father, Israel from famine. Now, Joseph protects the Savior who is also God With Us.
This is the Incarnate Word.
Fear and Genocide
We’ll save the Magi for tomorrow night. Today, let’s focus on the part the lectionary skips. The part in which a human king massacres innocent children. Out of fear. Fear of loss of power. Perhaps of his own life. Better to beat the insurrection to the punch.
There are great Star Wars parallels: from the rise of the Empire through fear and manipulation to its brutal tyranny of the galaxy through the same. And more recently, the rise of the First Order uses the same. The whole arc of these stories matches our faith story.
And yet for some, works of science fiction can seem unrealistic. But we don’t need to travel to a galaxy far, far away to know that fear: particularly how fear of loss and fear of danger can lead to proactive violence. And they can easily escalate to justify even genocide and the grotesque idea of “ethnic cleansing.”
The Holocaust is just the most famous and illustrative. Since then there were genocides of Germans in the post-war period, genocides during the Partition of India, and many more: in Nigeria, Algeria, Cambodia, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Burundi, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, East Timor, Argentina, Ethiopia, Iraq, Brazil, Afghanistan, Congo, Somalia, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and in Yemen.
Of course, we shouldn’t think that massacres and genocides only occur “over there”. The U.S. massacre of indigenous populations, of African and African American slaves, and of the nearly 5,000 victims of Jim Crow massacres through lynching follow the exact same profile.
Fear.
Fear of loss. And the fear of personal safety.
They use the myth of proactive self-defense.
Nobody sets out to massacre innocents. But fear is almost always the motivator.
A Story of Incarnate Grace
I know that every one of us wants to retreat back to the safety of the nativity. But for Matthew this is central to the Incarnation.
The murderous tyrant king is afraid of Jesus. And the strange fruit of his fear are the lifeless bodies of innocent people.
Fear is the tool of the wicked because it is both the motivation and justification of the wicked.
And yet, in the midst of that reality, angels come to Joseph with a message of not being afraid. Joseph’s job is saving the savior, saving the children of Israel. He participates in the saving by rescuing the Incarnate One. He becomes the vessel for God’s saving grace by protecting Jesus.
It makes sense then why Matthew gives so little attention to the birth of Jesus—the story isn’t just Jesus. It’s about God’s incarnation. And it becomes the story of how Mary and Joseph join in that genealogy of God breaking in, of God’s grace, of God’s commitment to the people.
It becomes a story full of incarnate grace: of God showing up, being with them and with all of humanity in the face of profound evil. And it reveals our own part—like we all get to be members of this family tree, incarnating the Word in the flesh, helping save the savior.
We’re connected, not through blood or through tribal identity or ethnic heritage, or all those things the fearful use to justify violence. But through a redeeming God of Love who keeps being with us through the darkest of times.
Never Fear
This is why we should never fear the darkness. For fear is the far greater enemy.
And it’s why the promise of the radiance of Jesus should enlighten our hearts and bring joy when all around us is misery. For his is a love which never succumbs to fear.
So we have nothing to fear from remembering our past and seeking to redeem those who came before us. And.not by papering over atrocities, either. But by rejecting fear and its forces in the present.
Especially the fear dressed up as antisemitism, racism, and bigotry.
And we must acknowledge how our Scripture, Theology, and Tradition have contributed to this fear.
Christians didn’t replace Judaism.
Jews did not kill Jesus.
We aren’t locked in a struggle we’re afraid we might lose or afraid the other might succeed in.
We are siblings, friends, partners in Incarnating the grace of God.
All of God’s Children
We are all children of God, inheritors of a life and relationship with a God who is always with us, among us, in us.
We must acknowledge the patterns in our tradition which distort our relationships with all of our Abrahamic siblings and encourage fear and hate. And condemn them.
We must see in our precious liturgy the ways we reinforce these distortions and fear of changing them. How we fear our siblings within The Episcopal Church who are called to erase these persistent evils and seek to strengthen the grace in our patterns of worship. So that we may best incarnate the love of God in our neighborhood.
And we must see in our own patterns of belief and behavior which center themselves upon our fear: particularly of loss. Of loss in market share in the Christian economy; loss of relevance in the public sphere; loss of relevance within our own families.
We can be so afraid. And that is the way of Herod.
Thank God that we have a different way. Jesus’s way of love. Of radiance. Of joy and gratitude and hope. A way of incarnated grace, of the kin-dom come, illumined in these long nights, brightening our star-filled skies, bringing us ever closer to the Incarnated One. Our savior. God with us.
May we always strive to be more worthy than ever of God’s grace.