In the Holy Family’s escape into Egypt, we receive the moral weight of the Incarnation: we are the givers of grace.
For the Second Sunday after Christmas
Collect
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
“This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.””
Reflection
I love Christmas. Everything about it. The gift-giving, the music, the decorations, the good cheer. Particularly the good cheer. People act…well, like Christ this time of year.
And there’s something about gathering on Christmas Eve night, hearing the story of Jesus’s birth, that fills us with joy.
I think our ancestors understood just how magical this all is. How revolutionary that kind of joy can be when days are short, and spirits are low.
I also think they understood the addictive danger a hollow joy can be. A joy that isn’t anchored in the challenge of living in the world.
From the earliest days of Christmas celebrations, they gave us the joy of Christmas and then the feasts of Stephen, John, and Holy Innocents. They also gave us the soaring beauty of John and the gritty fear of the flight into Egypt.
The Christmas story doesn’t only contain the joy. It contains the reason we have joy in Jesus’s coming into the world.
The Escape to Egypt
In this week’s story, Joseph is warned of the king’s intended murder of his son. So he takes Mary and Jesus and secretly steals them away, to be refugees in a foreign land. and while they’re gone, the king commits genocide, slaughtering all the infant boys around their home.
The gruesome violence of a fearful king mixed with the holy family fleeing for safety by the grace of God is an iconic image. But not only of the Holy Family. It is also an image of the Hebrew people itself. And this reversal: of the family fleeing to Egypt, rather than from it, completes the Exodus and casts Jesus as a new Moses.
It also reminds us of where God’s favor and delight resides. Not in the halls of power, through strict order, but in community, patience, hope, and love.
For us, it is easy to see Herod as a Disney Villain, grotesque and clearly sinister in his intentions. And we are obviously sympathetic to the plight of the Holy Family. But as Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles join God in reminding us that we are to show favor to the refugee because God showed favor to us when we were refugees.
To spell it out more plainly, we are generous to and welcoming of refugees now because our ancestors were. Being generous is not dependent on our being refugees now. It is our response to the generosity we were born to replicate. Especially in difficult times. And especially when others are replicating evil.