First Sunday after Christmas Day (January 1, 2023)
Christmas probably will always look to me the way it does in Luke, with May, Joseph, and the shepherds clustered around a manger and gazing, awestruck, at the baby Jesus. And I’ll always place the several angels in our ornament collection in the upper branches of our tree, as if they were assembling, as Luke says they did, to announce a saviour, peace, and good will.
But the older I get, the more Matthew’s version of the story captures the way Christmas feels. Matthew focuses immediately on the fear and conflict pervading Mary’s unexplained pregnancy and the dilemma it presents to Joseph. Next, the wise men take the stunningly unwise step of showing up in Jerusalem to announce that Herod, the tyrannical king running Israel for the Roman Empire, has a newly born rival growing up in defenseless anonymity somewhere nearby. Predictably, Herod orders an atrociously bloody offensive aimed at eradicating the threat. Divine intervention saves the Christ child, but none of the babies and toddlers whom Herod’s soldiers stab to death in search of him. Having packed up Jesus and fled in the middle of the night, Mary and Joseph escape to Egypt, finding shelter, most likely, among the Jews who had lived there since Israel had set up an outpost in Egypt some 750 years earlier. Only after Herod finally dies do Mary and Joseph bring the family back to Israel. And even then, they cautiously settle in Nazareth, a town in Galilee away from the center of what had been Herod’s kingdom.
We rightly feel outrage at Matthew’s story of a ruler so corrupted by power that he would slaughter children to keep it. And we wisely direct our own children’s attention away from Matthew’s violent scenes and toward the fluffy lambs, gentle shepherds and singing angels on display over in Luke. The kiddos have trouble enough as it is going to sleep in Christmas Eve. Indeed, if preachers in some areas of Christianity these days mention Matthew’s story at all, they tend to deflect the outrage toward those involved in abortion. I think that’s a conveniently narrow take on what the passage indicts, though.
Herod got away with slaughtering Bethlehem’s children partly, and probably mostly, because nobody who wanted to stop or penalize him had the power to do so. That’s how tyranny worked then and how it still works today. But it’s worth noting that Israel prospered greatly under the Roman Empire and the various henchmen, like Herod, whom the Romans put in charge. Among other accomplishments, Herod famously expanded the Hebrew temple in Jerusalem, the same one Jesus’ disciples would express admiration for later in the Gospels (only to have their enthusiastic nationalism smacked down by Jesus), and the same one that, until its destruction, rested on a foundation buttressed by the still-visible Western Wall in modern Jerusalem. Herod may have been an evil tyrant, but tolerating his rule had advantages that made overthrowing him and his kind costly.
That’s the uncomfortable truth Luke’s angel doesn’t mention. The Messiah has come, the angel tells the shepherds. Rejoice! But Matthew warns us that what the Messiah has come to challenge won’t go down without a fight. All four gospels will converge on Jesus’ agonizing death as the price of evil’s defeat, and the transformation his resurrection will unleash in the world still gets plenty of pushback. I could join the antiabortion preachers in singling out others whom I can comfortably denounce as present-day Herods, but I think Jesus would have me focus first on all the ways in which I am Herod, doing my worst to keep God from doing God’s best, and all the ways in which I am just another ordinary guy enjoying the perks of not paying too much attention to the atrocities happening around me.
I need that peaceful manger scene. We all do. But Christmas ultimately isn’t about where the baby Jesus lies. It’s about where our allegiance lies in the struggle the baby Jesus will grow up to lead.
