Christmas in Egypt: God's Solidarity in our Struggles

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday of Christmas by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

In today’s gospel we get the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. We’re in a bit of a post-Christmas time warp—despite Epiphany still to come on Thursday this week, in this text the wise men have already come and gone. These observers from afar followed the new star, gave their precious gifts, and worshipped the babe. And then they departed home to their own country by another road, not returning to tell the murderously insecure and envious King Herod where they found Jesus. Now, Joseph is warned by an angel in a dream that Herod is out to kill the child. So Mary and Joseph and Jesus become refugees, and they flee into Egypt by night for safety. It is a backwards Exodus for the new Moses, come to set his people free, and the holy child is protected by the hand of the Lord until the angel tells them it is safe to return. They settle in a no-name town called Nazareth, and it is all a fulfillment of prophecy.

But hold on a minute, our lectionary selection today is a paste-up job, and those missing verses 16 through 18 excise what seems to me a rather important and difficult piece of the story—important because it is difficult. Hear now what comes in between these two angelic visitations:

“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. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’”

There it is, genocide, smack in the middle of the Christmas story. Wailing and lamentation for toddlers who are no more. And this too Matthew says was prophesied. Where’s our sweet (if suspiciously Caucasian) Hallmark nativity scene now? We’re not in Kansas anymore. Our joyful carols have run into some clanking, wince-inducing dissonance. But better to leave it in: Herod’s reckless murder of these children, these holy innocents, places what too easily flattens into a sweet story about a baby and some farm animals firmly in the real world. Matthew’s version of the Christmas story tells us the truth about the world Jesus comes into: a world of unjust rulers, grasping for power via violence, political oppression, terror, and casual cruelty on a massive bureaucratic scale. We still live in that world, as the barest investigation reveals: a world of real people in real pain, refugees and reigns of terror, murderous neglect, devastation of the earth, wildfires ripping through houses, the death toll human and otherwise caused by our habits of numbing pain through consumption, and yes, genocide outright and other horrors we fear to look at.

This is the world Jesus enters and enters still. This is the world God comes to save by being with us in it, first as a helpless child. And so if Christmas is to mean anything real, if God’s taking on of human flesh is serious and not an empty gesture, if it is true, I mean—then the Incarnate One can’t stand outside of suffering or the slaughter of innocents. One starts to wonder about this business with the angel and the special message to get out of town just in time. Really, God leaves? Just as things get difficult? What about these other children, left to the horror of King Herod’s lunatic power? Are they not just as precious, beloved, and cared for? 

Well of course they are, and not a single sparrow falls to the ground apart from God’s care. It’s important that the Flight to Egypt is recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish of the four gospels. Matthew is very concerned with the continuity of the old and the new, the seamlessness of what God was doing in Jesus and what God was doing with the people of Israel. Over and over, Matthew casts Jesus as the new Moses, and the embodiment of the Law in human flesh. (Moses, you’ll remember, was also improbably spared at an earlier slaughter of infants, which is how he came to be floating down the Nile River in that reed basket.) And here, once the wise men have headed home, Matthew takes the Exodus, that founding narrative of divine liberation from slavery, and replays it to show us Jesus in it. Jesus, come to set his people free, must first, like Moses, join his people in their slavery. God takes up human life fully to share it and transform it. Redemption is an inside job: and in Matthew’s telling that means that Jesus has to go to Egypt. He has to empty himself and become a slave, becoming obedient even to the point of death. And he has to come through the Red Sea, making a way where there was no way, trampling down death by undergoing death and leading his gathered people home singing and dancing.

It is on the cross that we see most clearly the divine solidarity with humankind that Matthew is pointing us toward with the flight into Egypt. Where is God in human suffering? At the very heart of it, of course, identified with and present to and covenantally bound to those who are suffering. God in Jesus doesn’t keep his hands clean or skip town when things get rough; he gets down into the muck and straw with us. There are horrors here, traumas that undo our worlds, shatter meaning and any semblage of self, and God is in them, too, in our grief and tears and rage and confusion and uncomprehending shock. In our sense of isolation and Godforsakenness. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, Jesus cries out at the crucifixion, helpless as a child. God has journeyed to the furthest possible distance and so these places of abandonment and exile are infused with presence, a binding and durable love that will never let us go, though we journey to the depths of hell and make the grave our bed. Jesus has been there, too. He descended below all things so that he might fill all things (Ephesians 4:8-10); he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4).

And in doing so, he makes it possible for us to bear them, too. So much of our lives are a flight from pain, our own or that of others. We try to escape suffering. Sometimes it feels like it will kill us to feel it, to take up our cross—not a new cross by the way, just shouldering the one we already have, actually carrying the sorrows of our life as it is, which we are trying so hard to avoid. We build a cage around our hearts. We put other people in cages. Like Job’s so-called friends we look for some hidden reason, some secret fault to explain the suffering of others as if finding an explanation could control the contagion of their pain and keep us safe. We will try anything to push away the fear, the immense vulnerability that is the fact of our lives. 

I remember a time when I was absolutely convinced that if I let myself feel the sadness welling up inside of me, I would surely die. Dramatic perhaps but I felt this sadness as a threat to my literal existence, and the only possibility for survival was to ice it out, go numb, distract, and look away. And I tried that for as long as it worked, which wasn’t very long at all. The ice cracked almost immediately and thanks be to God I had to surrender to my life and the grief that was mine to care for at that time. It was painful, protracted, deeply unpleasant; I didn’t like it, but, I discovered, it didn’t kill me to feel it. It changed me profoundly and gave me to God. The craziest thing, the miraculous part, is that in the middle of that utter despair of which I was so afraid of, God was so present. God was at home there, not unmoved or cold, but at home and not at all afraid. As I painfully became aware of and became present to my suffering, tended to that grief, I became aware also of a broad and boundless compassion containing that experience, embracing it, with me in it, teaching me to bear it. It was radiant and utterly stable. 

God is present in suffering. It’s the truest thing I know but it’s a truth you can only tell slant. You can’t really point it out to someone else; at times it approaches sacrilege to insist on it. “Don’t worry, God is in it!” would be completely demented, and naïve, and cruel, in the face of a parent who has lost a child, for instance. And yet, whatever suffering is before you at this point in your life, God is in it. I say it not to deny the reality of pain or claim to understand it or insist on something counter to your experience but as an invitation, an invitation to open to your life and learn from the inside out that you are not alone in it, and you are not abandoned. What might you find if you didn’t have to look away or cut out that part of the story? As the psalm says, “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” There is provision in the desert.

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Listen to this passage from essayist Kristine Haglund’s reflections on the slaughter of Holy Innocents, penned at the end of 2012 in the days just following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. She says,

“And this is God’s gift, and God’s answer to the terrible questions raised by pain and evil. A baby. I love babies, but they are entirely unsatisfactory as either a practical or philosophical solution to the problems of the world. […] But the constant message of the infant Christ is that, truly, this is all there is. […] The infant Christ, the Prince of Peace, does not blow the trumpet and call us to ride forth in glorious battle; he does not show us the way to palaces where we can live free from want and pain; he does not even save us from Herod’s monstrous evil. He comes, instead, to teach us how to be vulnerable, how to have our hearts broken and then knit together in love. […] His gift is in the name “Emmanuel”—God with us. The promise of Christmas is that God is with us, in our joy, in our suffering, and that because he descended to become like us, we can become like him. […] And in and through and below all of this, God promises to be with us—and to make our suffering redemptive, as His was, to increase our capacity for love and joy as sorrow carves out space in our souls.” (Kristine Haglund, “Holy Innocents”)

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We live in an in-between time. We’re still in that post-Christmas time warp. On the one hand, it is finished: the gift has been given, the baby is born, the captives have gone free, we are blessed with every blessing, and all is accomplished; yet, still, on the other, all creation groans in expectant longing, waiting for the revelation of the children of God. God’s power makes space for our freedom, even, as is apparent, the terrible freedom to cause unfathomable pain. When will we human beings become truly human? That’s the revelation we long for. That’s why Rachel cries. We live amidst the birthpangs of a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, which are turning out to look really very much like the old ones except, except God is slowly cracking open our heart of stone like a surgeon cracks ribs to uncover a heart of flesh: so so vulnerable, and beating strong, in rhythm with every living thing.