Isaiah 63.7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2.10-18
Matthew 2.13-23
First Sunday after Christmas
©Suzanne Grimmett
Today we are celebrating the First Sunday after Christmas, but if we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Innocents, we would be hearing roughly the same Gospel reading, and it is not one that you would necessarily choose at first for a baptism! So close after Christmas and here we have the Holy Family having to run for their lives, refugees fleeing a despotic King. After the magi had come to Jerusalem seeking information about the prophesied newborn King of the Jews, Herod’s paranoia- something entirely consistent with historical accounts –leads to the murder of the innocents, those children in Bethlehem who could potentially be around the right age.
While it is not a pleasant reading, it can be argued that such terrible events at the time of Jesus’ birth can be just the tonic we need if we are in danger of over-sentimentalising Christmas. This is a real risk when we have the farm animals, rosy cheeked angels and the baby Jesus who doesn’t cry but sleeps in heavenly peace. As J. Richard Middleton points out in his meditation, “Let’s put Herod back into Christmas”, Jesus had no chance to sleep in heavenly peace but rather arrived in the midst of danger and death.[1] Without being reminded by readings like that which we have today, we would risk creating safe and soothing nativities that in Middleton’s words, ”Just don’t cut it in a world that’s full of the reality of Herod.”
Sadly the world has seen and continues to see today far too many Herods and the innocent are the ones who pay the price in the violence that surrounds despotic rulers. As we approach the New Year after a year of praying for an end to the violence in Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan and the Congo, we may ask how long, O Lord, before the innocent can be safe and begin to flourish again in these places? When our world is full of the reality of Herods who have the power to remotely deal out destruction, we need a saviour whose very arrival as a baby has the power to threaten a tyrant. We need a saviour who has entered, and continues to enter, just such a hurting world as our own. It is because Jesus joined a world that knew evil and experienced the worst of its violence, that human history can be redeemed. A sentimental story of a saviour born into a world of gentleness and peace cannot help us. But Jesus, son of Mary, threatened and forced to flee as a refugee, comes in solidarity with all the innocents whose lives are endangered, innocence destroyed and dignity defaced. The light has come into the world and the darkness of acts of terror or war or violence or hate can never overcome it. There is a power in Christ that can never be vanquished.
Today we come to baptise George, naming him as Christ’s own forever. What does this mean, for George, for us as a community of baptised disciples of Christ, to claim this name amid this world as it is?
It is, firstly to live as people who know the greatest power in heaven or on earth, is love. Secondly, it is to receive, through daily commitment to his way, this Jesus who came as one of the innocents and was dealt with so violently by those who could not see past their own fear. And thirdly it is to live with defiant hope, because hope is not positivity…or looking on the bright side or any of these other sentimental platitudes…but an action and an attitude that holds back the darkness. All of us at our baptismal liturgy were handed a candle and told we have been called out of this darkness to shine as a light in the world. Hope is a verb. Hope is the solid ground beneath our feet when we know that hate will never overcome love because Jesus, the innocent and forgiving victim, absorbed it all; the one whose life could never be swallowed up by the despotic powers of this world. It is because Christ came in the midst of a divided, violent world that we can have this hope.
So this Christmas-tide, may we be reminded through the candles we light of our solidarity with innocent victims everywhere, of the defiance which pushes back the darkness and of the light of Christ we bear in the world as it is now. May we have the courage to choose to make hope an action and an attitude in the face of all who draw on the power of fear and hatred, division, and violence.
These popular words by Howard Thurman ring true this season, and for every day of our lives as disciples of the Christ child;
I Will Light the Candles This Christmas
I will light Candles this Christmas,
Candles of joy despite all the sadness,
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,
Candles of courage for fears ever present,
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,
Candles of love to inspire all my living,
Candles that will burn all year long.
[1] https://dq5pwpg1q8ru0.cloudfront.net/2020/10/16/22/39/35/1da42b43-3d63-49fc-b483-9cb06711903e/JRichardMiddleton-Lets_Put_Herod_Back_into_Christmas%20(1).pdf