Lectionary for Dec 29, 2019
First Sunday of Christmas
Isaiah 63:7-9; Psalm 148;
Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23
The Feast of the Holy Innocents is a difficult day. Only a few days after we celebrate the Messiah’s incarnation, we mark the occasion of an empire striking back after being mocked and shown to be ultimately powerless to stop God’s mission.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Herod ordered his soldiers to kill all the children under age 2 in the area where Jesus was said to be born (2:16-18). For me, every year this incalculable cruelty is a stark reminder of the ability of power to corrupt human hearts. In other words: Jesus is Lord, but humans haven’t given up our violent pursuit of power.
Where was God in all of this? As Jesus’ parents were warned to flee, too many others died in his place. How do we understand God, who caused the incarnation to reconcile the universe to Godself, but still allowed human tyrants to inflict violence on innocent children?
The book of the Isaiah gives several suggestions that help me reconcile a loving God with continued violence in the world. In the closing chapters of a long book, full of meaning for hundreds of different generations, we read of God’s intimacy with God’s people. In a famously tricky passage of Hebrew (your Bible probably has an alternate translation in the footnotes), the author declares something like:
For [God] said, “Surely they are my people,
children who will not deal falsely”;
and he became their savior.
In all their distress, he was distressed.
The agent of his presence saved them;
in his love and in his pity he redeemed them;
he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old (Isaiah 63:8-9).
This image of God resonates with me. God has become our savior. And the very next line reveals that we still have distress. But instead of taking away that distress, or simply causing an end to such events, God’s response is to feel distress with us. God’s presence with us is what saves us.
I’m reminded of an anecdote that I’ve heard sprung out of Alcoholics Anonymous. A man falls into a well and breaks his leg. When a doctor comes by, the man yells up for help. The doctor says he will go to the hospital and get help, but he doesn’t come back. Next a priest comes by the well. The man shouts for help, and the priest says he will pray for help, but he doesn’t do anything else.
Finally, the man’s best friend walks by. The man calls for help again, and to his surprise, his friend jumps into the well. The man screams, “What are you doing, you moron? Now we are both stuck in the well?” His friend replies, “No, it’s OK. I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”
God’s response is, “Come here, let me hold you, I’ve been here, too, and I know the way forward.”
God doesn’t often lift us out of earthly troubles. Instead, Jesus comes and experiences the depths of pain, betrayal, disappointment, loneliness and despair (yes, even despair), so that when we experience pain, betrayal, disappointment, loneliness and despair, God-through-Jesus can say, “No, it’s OK. I’ve been down here before and I know the way forward.”
I also love Isaiah’s image of redeeming humans in both love and pity. These emotions prompt God to lift us up and carry us as in days of old (Isaiah 63:9). I hate when my children are injured. But I am grateful for the opportunities, when my 1-year-old falls and hurts himself, to run to him, full of love and pity, and hold him to my chest, assuring him that everything will be OK. I imagine God doing something similar when we humans do things that hurt ourselves and others. One of the most poignant self-revelations in all of Scripture is when God describes Godself, “I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them” (Hosea 11:4). This is who God is to us: the God who stoops down and holds us to God’s cheek.
God does not stop all tragedies, to be sure. But I’m pretty sure that God was bending down to hold the Holy Innocents and their parents to God’s cheek. That is the message that I take into this new year—that when terrible things happen, God’s response is, “Come here, let me hold you, I’ve been here, too, and I know the way forward.”
