Psalm
148: did Mary and Joseph sing this one during Jesus’ early days? “Praise
him in the heights, all his host” (a la the angels on Christmas night?). Echoes
of Job in this stirring tour of creation, including not just the pretty and
photogenic, but also monsters, frost, stormy wind, wild, dangerous animals. All
praise the Lord, even unwittingly, simply by being. Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) muses over the
mind-boggling diversity and experimental dazzle that is creation, saying
“There’s nothing God won’t try.”
Why the incarnation? A major piece of the
answer is in Hebrews 2:10-18, which doesn’t
feel very Christmasy until v. 17: “He had to become like his brothers and
sisters so he might be a merciful and faithful high priest.” God is like us. We
are like God. All of us were born. I have a book coming out early next year
entitled Birth, with a section on the very earliest days of Jesus’ life, some of
which is reported in Matthew 2:13-23;
here is an excerpt reflecting on that text and those earliest days:
We love the
carol which suggests “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Surely he cried.
We should hope he cried. He became one with all of us who cry. Babies cry, and
we may be grateful, as that sound is the sign of life, vitality, a protest
against being so rudely removed from the warm safety of the womb, a declaration
to the world that “I have arrived” – and “something’s wrong.” As an adult,
Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem, over the death of his friend Lazarus,
and he surely still weeps over us. His name, after all, is a cry, yeshu’a meaning “Lord, help!”
Mary nursed him, rocked him, whispered and
sang to him. Like all mothers, she fought through the weariness. Did she suffer
any postpartum depression?... Remember those long shadows in Rembrandt’s “Adoration of
the Shepherds”? Immediately upon the birth of this child, history’s ongoing
struggle of good versus evil got ratcheted up quite a few notches. A thin view
of Christmas might elicit giggles over the image of parents with their sweet
child. But a cosmic battle just got touched off. “Why do the nations rage?”
(Ps. 2:1). The idolatrous, unholy powers, immediately upon Jesus’ birth, seemed
to realize that their domain had been invaded.
And so they
recoiled – like that haunting moment in Peter Jackson’s film version of “The
Lord of the Rings.” The wicked “eye of Sauron,” atop a high tower, casts its
evil beam over the land, probing, ruling, intimidating, always watching for
signs of good to be dealt with; “its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its
fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread
upon which hung its doom.” When Frodo put on the ring of power, the eye was
seized with some paroxysm of envy and terror, jerking suddenly in Frodo’s
direction, far away. Jesus was born quietly at a distance of many miles from
Herod or Caesar Augustus. But in that moment, there was a recoil, a leap to
secure the borders, and police the people so the powers that be will remain
unchecked. How astonishing, that this birth struck anxiety into the hearts of
those dwelling arrogantly and securely in the corridors of power.
An appalling,
gruesome manifestation of this evil recoil was unleashed by King Herod.
Notorious for his paranoia, famously feeling threatened by and then killing
members of his own family, Herod flew into what for him was a typical rage,
ordering the cruel slaughter of all male boys under the age of two in his
realm. The arrival of the Christ
child was no security blanket to shelter the people from harm. On the contrary,
his advent actually brought on intense sorrow, such is the ferocious kneejerk
retaliation of evil in our broken world against the good that would bring life
– back then, and throughout history.
The laments, the shrieks of the mothers of
Judea have echoed through time. If we listen, we can still hear them, and also
all mothers who have flailed and strained and crumpled to the ground in sheer
agony as they have witnessed brutal violence against their children. A mother,
wrenched from her small son in Auschwitz, was forced to watch with the rest of
the horrified crowd as he dangled by a rope around his neck. A man in the crowd
asked, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Elie Wiesel, who was there, said he
heard a voice answer, “This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”
Of course,
thanks to a good angel who had warned Joseph, by stealth the homily family fled
to Egypt. Legend has it that lions and leopards in the wilderness bowed their
heads and wagged their tails in homage. Palm trees bent low to provide food for
them. Two thieves pounced on them, but then relented when Mary wept – the same
robbers who were crucified next to Jesus thirty years later. The symbolism of
this flight to Egypt would not have been lost on Jews of Jesus’ day or careful
Bible readers today. This child, who had come to be the deliverance of the
people, descended to Egypt, as Joseph and his brothers had centuries earlier,
only to return in peace to the land of promise.
Still in his
infancy, Jesus was a refugee, joining the ranks of countless throngs of people
through history pushed out of their homelands, in desperate flight to survive
grisly armies, rulers and thugs. I have known Jews who managed to slip out of
Europe and elude the Nazis; a neighbor of mine was hidden in a potato sack and
thrown onto the back of a truck by her parents, whom she never saw again.
Refugee camps dot the globe. Particularly haunting are those camps in the land
of Israel to which Jesus came. In Bethlehem itself, camps like Dheisheh and
Aida have been the home for thousands of Palestinians expelled from their
homes, living in harsh conditions for generations now since the war in 1948.
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