Those
three wise men that we so often sing about at Christmastime are traditionally
associated with this time of Epiphany. They come riding into town as the birth
of Christ transitions into the implications of God-incarnate living amongst us.
On Christmas Eve, I talked about the frankincense and myrrh, how these were
incense often used at burials—how the kings were, perhaps unwittingly, giving
this child the gift of spices for his own burial. I talked about how
appropriate that is.
But we need to talk about what
happens next. The Gospel of Matthew says, “Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord
appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother,
and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to
search for the child, to destroy him.’”
Leave this place, because it is not
safe. I find it fascinating that the holy family is told to flee to keep Jesus
safe. Jesus, who spends the rest of his life set toward the cross, begins his
time on earth being rushed away from it. As with every instance of evil in our
lives, God could have intervened. It didn’t need to happen this way. Instead,
the angel tells Joseph: Get up, take the
child and Mary, and flee to Egypt. That’s an order.
According to the UN Refugee Agency,
there are 25.4 million refugees in the world today, alongside 3.1 million
asylum seekers and 40 million people internally displaced in their own
countries. This is nothing new. The fact that the holy family was, for a time,
one of those should remind us that there is nothing but chance that separates
us from a very different, insecure life. We won the genetic lottery, were born
in the right place with the right people, and we can’t even imagine what that
life would be like if it were otherwise. Of course, it’s not only that simple.
Some are born with other advantages, others less. The point is: Because of
Jesus we should know that there is no virtue in being lucky with birthright.
The kingdom of heaven is not built on nobility or holy blood. We didn’t earn this
life by our special-ness; it is ours as a gift with no assurance that that safety
and security will last.
But being displaced from your home
is nothing compared to what follows. Jesus was the lucky one. It was the other
children in Judea—those who didn’t know to get away, whose parents didn’t pick
up on the political whisperings of the day and stayed in their homes, trusting
that it would all blow over—it was those people who lost everything. Every
child in the land under two years of age was killed by Herod in a last-ditch
attempt to defeat this boy-king using the means despots always use.
This kind of terror is nothing new.
It’s happening today in Syria, in South Sudan, in Afghanistan, in Burundi, and
Iraq, and Yemen, and Venezuela, and Guatemala, and Honduras, and Royinga, and
Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. Those are a few of the places we
know that are currently experiencing crises leading to displacement. The baby
Jesus flees; others are unable.
There are many worthy empathetic responses
to this, and something should be done about it, but the enormity of the problem
betrays all the ways we have failed one another. Every humanitarian crisis
should be a stark reminder of why we need Jesus—not as an excuse not to fix
things and make them better but as a reminder of why we so often don’t.
Everywhere that Jesus goes, terror follows, bred from fear. We become fearful
when we are confronted with the fact that we are not God, and we seek to
destroy the one who is. It is as terrible as it is commonplace.
Worst of all, we all have this in
us. We are afraid. The combination of fear and power gives us Herod, but
whether you have power or not, your fear will defeat you. It will shut you off
from those around you who need help. It will turn you in on yourself. It will
lie to you and tell you that you do not need help—that you need to be strong
and that will be enough. Fear and pride go hand-in-hand. The difference between
us and those on the outside is mostly that genetic lottery, and this is so
important for us as Christians because we have a God who emerges from the
margins, and who came so that the least might be greatest.
Whenever we build walls, Jesus is always on the other side. We never wall
Jesus in; we always keep him out.
Jesus was born humbly in the land of
a despotic governor with the words of Mary’s Magnificat ringing in our
ears—that every tyrant will be ripped from their throne—because God knew the
history of what was enfolding and where it would go from there.
Jesus came for the first-century
Jews under the thumb of the Roman Empire—for those whose visions of a Messiah
would never come to be.
And Jesus came for the first-century
Christians, oppressed because of their faith, imprisoned and tortured for their
faith.
And Jesus came for the Muslims
killed in the name of Christianity in the crusades.
And Jesus came for the early
Protestants, like Jan Hus, killed by the church for the audacity of
re-centering the faith.
And Jesus came for the Native
Americans, decimated by Christian zeal to create a shining city on a hill in
America, and for the Armenians murdered under the Ottomans, and the Jews
murdered under Nazi Germany, and the Tutsis in Rwanda, and every oppressed
people in the history of history, and we desperately need this, not only for
their sake, but for our own—because they are us. If the only way to encounter
Christ is to tear down walls, then that means there is nothing that can
separate us from one another in our humanity.
Epiphany is about many things, but more than anything it recalls the
Exodus, where God’s chosen people fled from a tyrannical Pharaoh bent on
keeping them enslaved. Now, some few thousand years later, Jesus returns
looking for safety of his own. The circle comes around.
Jesus was born in the meekest of
places and times for exactly that reason: We need a God who breaks the cycle.
We need a God who elevates not the throne of the king but the throne of the
cross, who brings salvation not through prosperity and security, which only
delay the inevitability of mortality, but through self-sacrifice and humility
and grace. We need a God who smashes borders, because we won’t. Nothing makes
this more evident than the fact that the holy family is forced to flee soon after
his birth. The borders remain and, yet, ultimately they are made irrelevant by
God’s grace.
One of my favorite visions from the
Bible is that vision of the New Jerusalem found at the end of the book of
Revelation—you know the one—that challenges our cultural expectations of what
heaven looks like. Everybody has that image in their head—right?—of Peter
standing before the pearly gates letting some people in and others out…. except
that’s not it; that version exists nowhere in the Bible. The image from Revelation
is of a city with gates without doors, open wide all day long with no night to
speak of. The image of the kingdom of God is a place freely entered—no pearly
gates, no gatekeepers.
It starts with Jesus, forced to flee
to Egypt, breaking down those first barriers between past and future that leads
us to that New Jerusalem. It starts with terror and it moves toward joy. It
starts with exclusion and moves toward inclusion. It starts with a fearful king
who will do anything to secure his throne and ends with a different kind of
king giving up his life for the sake of the very ones who chant “Crucify him!”
Jesus breaks down walls. The last
one of all brings us back to those kings and those burial spices once more. As
it says in 1 Corinthians, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”
(15:26). From Bethlehem, to Egypt, to the cross at Golgotha, that last wall has
met its match.
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