Joseph Listened to an Angel
29 December 2019 –– Sunday after Christmas
The story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents encourages us to focus on the family in a new way: to focus on children whose lives are needlessly taken from them in urban violence or as casualties of war, to hear the anguish of their parents, and to challenge the relative quiet of the church in its response to this violence. Do we hear Rachel weeping for her children? –– E. Byron Anderson
Matthew 2:13-23
Matthew, more than any other Gospel, draws close parallels between the life of Jesus and the promises of the Hebrew scriptures. . . both to the life of Moses (the massacre of the innocents, the saving of this one child) and to the life of Israel as a whole (in Hosea 11:1 Israel, God’s Son, is “called out of Egypt” at the time of the Exodus). Jesus’s birth and ministry signals a new exodus with Jesus, the true Son, at the head. –– Mary Katharine Deeley
Jesus enters the world soon to become a refugee, fleeing to escape a monarch, a government willing to kill its own children to protect its power and status. We understand refugees. How many have come to this country with stories of fear and repression—from Hungary and Eastern Europe, from the Balkans, from Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador and Chile, Uganda and Sudan and Somalia. . . Christ entered the world to become a refugee among refugees.
Yet, God acted to save this child, and this child acted on behalf of the world and all of its people. God’s goodness is present, and Herod, who kills the innocents, does not reach Jesus. The angel comes; Joseph listens. You and I know and question a world in which children are caught in turmoil and even pursued by evil circumstances, and yes, Jesus has been one of these children in this real world. . . .
Jesus was relentlessly pursued by evil, but evil did not get this child. He knew injustice and all the temptations to cynicism and bitterness that we share. From the very beginning, he was with us. . . . Did Jesus not pray in the Garden of Gethsemane that the hateful hands and the cup of torment that awaited him might pass from him? . . . God’s child, Jesus, does not surrender to death and evil, but to the presence of God’s goodness. He is not corrupted, twisted into another instance of bargaining with evil to become its agent. –– John E. Smith
Isaiah 63:7-9
Isaiah’s emphasis on God’s personal intervention (v 9) is key to Christian understanding of Jesus. Note, too, that it is out of love and compassion that God redeems, a theology very close to John’s gospel (John 3:16, ‘‘God so loved the world . . .’’) –– Mary Katharine Deeley
Hebrews 2:13-23
Chapter 2 of Hebrews deals with Jesus’s human nature (v 7). The crux of the latter half of the chapter can be found in verses 16–17: he chose to help the descendants of Abraham and to do so he had to become like them in every way. –– Mary Katharine Deeley
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E. Byron (Ron) Anderson is the Ernest and Bernice Styberg Professor of Worship and the Director of the Nellie B. Ebersole Program in Music Ministry at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
Mary Katharine Deeley is the director of Christ the Teacher Institute of the Sheil Catholic Center, the Roman Catholic campus ministry at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, the author of many books, a frequent speaker on diverse topics, and a pastoral advisor.
Homily Service 41, no. 1 (2007): 67-77.