Sermon – “The Dark Side of Christmas” (Matthew 2:1-18)

 It’s going back quite a few years now, but I suspect there are some in the congregation who can recall the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. One of its more memorable characters is Gus Portokalos, the father of the bride. At one point in the story Gus makes the claim, “Give me any word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.” “OK,” someone pipes up from the back of the car, “how about the word ‘kimono’?” “Kimono, kimono, kimono,” Gus mutters to himself. You begin to wonder if he hasn’t been stumped. Then he triumphantly shouts, “Ha! Of course! Kimono is come from the Greek word cheimónos, is mean winter. So, what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe! You see: robe, kimono. There you go!”

Well, perhaps unbeknownst to many of us, today we enter the season of Epiphany—and unlike “kimono”, “epiphany” really is a Greek word. It has to do with showing forth or making an appearance. By and large the only time we hear the word nowadays is on those rare occasions when someone might say, “I just had an epiphany,”—by which we might understand they had something like an “Aha!” moment, a flash of insight when suddenly something became clear.

That actually comes pretty close to the meaning of the church’s season of Epiphany. It begins with today’s reading about the journey of the wise men and how Jesus was made known to people from outside the Jewish nation for the first time. It will continue next Sunday with the account of Jesus’ baptism and of God the Father’s pronouncement that Jesus was his beloved Son. And so it continues, until we come to the mount of the transfiguration, where Jesus is revealed to Peter, James and John in all his heavenly splendour.

Yet to observe the season of Epiphany in that way is really to recount only half the story. Running side by side with the account of Jesus’ glory there is another narrative: the context of the dark world into which that light shone. If we take a moment to examine them closely, we find that surrounding those charming scenes on our Christmas cards of angels and shepherds and the wise men presenting their gifts there was a sinister world of hardship, shame and squalour.

The Darkness of Bethlehem

Those of us who watched the “Walking the Road to Bethlehem” video series during Advent were given a different perspective on the events surrounding Jesus’ coming. Let’s begin with Mary and Joseph. Nazareth, where they lived, was a village of fewer than five hundred people and news of Mary’s premarital pregnancy would have spread like wildfire. Although they had both been visited by angels, there was no one in Nazareth who would have believed that Mary was a virgin. In the eyes of the townsfolk her condition would have been a scandal, the subject of endless rumour and chitchat, bringing shame to her and embarrassment to Joseph.

And months later, when they came to Bethlehem, what about the manger where Jesus was laid? It is easy to forget that what we are talking about is a feeding trough for animals. It could not have been the least bit sanitary. Yet it was the only thing available. I wonder what was going through Mary’s mind as she laid her tiny baby down in it. Did she and Joseph have to shoo the animals away as they came in search of food?

Then there were the shepherds. They were not clean-cut farm boys, as we might like to imagine. Rather, as Adam Hamilton pointed out,

They were typically uneducated, usually poor, and, since they lived among animals in the elements, sometimes smelled of dirty sheep… Shepherds were tolerated but not always esteemed by their neighbours.[1]

In fact, Hamilton was being kind. First-century rabbis classed shepherds with thieves and cheats. Their roving life gave them the opportunity to steal from the flocks and they were known to take advantage of it. They had what one commentator has described as an “unfortunate habit of confusing ‘mine’ with ‘thine’ ”.[2] For that reason, to buy milk, wool or kids from a shepherd was forbidden, because more than likely you would be receiving stolen goods.[3]

This morning we read of the visit of the magi. Behind that story there lies the evil shadow of King Herod, sitting on his throne in Jerusalem, less than ten kilometers away. History records Herod as an insanely jealous, paranoid, ambitious and despotic ruler. He maintained a personal bodyguard of two thousand soldiers and employed secret police to keep a watchful eye on the common people. He banned anything that smacked of opposition and would have it put down by brute force. His insatiable thirst for power led him to a series of ruthless acts, including the execution of his wife, his brother-in-law (who also happened to be the high priest), three of his sons, three hundred military leaders, and many others.

So it is that this morning’s reading concludes with a horrific act of violence. It is a scene not depicted on any Christmas cards that I know of. It is not re-enacted in children’s Christmas pageants. Yet it is part of the real world into which Jesus was born. And as a result Mary and Joseph are forced to take another journey, this time to flee with their infant child as refugees to Egypt.

Thus before he reaches the age of two, we find Jesus already the subject of rumour and innuendo, homeless, in the company of the lowest of the low, threatened, persecuted, and a refugee. As we follow the gospel story, we find him hungry, thirsty, tempted, caught in a violent storm at sea, grieving over the death of a friend, in such intensity of anguish that his sweat becomes like drops of blood falling to the ground… So it is that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews can claim that in Jesus, “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all” (Hebrews 4:15, The Message). “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Darkness Today

The apostle Paul summarizes it in his famous hymn in Philippians, chapter 2:

Although in very nature God,
     he did not consider equality with God something to grasp;
rather, he emptied himself
     by taking the very nature of a slave,
     being made in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
     by becoming obedient to the point of death—
              and nothing less than death on a cross!

Jesus knows what it is to be poor, oppressed, homeless, a refugee… And so he stands beside such people; he stands beside you and me today. He is with us, not just for the good times, but in our moments of weakness and need, in our moments of doubt and sorrow, in our moments of anguish and grief. As we pondered in the sermon a couple of weeks ago, Jesus is Immanuel—God with us.

In the church where last served I had my eyes opened to what that means in extreme terms. One Christmas Eve we had the privilege of being “invaded” by the first of what became more than a hundred refugees. They were Karen people from Burma and they are among the most persecuted minorities in the world.

This past Friday Burma marked the seventy-first anniversary of its independence as a nation. Not one of those years has passed when the Karen people, along with other ethnic minorities, they have not been hunted, tortured, forced out of their homes and villages, and slaughtered by the Burmese army. They have been subjected to bombings, sniper shots, machine gun fire, torture, germ warfare and chemical attacks.[4]  Some of my parishioners had seen their relatives shot down in front of them. Others bore machete scars and bullet wounds. Still others had found escape only by risking their lives to walk through minefields. And when they reached the supposed safety of refugee camps in neighbouring Thailand, the Burmese army continued to shell them.

Yet through all of this they never lost their love for Jesus—and, more importantly, their confidence in Jesus’ love for them, Jesus’ presence with them. To hear them sing some of the old favourite hymns like “Take my life and let it be” or “O Jesus, I have promised to serve thee to the end”, and to see them come humbly and faithfully to the Lord’s table, for me was a deeply moving experience. They had known what it was for Jesus to dwell with them in the darkness.

Never Alone

It’s my sincere hope that 2019 will be a year of blessing for all of us. Yet inevitably there will be times of darkness. My prayer is that, as Jesus stepped into the darkness of Bethlehem twenty centuries and more ago, so you may know his presence with you both in the good times and in those moments when darkness seems to be closing in your life.

So allow me to conclude with a story:

At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly—not with cringing shame but with belligerence.

“Can God judge us? How can God know about suffering?” snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. “We endured terror, beatings, torture, death!” In another group a man lowered his collar. “What about this?” he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. “Lynched for no crime but being black! We have suffocated in slave ships, been wrenched from loved ones, toiled till only death gave release.”

Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that people had been forced to endure in this world? “God leads a pretty sheltered life,” they said. 



So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he or she had suffered the most. A Jew, a slave, an untouchable from India, a 
person from Hiroshima, a prisoner from a Siberian gulag, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the plain they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather simple: before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their verdict was that God should be sentenced to live on earth—as a human being!

“Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Let him champion a cause so just, but so radical, that it brings down upon him the hate, condemnation and efforts of every major traditional and established religious authority to eliminate him. Let him try to describe 
what no-one has ever seen, felt, tasted, heard, or smelled: let him try to communicate God to human beings. At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him be indicted on false charges, tried before a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured and let him die! Let him die the most humiliating death—with common thieves.”

As each leader announced a portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of
 approval went up from the assembled throng. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered another word. No one moved. Suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.[5]

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[1]     Adam Hamilton, The Journey, 113

[2]     Leon Morris, The Gospel According to St Luke, 84

[3]     Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 902

[4]    See Andrew Boyd, Baroness Cox, A Voice for the Voiceless, 215-257

[5]     Author unknown