The Sunday after Christmas is kind of a family feast in the Byzantine tradition. We’re still in the post-festive 
time of Christmas and so there’s a kind of representative selection of Jesus’ relatives here. We already celebrated his Mother on the day after Christmas, so today we celebrate first of all someone who is not actually a blood-relative, but who is closer to Jesus even than that: St Joseph, the one whom God the Father had chosen to take his place, as it were, fulfilling the role of the father of Jesus in a human way. Blood may be thicker than water, but grace is thicker than blood, so to speak, and so this relationship of Joseph to Jesus was profound and intimate. We also celebrate a blood-relative, a cousin, St James, who seems not to have been a follower of Jesus until after his resurrection, since St John remarked that not even his relatives believed in Him. But he ended up as the first bishop of Jerusalem and the author of one of the books of the New Testament, so I guess he made up for lost time.
Finally we also celebrate the most famous ancestor (and the most important, as far as the Messiah is concerned), the holy King David. He also connects to St Joseph—who is the only person in the New Testament besides Jesus who is called “son of David”—because the lineage of Jesus is traced through Joseph, not Mary. It is because of Joseph that Jesus is reckoned to be of the tribe of Judah. The liturgical services keep saying that Mary too is of David’s bloodline, but the Scriptures give us no evidence of this. The only hint about Mary’s lineage comes from St Luke, who says she was a relative of St Elizabeth, who was of the tribe of Levi (one of the “daughters of Aaron”), not the tribe of Judah. Well, perhaps we’ll have to wait till we enter Paradise ourselves before we get the whole story on this.
But let us look at the Gospel (Mt. 2:13-23). The first thing we hear is that Joseph receives an urgent message in the middle of the night from an angel who tells him to get up immediately and flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus, because the Child’s life is in danger. Now, if Joseph was not such a devout and obedient man, he might have looked at the Child and said what the wicked thief would say decades later from the cross: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Then save yourself and us!” We might think that God would simply have miraculously shielded his only-begotten Son from those who would destroy Him, rather than putting the whole family through such a dreadful ordeal. But the Father never worked miracles to make things easier for Jesus, and Jesus never worked miracles to make things easier for Himself. His commitment to entering the fullness of our wretched human condition, for better or worse, was absolute. He voluntarily abandoned Himself to the vicissitudes of earthly life, for He was fully man as well as fully God. Of course, He did benefit from the angelic warning, but that was only so the plan of salvation wouldn’t be ruined from the very beginning. He had to be kept alive so that He could later die for our sins.
Let’s see if we can also look at the time frame of this event. It’s a bit difficult to harmonize the accounts of Luke and Matthew concerning the chronology of events and the places that Joseph and Mary lived. But we have to say that the flight into Egypt had to have happened after the presentation in the temple, which was 40 days after Jesus’ birth. This also means that the magi arrived sometime after the presentation (so the Christmas cards and nativity scenes with the magi at the manger are not historically accurate, but the theological message is sufficient for not having to overthrow venerable customs). Three things from Scripture verify this: it says that when the magi arrived, they “went into the house” and saw the Child with Mary, so Jesus was out of the manger by then. Also, if the magi had left them with gold and other valuable gifts, they would not, only 40 days later, have to give the offering of the poor in the temple, unless they were incorrigible spendthrifts, which I seriously doubt. Finally, St Matthew says that Joseph got the angelic message to go to Egypt right after the magi left, so if they had come to the manger, the Holy Family would have been in Egypt 40 days later and not in the temple at Jerusalem. It is implied that they stayed in Egypt for a considerable amount of time (it’s hard to know the exact date of Jesus’ birth, but it looks as though they had to stay in Egypt 2-3 years, for they had to remain there until the death of Herod).
So, one of the things that all of this chronology has established is that by the time the Holy Family had to flee to Egypt, Mary had already heard and pondered Simeon’s prophecy that her Son was going to be a sign of contradiction, set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce her own soul, too. It didn’t take long for this first stage of the fulfillment of the prophecy to begin. Mary and Joseph were just starting to realize the price they’d have to pay for being chosen to raise their little bundle of joy!
This brings to mind a word that came to me several times during our Advent retreat. [I mentioned this in a previous post, but I decided to use it again, reworked, for this one.] I was reading some of Pope Benedict’s reflections on the priesthood, and he kept referring to what Jesus told Peter on the shore of the sea, after the Lord rose from the dead. He said that Peter would be led where he did not wish to go. The Pope said that this word is one for priests, and it highlights the difficulty of the vocation as well as the importance of obedience at all costs, if one is going to fruitfully endure the hardships that are entailed in being a disciple of Christ crucified. The priest is specifically configured to the person of Christ, particularly in Christ’s own high-priestly sacrifice on the Cross. The Lord does not ask of us anything He wouldn’t do first. He was led to the Cross where, humanly seen, He did not wish to go, for He had said to his Father in Gethsemane: “take this cup away from me.” But the Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus learned obedience through suffering, and being thus perfected, He became the source of salvation to all who obey Him, the High Priest according to the order of Melchisedek (5:8-10).
But this word is not only for priests, because all who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death, says the Apostle, so all share in that cruciform configuration. So we can all expect, in one way or another, that fidelity to our Christian vocation will require that we be led where we do not wish to go. The example was given to us in today’s Gospel. I’m sure that Mary and Joseph had hoped to live a relatively quiet and happy life with their beloved Son, and most certainly to do this within the borders of the holy land of the chosen people. But guess what? Before they could even get fully settled, an angel from Heaven came and told them to get up and go where they did not wish to go! They had to go to pagan territory, a land of idols, the very place from which their ancestors were rescued by the mighty hand of God, who swore to give them a new land, one flowing with milk and honey. “Well, honey,” said Joseph to Mary, “we have to leave the land of milk and honey—right now!—and go to the land of sand and scorpions and foreigners and demons.” This was a harsh trial, but all God’s chosen ones are tested like gold in the fire. As we know, there would be another, though quieter, exodus from Egypt a few years later when they returned to Israel under the blessing of God.
Meanwhile, Herod’s face was turning as purple as his royal robes, as he furiously fumed over being tricked by the magi, so he initiated a massacre of babies, hoping to catch that newborn pretender to the throne in his bloody dragnet. Isn’t it strange how people can become indignant over Herod’s killing of innocent babies and at the same time claim a woman’s “right” to do the same thing? Herod actually had better reasons than most of today’s abortion-minded women. He at least feared for his kingdom and possibly for his life because of the supposed usurper. He was trying to remove a mortal political enemy. But children are killed for less serious reasons today: it’s inconvenient to have a child now; I’ll have one later, maybe; can’t afford it now; cramps my style, interrupts my career; it’s a burden I don’t want to deal with; or even: oops, forgot to use contraception; well, abortion’s a good back-up plan.
Such women are being asked by God to go where they do not wish to go, for the sake of preserving human life, out of respect for the image of God imprinted upon the souls of these little ones. But they refuse. They don’t want the cross, so they’re not going to get the resurrection. Their little victims will rise up as living testimony against them on Judgment Day—unless, of course, they had sincerely repented and forever disavowed such evils.
As for us, let us be aware of the great responsibility and even the sufferings that being a member of the family of Jesus entail. But let us also know the joy that awaits us who faithfully follow Him even to the point of being led where we do not wish to go. This life is a pilgrimage through sometimes unfriendly places, but our destination is the Promised Land of Paradise, the Heavenly Jerusalem, from which there is no banishment, and no sorrow or pain. If we accept to be led to the Cross in this life, we will ultimately be led to the place to which we really do want to go: the family reunion with all the holy ones in the Heart of God.
