January 5th, 2019

At Christmastime, I like to encourage everyone to read and study the two accounts of Jesus’ birth given in the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, the first two chapters of each gospel. You will find them to be quite different accounts with many different and sometimes conflicting details. This is because each evangelist has a distinctive purpose in his narrative of the events surrounding Christ’s birth. Over the course of time, many of the details of the two distinctive narratives have been combined as though there was just one story. If, when you read each account, you try to block out of your mind everything you have come to know about the birth of Jesus from Christmas nativity sets, hymns and decorations, you will discover the distinctive message that each evangelist was sharing. For example, this weekend we celebrate the Epiphany with the visit of the Gentile astrologers from the East seeking the newborn king. This story of the wise men appears only in Matthew’s account. As he writes primarily for a Jewish-Christian audience, Matthew stresses that the newborn king, the Messiah, is not just for the Jews but for all peoples, represented by the wise men. Writing his gospel, of course, decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Matthew also intends to show that Jesus’ persecution and rescue from death in the resurrection was forecast at the very beginning of his life. From the very beginning, a menacing shadow of opposition and persecution hung over Christ. Only Matthew includes the details of King Herod being so unnerved by the wise men’s talk of a newborn king, that he slaughters all the young baby boys in Bethlehem as an attempt to slay this newborn king. We observe this tragedy in our Christmas weekday liturgy on December 28. Yet, as the adult Jesus triumphs over his death in the resurrection, so, too, the infant Jesus is rescued from the clutches of Herod’s mass murder by the angel who warns Joseph to escape with this family to Egypt. This dramatic and tragic detail of the holy innocents appears only in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ infancy story. While our focus on the baby Jesus at Christmas tends to evoke all kinds of warm, peaceful and cheerful sentiments, the full infancy story of Jesus –especially St. Matthew’s account—is a great drama of life and death, joy and sorrow, hardship and reward. It is a fitting prelude to the full story that is to come about in the adult Christ and, for that matter, in  the adult Christian who strives to follow “the Way.”