Second Sunday after Christmas sermon

It is no exaggeration to say of Jesus, that he began his life as a refugee, fleeing political oppression. Because that is exactly what a refugee is. The UN Refugee Agency makes it clear:

A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.

Herod the Great was a client king of Judea. He was a regional, political ruler, trying to kill Jesus for a combination of political and religious reasons. And so, his family fled to Egypt, beyond the borders of his authority, in order to survive.

So, yes, Jesus and the Holy Family were absolutely political refugees. It is precisely what they should be called.

Mind you, Israel and Egypt were both part of the Roman Empire, so they weren’t exactly foreigners as we might presume. And there’s no reason to think they were particularly poor. Certainly, they were vulnerable, especially at the moment of flight. But there was a large Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt. That’s likely where they would have settled. And Joseph had a trade. He was a carpenter. So it’s reasonable to think, that after some little time, they settled into a certain degree of stability and normalcy.

But it is worthwhile for us to consider the importance of these circumstances when we think about Jesus – both from a human point of view and from a theological point of view.

From a strictly human point of view: this was his childhood. These were the circumstances of his childhood. These were the circumstances that shaped his home and homelife. These were the things his parents were talking about. These were the things they refrained from talking about, yet had to have fueled their behavior all the same – behavior (surely) both noble and afraid. Because they were human, raising a human child, and figuring it out as they went along.

Just like with all of us. We are raised within a context which shapes us – which forms and in-forms our sense of self in this world. There is no way the incarnate Christ could (or should) have had a human life devoid of context or influence. And his human life – his childhood – included the reality and experience of being a refugee, and being raised by parents who also were refugees, doing their best.

Which brings us to the second point – the theological importance of what it means for Jesus’ early years to have been experienced as they were.

Matthew, the gospel writer who gives us this story of the flight to Egypt, tells us why he included this snippet from his childhood: “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”

What mattered to Matthew was the fulfillment of prophecy. He wrote his gospel to convince the first century world: Jesus is the Messiah. This is the one to trust and to follow. And in the ancient culture of Judea and Rome – far more than in ours – fulfilment of prophecies was extraordinarily convincing. It was authoritative in a way we can’t relate to. So, Matthew is pulling up these Old Testament texts, written centuries before, as Israel awaited its Messiah, to validate his point. The narrative of Jesus’ life and circumstances fulfills the prophecies.

But over time, as we’ve continued to explore, theologically, who the Christ was, his experience as refugee is noteworthy unto itself. The theology in question is that of “incarnation” – that God, in Christ, would take on a body and have a fully human experience, which – by definition – means a life that is particular to its place and circumstances, and a life that is vulnerable to threat, as it is for any living thing in creation.

And what interests me here is how this theme of “refugee” might have become for him, in retrospect, an essential part of his incarnation. His humanity was shaped while being the hated one, the threatened one, the fleeing and displaced one, the fragile one.

But why does this matter? Why did Jesus’ incarnation need to include this?

I can’t be certain. But I see a couple things worth considering.

One, it’s a question of solidarity. The one who has shared our experience, understands our experience, and can be compassionate to us as we endure it

My friend Petronella was a refugee during World War II. In fact, she gave birth to her first child – and nearly died doing so – while fleeing the Nazis, who’d invaded her home country of Belgium. Petronella and her husband were racing for the French frontier, desperate to survive. They did manage to get to France, eventually, only for France to fall victim as well to the Nazi’s advance. And, when that happened, they figured, “If we’re going to live in an occupied country, it might as well be our own.” So they returned to Brussels and lived out the war, under constant threat. But during that time, and after the birth of her second child, she risked her life and that of her infant in a scheme to save her Jewish friends from deportation to a concentration camp. There was a loophole at the time in Nazi law in Belgium that Jewish parents of newborn children were exempt from being deported. So this Jewish friend set up their apartment to look as if there were a baby there. She would regularly put out diapers on the line. And then Petronella would loan her baby to her friends whenever an inspection was occurring. And it worked. They were saved. And there’s no knowing how bad it could have been for all of them if they’d been caught. But they weren’t.

And I wonder, how much was Petronella’s willingness to risk so much on her friends’ behalf, informed by her own harrowing experience as a refugee, as a mother, as one who nearly died in becoming a mother? After all, we are who we are through our circumstances. They form and shape our character. And, if all is working as it should, they shape our character for good. We choose love, where we ourselves have needed love.

What community, I wonder, in Egypt, welcomed in this fleeing holy family? Who first gave them shelter? Who gave Joseph his first job in this strange land? Who were their first new friends? And how did this narrative and the lore of Jesus’ family become the narrative that taught the growing Messiah how he, too, would care for the hunted ones, the vulnerable ones, the displaced and hated ones?

Years later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he conceded his life to God’s redemptive purpose, “Not my will, but yours be done,” in what untraceable way was it the survivor refugee choosing to risk everything on behalf of this hurting, vulnerable world?

We can’t possibly know.

But we can know that this was his story, that it had to have shaped him, and that he did say, “Yes,” when the time came. And he said, “Yes” all throughout his ministry: Yes, to the sick one. Yes, to the outcast Yes, even to the dead.

I wonder, too, how much his origin story as a refugee was significant for Christ at a deeper, ontological level. How much did it become true of who he was, in his essence, particularly in his incarnational identity with all humanity? After all, if the nature of God is as one – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and if the Son is now also one with all humanity, linking earth to heaven and heaven and earth, what does it mean that this human/divine Christ began life as a refugee?

Might it be safe to say that the human experience we are all having in this broken world is akin to being refugees? Perhaps it’s a metaphor rightly applied to all of us, each in our own way:

After all, from the moment we exit our mothers’ wombs, we are as strangers in a strange land, with threats at every turn. I remember taking a children’s first-aid course before Henry was born. I came home terrified, telling my spouse, “I don’t know how any of us survived to adulthood.” And that was just to do with accidents. There’s danger everywhere, to our bodies and souls: sibling torments, inadequate parents, school bullies, falling behind the others in class and feeling stupid, striking out every time at bat and being jeered by your own team, staring in the mirror as a middle-schooler and feeling ugly.

Which of us didn’t wonder at some point in our childhoods if we’d been adopted, sensing somewhere deep in our psyches that we didn’t belong? Or which of us didn’t yearn to live in some different family or city – out of some abiding sensibility that we didn’t fit…this wasn’t right…that something was amiss in our place in this world?

And this is all just “normal” growing up, without any particular suffering… except the fact, that it was suffering. It was lonesome and fearful. The threats to knowing ourselves as holy and beloved, sacred and beautiful, rightfully at home in this world are real. How do I know? Because so few people I know believe, deep in their souls, that it is true. We live as refugees within our own countries, our own families, our own church, and yes, even within our own bodies.

And as we age, the threats only increase, confirming the fears that took root from the start: We don’t belong. We are not safe. We are surrounded by powerful forces that seek our demise. We are refugees.

And into this world God makes an entrance, precisely as one of us, sharing the entire human experience, even to the extreme of beginning life as a literal refugee, a refugee who – in fact – one day will be killed by the heir of Herod who sought his destruction from the start.

So, what can this mean, this mystery of Christ’s identity: one with God in perpetual peace, one with us as refugee, slaughtered eventually upon the tree?

The answer, I believe, is this paradox – this terrible beauty – that by joining us as a refugee unto death, even the existential reality of our solitariness and vulnerability has itself become the place of divine union and essential oneness.

Every solitary, frightened place, is now the place of God, safe with us.