Though Christmas comes with tidings of comfort and joy, it also comes with tidings of discomfort and trouble, where love finds its deepest measure not at home with family and friends, but out on the open road on your way to who knows where.
It’s how St. Matthew tells it anyway, recalling the holy family’s flight into Egypt, a story told against the urgent backdrop of another story: the story of the massacre of innocents, a story recalling not the one child who survived but the many who didn’t. It’s an abysmal world St. Matthew dares to hold onto lest we decorate our understanding of Christmas with too many lights: a story from hell set firmly within the nativity narrative itself.
According to the late Leonard Cohen, “Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” It’s an old Jewish idea: the notion that you learn to put your whole trust in the promises of God by way of exile and heartbreak because when you’re on your own, separated from kin and country, it’s all you have.
By way of a dream that came to him unguarded and asleep, St. Joseph got up and took the child and his mother into Egypt as if tracking with the life of Moses. Joseph did this because it wasn’t safe to go home, and because God mysteriously called his son into exile. Though biblical scholars mostly doubt the historicity of this story, what I notice in it is how it lands the holy family in a place where nothing made sense to them.
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