Christmas II – Holy Family

Christmas II – Holy Family 2017 – Cycle B Genesis 15:1-6; 21:1-3; Psalm 103; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:223-40

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

the Wizard of Oz bellows out of smoke and fire to Dorothy and her companions.  Why?  Because behind the curtain, the great and powerful Oz in reality is just an old huckster afraid of his own shadow.  Behind the curtain of any theater you find very different realities than what is on stage.

What are the realities if we look behind the curtain on the scene of today’s Gospel?

Nazareth is a small village.  Its inhabitants, people of limited means.  To take time off from work to travel to Bethlehem for this census was a struggle for Joseph.  Mary is very pregnant.  Can you imagine the bumping up and down while sitting on a donkey?  But governments of all ages like red tape and paper work; lack common sense and don’t tend to make life easier for those governed.  Remember it is the reign of the divine Caesar Augustus.

Luke tells us there was no room in the inn.  Might the reality be that this new dad, Joseph, didn’t have the money for a hotel stay?  And there is as yet no Ronald McDonald Houses.  He has to watch his wife give birth alone, no midwives, just the presence of donkeys, oxen and cows, beasts of burden.  Now having traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, eight days after the birth of Jesus they must travel to Jerusalem to fulfill the Mosaic Law.  They can’t afford the lamb prescribed for sacrifice so they present the gift assigned to the poor, a pair of turtle doves.

Joseph and Mary represent so many families in which each day is a struggle to make ends meet.

Behind the curtain, there are no singing angels, drummer boy shepherds and starlight.  We instead find a young man faced with the human role to be a provider for his family.  And all he has to offer his son is a life tied to a small backwater village and for the rest of his life hard manual labour.  I recall my father saying that he didn’t care what my brother and I did in life as long as we didn’t work in a factory like he had to.  Joseph will not be able to offer Jesus upward social mobility.

Can we understand why Jesus will later teach, “Blessed are you who are poor”? Not “poor in spirit” as Matthew records but “you who are poor” as Luke records.Jesus knew first hand a life of poverty.

In our capitalist consumer oriented society, it is hard to accept the idea of poverty as a blessing.  “Blessed are you who are poor”.  Prosperity, not poverty, is a sign of God’s blessing, is it not?  Some Christian ministers even preach what is called the Prosperity Gospel.   Prosperity theology is the religious belief that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for us, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one’s material wealth.  If humans have faith in God, this theology posits, God will deliver security and prosperity.  Note what is missing – the cross!  This is faith as a contract, a quid pro quo trade-off, not a relationship.

If humans have faith in God, God will deliver security and prosperity?  Is that true?  Mary and Joseph, like many poor people today, were trying to be faithful, fulfilling the requirements of the State and the Mosaic Law of their ancestors.  Where is security and prosperity in their lives?   Don’t forget their forced flight as refugees into Egypt when Herod seeks to murder the infant Jesus.  Other children of Bethlehem, as today, always pay the price for adult greed and grasping of power.

Where is security and prosperity for Jesus hanging on the cross?  Fidelity to our God is not a guarantee of anything, least of all health and wealth.  Fidelity to God and to each other is an end in itself, it is how we are to live our lives of faith.

The challenge for us to wrestle with is the injustices that many poor people of faith face.  Realities behind life’s curtain where few of us want to look.  The poor and powerless are blessed because of the faith they hold in their hearts.  A faith that can and is often obscured for others by prosperity that comes in many forms.  This is not a condemnation of living comfortably and being healthy but a warning that such a life can blind us to the realities of our sisters and brothers.

Mary and Joseph, like many people today, could have made the decision to give up their faith.  It costs too much; it takes up too much time, too much money for sacrifices, too much of a struggle, too inconvenient, it does fit into my schedule.  But Mary and Joseph didn’t make that decision.  The choice they made was for fidelity.  Joseph and Mary, like us, had the example of our ancestors Abraham and Sarah.  Fidelity to God cost this older couple very much.  The cost of moving to a foreign country, the cost of an infertile couple waiting patiently for a child where no child can be born, the cost of sacrificing that child, Isaac, as an act of fidelity with no questions asked.

In a world where children are used as shields in war, sold for slavery and sex, allowed to starve, watch their parents murdered before their eyes and left as orphans, not have basic healthcare, shelter, clothing and education, people of faith in a privileged nation as ours have an obligation to care for poor families in tangible ways.  All children and families are to be acknowledged as gifts to our world.  We simply need to look behind the curtain.

If Jesus were born today to teen parents in American urban poverty, would he be any better off than he was 2,000 years ago?