When I was a newly ordained priest, I served in both a parish and as choir director at St. James School in north Philadelphia, a place well known to many of us. Each summer, the entire school would spend several days at an outdoor adventure camp in northern Maryland, which was a hands-on learning experience for the students and several days of unharnessed fun. But the camp was more than an excuse for a vacation in the northern Maryland woods. It was an opportunity for students to gain self-confidence as they navigated various challenges with courage and grace.
And this is how I found myself standing in line for a ropes course mounted high in the trees of a section of northern Maryland forest. As a school staff member, I was assigned to accompany a group of students in their scheduled activities each day. At this camp, staff members participated as fully as the students. Everybody was in it together, and apparently this shared participation included walking on tree limbs hundreds of feet in the air, with nothing but a harness and helmet for protection.
As I stood in line, my heart began to race. I don’t like heights. I wondered how I might gracefully avoid the ropes course while still supporting the students as they walked out on limbs. Could I just cheer them on and not move forward in the line myself? But I watched as one student after another, some of whom sang in my school choir, literally went out on a limb, encouraged by their fellow classmates.
It was exhilarating to see each student bask in the victory of completing the challenging ropes course, however torturous it was for an acrophobic. Soon, it was my turn. How could I, as their teacher and elder support them with words and not action? They were waiting for me to join them in this test of emotional bravery. So, I stepped up to the course attendant, saddled myself with a harness, and walked out on a limb. Behind me, the students cheered. I went farther and farther out on the tree limb. The ropes course got trickier with each step. My hands sweated. My knees trembled. But the students cheered me on, and when the nightmare was over, the students congratulated me, too. We’d all been in it together.
While I hope never to undertake such an obstacle course again, I understood the impression this whole experience had on the students. They needed their teachers and mentors to share this experience with them. The relationship between teacher and student was one of mutual investment. Students invested trust in their teachers, and teachers invested themselves fully in their students. It was an inspiration for the students to see their elders facing their own fears, just like them. Everyone was in it together.
One of the most common reasons people give up on God is that they don’t believe God is in it with them. They think that God isn’t fully invested in the human experience. God has failed to prove his benevolence, they say. God reigns on high while below children starve, airplanes crash with hundreds of people on board, and terrorists drive cars through crowds of innocent people celebrating the holidays. Meanwhile, God does nothing, say those who have given up on God. Why should they go to church and worship a God who seems distant and removed from the human condition, who isn’t in it with them? To their eyes, God is far away, and we toil here below. We’re not in it together.
To those who think this way, I’ve never been able to provide a convincing argument for belief in God. I suspect that no theologian has or will either. I’ve learned that silence before the mystery of suffering is the most genuine response. It’s often what garners the most respect, even among those who want nothing to do with God.
The Gospels themselves fail to address the problem of suffering and evil in a systematic way. It’s not what their aim is. And yet, if we steep ourselves in the Gospels, they do have something to say about God’s involvement with evil and suffering—quite a lot, actually. And it’s no small comfort to hear St. Matthew the Evangelist assure us that our Messiah and Savior is named Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Surely, Matthew knew suffering in his own life. He knew what it was like to be a reviled tax collector-turned-Christian. He knew what it was like to give everything up to follow his Lord. Unsurprisingly then, at the heart of Matthew’s Gospel, we discern the unspeakably good news that even though bad things happen all the time to good people, our God hasn’t forsaken us after all. And God certainly hasn’t caused the evil and suffering himself. God has been with us in the most intimate way in the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, God with us.
Without this deep conviction that God is really in it with us, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt makes no sense. St. Matthew is indeed the only evangelist to give us this story. Practically speaking, I suppose the Holy Family had to flee to the most remote place possible, far from the jurisdiction of Roman tyrants, and certainly, Egypt was high on that list. But what Jewish person would have wished to go back to Egypt, the place from which their ancestors had fled so many years before? Who would have wanted to make that long and arduous trek through hazardous conditions? And even after the Holy Family departed Egypt, the journey was still filled with uncertainty and the specter of yet another tyrant to avoid, which explains how they eventually ended up in Nazareth.
At first glance, Matthew’s story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt simply provides more fodder for those who want nothing to do with God. How could God allow the Savior of the world to escape Herod’s wrath while all the Holy Innocents were slaughtered? And was all this simply to fulfill Scripture?
But Matthew doesn’t try to explain the massacre of the Holy Innocents, nor do I think he intends to literalize Scriptural fulfillments in a rigidly providential way. St. Matthew is telling us something profound about salvation in his story of the flight of the Holy Family to and from Egypt. The infancy of the Christ child retraces the footsteps of God’s people, in thick and thin. Our infant Savior is taken by his parents into the land that enslaved his own people in the past. And under his parents’ care and God’s providence, the holy Child is brought once again into freedom. The One who comes to make his home with us and within us, becomes for a time a homeless person, wandering like many today. The One for whom John the Baptist prepared a straight path, is carried by his family through a circuitous desert excursion until they finally make their home in Nazareth. The Holy Family must meander its way around the traps of imperial oppression. The Word doesn’t become flesh in a distant, straightforward way, but in a human, intimate, and complicated way. God hasn’t removed himself to a remote corner of the sky. God, in Christ, has been through it all with us, to Egypt and out of it again.
God in Christ, in human time, has gone where our spiritual ancestors had already traveled and suffered and been liberated, and God in Christ, in human time, goes where his beloved children will yet venture in the future. And in between Good Friday and Easter, the Son of God goes to the depths of hell to ensure that not one corner of the earth is left untouched by his saving power. As the Gospels tell us, Jesus sent his disciples out into the places where he himself would go. Our Savior doesn’t leave us to experience hell alone. He’s been there, too.
On this twelfth day of Christmas, as we continue to celebrate the coming of God-with-us in Christ, no amount of Christmas cheer can turn our faces from the horrors around us. War continues in the Middle East. Families of those killed in random acts of violence mourn their beloved. Refugees risk their lives to seek better futures for themselves and their families. People still worry about their next meal. Friends and family are separated by unhappy divisions. Bad things still happen to good people.
St. Matthew doesn’t explain any of this. We can’t explain it. But St. Matthew suggests that we can trust that the God we worship and adore, who has come to us in the most intimate way, has not left us to our own devices, nor does he treat us like puppets on a string. In Christ, God has been where we’ve been, and God will go where we’ll go, too. Christ has been homeless. He’s thirsted on the cross. He, too, has shed human tears. He, too, has lived with the poor and as one of the poor. He, too, has gone from slavery into freedom. He, too, has suffered and died. But he’s also been raised again so that he can reign in glory. And where he’s gone, we shall go, too. And no matter where life will take us, we know that he’s been there, too.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 5, 2025