God with us in the mess

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So the last figures in the nativity scene, those tardy wise men, have made it to the manger. The set is complete, and can be put away tidily for next year. The Incarnation is safely accomplished, the decorations can come down (or, at most, stay an extra couple of days) and we can get on with the New Year.

But, as Sorrel reminded us last week, the mess and complexity, the difficulty and the danger of the infancy narratives are impossible to escape. Having skipped ahead to the massacre of the innocent children by Herod last week, today we return to the passage immediately before it, the catalyst for this spilling of innocent blood. In Evelyn Waugh’s fictional account of the life of St Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, he gives an account of Helena kneeling in Bethlehem on the Feast of Epiphany, and meditating on the story of the magi. 

‘“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent! …

“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.” ’

The truth is that the story of Christ’s birth, especially as recounted in the gospel of Matthew, our gospel for this year, is complicated. It’s messy. Things don’t go to plan, or at least they don’t go according to any sane or sensible plan. Witness, for example, the last line of today’s gospel: ‘having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.’ While Matthew doesn’t explicitly say so, it appears likely from context that this warning came from an angel, as is so often depicted. Angels may not be involved in announcing Jesus’ conception to Mary or his birth to the shepherds in Matthew’s account, but they play a vital corrective part in keeping the story on track. Joseph, faced with an unexpectedly pregnant fiancée and trying to do the right thing by divorcing her quietly, has to be dissuaded by an angel. Later, it is again down to an angel to get the Holy Family safely into Egypt and away from Herod’s systematic slaughter. And even then, the angel can’t rest, but has to prompt Joseph a couple more times to get them back to Nazareth. 

This is not a story of everything slotting neatly into place, of cogs moving and strings being pulled so that God’s plan for salvation can be rolled out. This is a story of jarring course correction at almost every stage.

As we begin this new calendar year, it is very difficult to avoid getting sucked into the cycle of self-improvement and shame with which society loads the beginning of January. I’m far from immune to it myself, looking round my living room at the literal tide of mess left by the retreating waters of Christmas and being sure that tomorrow I will wake up a different person, full of resolve and the ability not to leave things in little piles everywhere. We may have managed to grasp for a moment, over the course of the Christmas services, the great truth that in the Incarnation, God came to share and participate in our mess. We may have noticed how God chose the least important, the teenage mother and the reluctant foster father, the smelly shepherds to be the first witnesses of what he was doing. We may have gone further, and believed for a moment that we, too, are welcome at the manger, not because of any merit of our own but because of the pure desire of God to be with us, to be among us. 

But it is so difficult to keep hold of this lesson. Thrown back on our own resources, we trust in our own minute strength, not the power of God, and like our New Year’s resolutions, we falter and fail.

Short of angelic intervention, what are we to do to remember that Emmanuel is God with us for life, not just for Christmas? One thing we can do is to pay further attention to the idiosyncrasies of Matthew’s Gospel, which will be our companion until Advent Sunday begins the cycle again. Because Matthew, perhaps more than the other three evangelists, struggles too with the desire to make everything neat while recognizing that Jesus resists this at every turn. Matthew’s gospel is intricately structured and organized: it begins with a meticulous genealogy, tracing Jesus’ descent through three sets of fourteen generations. It is structured around five great speeches. Whenever he gets the chance, Matthew points out the ways in which Christ is the fulfilment of the prophets, a neat ‘I told you so’. 

And yet Matthew is also unflinching in keeping Christ’s harder corners in place. To Matthew belong the uncompromising parable of the judgement dividing the sheep and the goats, the demanding social teaching of the Sermon on the Mount urging us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, and the harshest judgements on hypocrisy.

And to Matthew belong some of the most human and humane of Christ’s teachings: the promises of the beatitudes, the invitation to all who labour and are carrying heavy burdens to come to Christ. And the final assurance of Matthew’s Christ: remember I am with you, to the end of the age.

May Matthew’s Gospel be our course corrective this year, reminding us that God is with us in neatness and in mess, in simplicity and complexity, in joy and mourning, when the path seems clear ahead of us and when it becomes clear that we are helplessly lost. May we, like the Magi, travel onwards from the crib not in the assurance that we know what to do now, but with a willingness to change course again, trusting in the transformative power of the one who is with us to the end of the age. Amen.