Christmas 1, 28 December, 2025

Sermon. 

Rev’d Howard Wallace

It is the season of Christmas and our liturgical colour has changed from the purple of Advent to white, even if only for a brief time. That made me ponder if white is a good colour for Christmas. If we look at the gospel stories of the birth of Jesus what sort of colour is suggested by them?

First, we note that only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, tell us stories of Jesus’ birth. Why that is the case is a matter for another time. If we just took the story from Luke, then white would seem an appropriate colour, or we may want to vary it a little to a bright yellow or even gold. There we have a story filled with joy with angels singing glory to God on high, with the message of peace on earth, all set against the humble context of a stable with animals and shepherds watching over their flocks. This is the stuff that shapes our Christmas cards, at least those that still give a nod to the Bible story.

However, Matthew, our Gospel this year, gives quite a different story. One that is bleak and dark. Maybe dark grey or even black would be a better colour for Christmas. Matthew’s story starts with a threat of abandonment with Joseph pondering if he should stay with Mary once she was found to be pregnant. Then we get the story of the wise men coming from the east – the only bit of Matthew to make the Christmas card drawing board. But then we hear of an insanely jealous king, of infanticide, of death squads, of refugees fleeing for their lives. We see the kind of horror and terror they experienced on our TV screens regularly these days. And yet, is not the darkness of Matthew’s story something that needs to be encountered if the peace that the angels in Luke’s story speak about is to be realised?

Before we look a little closer at Matthew’s story we should note that we are not dealing with a literal account of a birth that happened long ago. We should not expect such details of the birth of a child to a poor, artisan family from a town in the north of the country, relocated to an obscure town in the south, located in the back room of an inn. No, this story depends more on long held traditions and earlier stories in order to say to us what it does. The story looks backward as well as forward.

The story looks backward. This may not be recognised too easily today but for the Jewish Christian audience of Matthew it would be clear to see, the allusions would be manifest. The angel’s command to Joseph to take Mary and her child south to Egypt for safety, echoes the ancient story of the patriarch Jacob moving to Egypt for survival in the face of a famine. The oppressive act of Herod of seeking to kill all the young children echoes the Pharaoh’s act of killing the children of the Israelites and then of the death of the first-born Egyptian children by the angel on Passover night. Matthew connects the events of the story with prophetic oracles from Micah and Jeremiah. And finally, Matthew quotes a text from Hosea: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’, a quote once applicable to Israel, now applied to Jesus. Right at the start of the Gospel Matthew applies Israel’s great message of liberation and deliverance from violence and enslavement to the coming of Jesus. Jesus’ story and ministry are about deliverance from all that binds, captures or oppresses. Jesus’ story is a re-enactment of the story of Israel.

But Matthew’s birth story is not only one that looks back. It is one that also looks forward. It firmly plants the story in the ages to follow, even in our own time. How many Herod’s have we read about or even seen on TV or film that have come and gone and exercised their insane jealousy and ego at the expense of their own people – we think of Hitler and Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, the Assads of Syria, Pol Pot, and closer to our time Putin and those in the Israeli government who would banish Palestinians from their land. And would we even add Trump whose slashing of US foreign aid will hasten countless deaths across the third world.

But even on our own shores do we not now recognise the collective insanity of the separation of children from their parents in the stolen generation and the intolerable pain it has caused? Or the pain caused by the many children exported from Britain to Australia in an earlier generation? And we continue to hear the stories of asylum seekers coming to this country and of their treatment in off-shore detention.

Is not Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus a reminder that Luke’s message of peace and joy is uttered in the midst of a world full of pain and hatred both at government levels and at the level of individuals as we have seen recently at Bondi. But Matthew is also saying that God in Jesus identifies with those who suffer in this world, and especially those who suffer most and unjustly. God suffers with those Israelis killed and terrorised by the Hamas attack last October and with the thousands of Palestinians whose lives have been disrupted or ruined since. It seems that Luke’s peace and joy will only come at a terrible price, but it is a price that God in Jesus bears within himself. Matthew, in his allusion to the Israelite stay in Egypt and their subsequent liberation from slavery, is hinting at the connection of Jesus’ birth to God’s saving action for his people. Jesus’ birth is linked fully to his death and resurrection. God comes among us in Jesus in mercy, love and pity all the way to the cross and beyond in order to bring about our deliverance. God works that deliverance by taking the suffering we know about into himself, and overcoming it there in the life of Jesus. In the process he calls us his brothers and sisters, who in turn carry the prayer for peace and joy with us in our daily lives and express God’s love, mercy and pity for those who continue to suffer in our world.  Amen