Feast of the Holy Family (Mt. 2:13-15,19-23) “Do I have Room?”
As we live through the holidays this year, we hear 123 million people will be traveling at least 50 miles from home in America. Doesn’t that seem like a staggering number? One third of the population will be on the move.
Why will this happen? The Mass migration will happen so that we can celebrate the holidays with our families. Millions of dollars will be spent on travel. We Americans believe that it is a human right to be with our families at some point during these days of celebration. We feel that it is a tragedy if this isn’t the case.
We hum the song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” We have movies that tell of heroic attempts of family members to travel home to be with family. And then we have the other phenomenon of people leaving home for Christmas so that they can get away. Sometimes whole families leave home for vacation at some resort during Christmas. But what about families who have been forced out of their homes this Christmas?
The Biblical Christmas story is a story of family that is forcibly pushed from place to place. But that isn’t something we like to think about. We see manger scenes in our churches as well as in our homes. Some of them are elaborately decorated. Some are rather crude. Somehow it seems like they blend in with the other Christmas decorations. When we see a creche we know what will be there. A few pastors around the world recently have used nativity scenes to prick the world’s conscience.
We could remember the Lutheran pastor who placed the manger with the Baby Jesus on a pile of broken cement in Bethlehem last year. He said that if the baby Jesus was born in 2024, he would have been born under the rubble of Gaza. The display provoked a lot of anger amongst people. “Don’t bring politics into the Christmas story,” it was said. But the Christmas story is saturated with political turmoil and with violence. Also, there are messages we need to hear about loving our neighbor in the story of Jesus’ birth. For the nativity story was different than we might picture it.
We could take one line from the narrative in Luke to see that. We imagine the Holy Family walking to Bethlehem to participate in the Roman census. Thousands of people are on the move, not to vacation, but to satisfy an oppressive government that wants to count its people for tax purposes. We further picture Mary and Joseph going from hotel to hotel being refused lodging. But what does the actual scripture say? “While they were in Bethlehem, the time came for her to have her child. She gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn (Lk 2:6-7).”
If we look at the word in Greek that is used for inn, it doesn’t refer to a hotel. There are two Greek words for inn. The word Luke uses here refers to a spare space in a peasant home in Palestine that was reserved for guests. Most homes were made up of one big room with two levels. The lower level was reserved for the animals the family owned. The upper level was the living space that humans occupied. The men, women and children would sleep in this space together. Guests might be at a third level which was called “the inn.”
Joseph and Mary weren’t turned away but they were given a space in a home where they went for shelter. To refuse hospitality was a terrible sin in the minds of Biblical people. People staying in the home that Joseph and Mary went to moved aside and made a space for the pregnant couple. Maybe it was so crowded they stayed in the lower space where the animals spent the night. For that reason, Jesus was given a manger for a cradle
From there, if we read on, the Holy Family migrated two more times because Joseph feared persecution. He took his family into Egypt where they probably took shelter in a refugee camp. Eventually, they migrated to Galilee motivated by fear for their lives. The family didn’t go back to Judea, where they were from, because it was too dangerous for the child Jesus. And that is where our Lord grew up. The Holy Family, like so many families, were driven from place to place by the politics, wars and economy of their time.
How these facts change our perspective. The story of Jesus’ birth isn’t a cute bedtime story, but we see the story repeated often in the history of the world. The question we are left to ponder is whether we can make room in our life for the least among us. We are challenged to exercise the virtues listed in the second lesson from Colossians. Can we exercise heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience? If we reflect on the narrative of Jesus’ birth in all its complexity, the Gospel can become not just an entertaining childhood story but a story that challenges us to love as God loves.