A family forced to flee across the border in order to keep their son safe from violence: this part of Jesus’ ancient story is as up-to-the-minute as the latest news cycle. This part of Jesus’ story is often overlooked, yet it surely resonates with the millions in our world who have been torn from their families and birthplaces by geo-political realities, vengeance and violence. This is a Syrian family, a Salvadoran family, a ghetto family.
This is a dark topic on which to end our year, but perhaps right on point for a year so marked by darkness and terror. So let’s turn our focus from the reasons for Joseph and Mary’s flight to the hand of God in ensuring Jesus’ safety. This prompts a tricky question: did God always intend that Jesus spend his early childhood in Egypt and end up in Nazareth, as Matthew – ever seeking to link the details of Jesus’ life to Israel’s prophecies, no matter how obscure – would have it? Or does God adjust to human choices, inviting us to follow the new route as it unfolds?
If we hold to a strong view of free will, believing that God gives humankind the free exercise of will, then we must also affirm God’s voluntary non-interference in the exercise of those choices. I believe the biblical record, certainly the accounts of Jesus’ life, bears out this view. Herod had a choice not to pursue his murderous campaign. Judas had a choice not to betray. Pilate had a choice not to condemn. Even Jesus had a choice, as we see in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Where God intervenes, it seems, is in the aftermath of our choices, offering comfort and guidance into new choices that can bring healing and hope, even redemption as we move through the consequences of human will. As I have often been reminded, God does not prevent the messes – God shows up in them. There could be no greater “mess” than the brutal death of God’s own son; yet look at what God brought about three days later.
As we turn from this year when so many of the consequences of human choices hit us, one after another (remembering that even pandemics and forest fires and floods, and certainly racism are rooted in human choice), we can see even more clearly the Good News in this story. God’s shepherding Jesus’ family into exile, and Joseph’s choice to agree to this divine instruction, allowed God’s plan to be carried out. Jesus got to Nazareth in the end, whether or not that was always intended to be his home town.
And God continues to make adjustments to God’s plan in our lives. Millions dead of Covid-19, many preventably, was not God’s plan, not the God who is Love. Lives, careers, educations, relationships massively disrupted are not God’s plan. The persistence of racial discrimination, economics and politics are not God’s plan.
What is God’s plan is us: our willingness to make ourselves available as agents of God’s adjustments to the plan; our desire to be filled with God’s Holy Spirit and attentive to the Spirit’s leading; our capacity to carry the Spirit’s power and make visible God’s love. Where are you being invited to do that?
2020 may have been a year when the messes overwhelmed us, but God is still showing up in right smack dab in the midst of the messes, bringing hope and healing. This new year will not magically undo the messes – it just offers us another 365 days to allow God to bring redemption through us.
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