“With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back” (Jer. 31:9).
Christmas is a time of coming and going: families and friends gathering here and there, sometimes requiring heroic efforts to collapse time and space for the purpose of being together. Even if it’s just the next town over, we leave off the familiar round in order to be with others. We’re displaced, or others displace us, as our usual patterns are preempted by the holiday. In the end we return, maybe grateful for the resumption of normal life after a measure of toing and froing.
Notice that going the distance figures in the Christmas story itself. There’s plenty of travel in the New Testament accounts, all of it tough and perilous. Think of the Holy Family in Luke’s Gospel, going from Nazareth to Bethlehem in Judea: the Virgin Mary, great with child, crossing the border in order to be registered with her husband Joseph. Or the journey of the wise men from the east, in our Gospel today, following the leading of a star in order to worship the one who was born king of the Jews. “A cold coming we had of it,” one of the wise men says in T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi.” “Just the worst time of the year/ For a journey, and such a long journey…”: here, the poet is imagining what that journey was like. Or the flight into Egypt, also in Matthew’s Gospel, when the Holy Family leave their home in order to avoid the wrath of King Herod. Herod will brook no competition from a child for the title “king of the Jews,” and is willing to massacre innocent children to prove it. Traveling just doesn’t get any harder than that.
The tradition of the journey in the Christmas Gospels is faithful to the Old Testament account from which it sprang. From the very start, God required his People to be light on their feet. The journey of faith in Genesis begins with Abraham, called out of his home in Mesopotamia in order to become the father of a host of nations. God sends him out, even though Abraham doesn’t really know where he’s going. Going that distance requires faith. “I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you” (Gen. 17:6), God tells Abraham. Believing that promise also required faith.
Or again, when God brings Abraham’s family out of slavery in Egypt, they have to get going, through the perilous water of the Red Sea, in order to escape their enemies. They had to scamper around the angel of death in order to pull that off. There are forty years of wandering in the wilderness ahead before they can enter the promised land. When God brings the People back from exile in Babylon, there is yet another journey of faith to be undertaken, a final distance to be covered, in response to God’s call..
Our first reading today, for this twelfth day of Christmas, announces the journey home from exile. God tells Jeremiah, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock” (Jer. 31:10). “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,” God says, “and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth. Among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor together; a great company, they shall return here” (Jer. 31:8). When Israel returns from exile, the prophet says, mourning will be turned to joy, and sorrow into gladness.
There’s a distance to be covered in the Christian life: as seen both in the stories of Christ’s birth, and in the stories of faith that preceded them. Mary and Joseph and the kings needed faith, confidence in God, as did the patriarchs and prophets before them. Without that faith, there would be no journey and no arrival. There is risk involved in going from where you are to where you need to be: that is, the place where God has called you. Some parts of the journey from here to there are perilous, and traveling the road is hard. But as the prophecy says this morning, “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back” (Jer. 31:9).
This action requires faith, but we ought not to forget the God who is faithful to us in the course of the journey. God will supply all that we need as we respond to the call. That’s God’s gift to us: God’s grace that makes us equal to the task, able to bear the journey and to arrive at the goal. It’s the grace that God “freely bestowed upon us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:6), as St. Paul writes in our second reading this morning. On this journey, Jesus is the shepherd who will lead us, and the faithful companion who will accompany us, as we follow the path and walk along the way.