The Great Reversals of Christmas

Text: Matt. 2:13-18

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

            “O Jesus Christ, Thy manger is My paradise at which my soul reclineth…” So begins a treasured gem of our Lutheran Christmas hymns. But today, a mere three days after Christmas morning, on this feast day, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, we are reminded that we don’t need to get very far away from the manger before we leave paradise. Not long after the glory and peace of Christmas, there is anything but in Bethlehem. Vain and paranoid King Herod, figuring out that he had been tricked by the wise men when they had not returned to him to tell him where they found one born King of the Jews, became furious. He ordered that all the male children in Bethlehem and that region under two years of age were to be killed, a sacrifice to his desire to stay in control and remain in his comfortable position. One of the saddest prophecies of Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, came to pass: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” It would seem to all human understanding of appearances and feelings, that the goodness and joy of Christmas had been thwarted by evil.

            Yet our Lord was not born to simply be thwarted at the first—or any—opportunity. No, He shows that He can turn evil, even unspeakable evil, to good. Behold, His great reversal, which He was born to perform, is beginning even now in His infancy.

            Jesus escaped murderous King Herod. An angel of the Lord appeared to His guardian, Joseph, in a dream, warning him to take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until Herod’s deadly intentions were put down. So Joseph took his small family to Egypt. And this is where the great reversal begins to shine.

            If you will remember, Israel had spent some time in Egypt, over a thousand years before. It was the murderous order of Pharoah to kill all of the boys born to the Israelites while they were slaves that set off the Exodus from there. Egypt, which had been a place of slavery and oppression for God’s people, a place of danger and death, is now with the escape of Jesus there 1500 years later, turned into a safe haven for the descendant of those Israelites. Meanwhile, the Israelite king, Herod, who should have known better and welcomed the newborn Messiah, now becomes the vilest of villains, giving an order that the Pharaoh of old would have approved. But in another great reversal, this arrogant King Herod, who seeks to overthrow God’s will now has his own plans dashed to pieces by no more than an infant, a young woman, and a carpenter. And while all Jerusalem and Judea are in great distress when the Savior of the world arrives, the Gentile nations, particularly the magi from decrepit pagan empires, now rejoice and present gifts and find themselves at peace.

            So we see the Lord begin His great reversal, casting down the mighty from their thrones and exalting the lowly. He brings in the outsiders to become part of His people, while those who thought themselves secure on the inside are quickly exposed to be on the wrong side of things. Kings will be humbled and their plans ruined, while shepherds in the fields outside the little town of Bethlehem and nobodies from backwater Nazareth in Galilee have honors and privileges heaped upon them from heaven. But our Lord is not nearly done with His greatest reversal yet.

            For it will become even grander. The unclean and diseased will be purified and healed. Enemies of God will be reconciled and become His most dedicated servants. Sinners will be forgiven. The mourning will be comforted. The dead will become alive again. Even the child martyrs of Bethlehem will be resurrected. At Jesus’ cross, when He lays down His life of His own accord, not because of the rage of a king or the machinations of man, but for the joy set before Him, when Jesus lays down His life on the cross, all things will be reversed. He will take on the sins of the world, as His cousin John the Baptist proclaimed. He will absorb the disease and uncleanness of every wounded, sick, and desecrated descendant of Adam and Eve. He will even take the death of every man, woman, and child into Himself and there on the cross He will deal with it. He will fight those foes in His flesh as He hangs suspended on that cross of wood between heaven and earth on Golgotha.

            And what is given in that greatest of reversals? We who have carried in us nothing but sin, disease, curses, and death, are now given forgiveness, wholeness, holiness, and life that cannot die. We receive what is Jesus’ and He receives what is ours. And so those Holy Innocents of Bethlehem receive Jesus’ life there on Calvary, thirty years after their death. Their death is traded to Him and His life is granted to them. They will wait for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come that we confess in the Creed. When their Savior returns, they will be raised to proclaim the excellencies of Him who called them out of the darkness of Herod’s shadow into God’s own marvelous eternal light, where they have rested even until now.

            So it will be for you too. What Jesus has done for them, He trades to you. You have His great reversal in your life as well. Your sin, your disease, your heartbreak, your sorrow, your weeping and loud lamentations, even your death is His now. He’s traded for it. Your lot is reversed with His. So you have His purity, His grace, His love, His peace, His healing, His eternal life that cannot die. It’s yours now. He has proclaimed it from His cross. He has poured it all out for you in the baptismal font, where the exchange was sealed. It is reaffirmed in His blood of the covenant, given to you at the rail.

            This is what Christ has come into the world to do. His mission was not to remain comfortable and above the battle. He has come to fight for you. He has come to take everything evil from His people and to give them the best of things. He has come to give them life and give it abundantly, even if it’s in ways that remain mysterious and not comprehended by us on this side of the resurrection. But be comforted, His manger still is your Paradise. He leaves it so that you can move in and live there in peace and safety. He trades it all for you in the greatest of reversals, coming down from heaven so that you would rise there; dying so that you—and all His holy ones—would live, even though they die; making all things new so that you would inherit grace upon grace. In the name of Jesus, who came to give us life. Amen.