Isaiah 63:7-9 – Psalm 148 – Hebrews 2:10-18 – Matthew 2:13-23

The Very Rev’d Bertrand Oliver, Dean and Rector

There is something almost shocking about the way the lectionary carries us from Christmas Eve to the Sunday after Christmas. We go from shepherds and angels, warmth and candlelight, to the terror of a tyrant, a family fleeing for their lives, and the cries of children. And yet this is exactly what the Gospel insists on: that the Incarnation is not a fairytale but God entering the world as it really is.

Many of us arrive at this first Sunday after Christmas still carrying images from the past year—images we might rather forget. We have watched political leaders act with arrogance or cruelty. We have seen livelihoods cut with the cold efficiency of a hacksaw. We have seen migrants moved like packages, sent to high-security detention centres and treated worse than animals. We continue to witness the suffering of children in Gaza and in countless places where power games and violence always fall hardest on the innocent.

Some churches in recent years have made these realities visible in their nativity scenes: the Magi halted at a separation wall; the Holy Family set amid rubble; Jesus lying in a manger surrounded by barbed wire. These scenes are provocative, but they are also faithful. They remind us that the story of Christ’s birth has always unfolded in the shadow of empire, fear, and displacement.

Christians believe—strangely—that Christmas does not end on the 25th of December but begins there. For twelve days, we contemplate the wondrous mystery of the Incarnation: that God, out of sheer love, chose to become fully human, sharing our experience from the inside. And the lectionary does the same: it moves swiftly from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from angels to danger, from birth to flight.

Isaiah 63, the first reading, gives us a crucial key to understanding this season.

The prophet begins: “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord… his steadfast love… his mercy… for he became their Saviour in all their distress.” Isaiah is not recalling a sentimental past. He speaks as someone who knows suffering, displacement, and fear. He remembers God’s mercy precisely because the present is fragile. And then comes this astonishing line: “In all their distress, he too was distressed.”

Already in the Hebrew Scriptures, God is the One who suffers with humanity.
Already we see the shape of the Incarnation.

The Gospel today turns that truth into flesh.

The Magi have left. Herod realises they are not returning, and fear grips him—the fear of losing power. And tyrants afraid of losing power always lash out.

He orders the killing of the infant boys of Bethlehem, perhaps twenty or thirty children according to scholars —impossible to know for certain, but each one a precious life, each one a heartbreak.

An angel appears to Joseph in a dream. He rises, gathers Mary and the newborn child, and under cover of night they flee across the border into Egypt. Jesus begins his life as a refugee.

When Herod dies, another tyrant, Archelaus, reigns in Judea. Joseph fears him as well, and the family eventually settles in Galilee, back in Nazareth—far from the political centre, far from danger.

From the very start, the human life of God is shaped not only by worship and wonder but by fear, violence, displacement, the search for asylum, and the rebuilding of life in a foreign land.

Hebrews 2 expands this truth. Jesus, it tells us, is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters. He shares our flesh and blood. He becomes like us “in every respect.” Not only in joy and celebration, but in vulnerability, fear, and danger. He experiences what it means to rely on the bravery of parents, to depend on the hospitality of strangers, to live in the shadow of political oppression. God’s solidarity with humanity is not abstract or theoretical—it is lived.

That’s why the flight into Egypt has always stirred the Christian conscience toward compassion for migrants and asylum seekers. It is not simply that Jesus experienced what they experience; it is that when we encounter people seeking safety, we encounter Christ himself.

Jesus makes this explicit later in the Gospel of Matthew:
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me… whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” (Matthew 25)

And in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus overturns every boundary and prejudice, insisting that mercy defines neighbourliness, not ethnicity, legality, or social status.

In our own time—marked by political polarisation, economic anxiety, and social fragmentation—it is tempting to imagine that humanity used to be better, simpler, or more virtuous. But the truth is that the “rosier past” never really existed.

Human beings have always struggled with the lure of power, the temptation to dominate, the instinct to enrich and protect ourselves at the expense of others.

But the Scriptures also insist on another truth: that God has always been present in the midst of human fragility, always working to free us, heal us, and draw us into a community shaped not by fear but by steadfast love.

This is where Psalm 148 becomes a gift. It sweeps us out of the narrow view of human politics and invites us to see the whole creation praising God—sun and moon, mountains and hills, wild animals and creeping things, rulers and children together.

The Holy Family fleeing into the night; the migrant child crossing the Rio Grande; the elderly person alone in a Montreal apartment; the nurse in Gaza tending the wounded; the newborn in Bethlehem—each one is part of the cosmic choir.

None are expendable. None can be reduced to what our society sometimes tries to make of us: economic agents, data points, disposable lives.

Psalm 148 restores our vision. It tells us that God sees creation with eyes of delight and compassion. It tells us that every human being—especially the vulnerable, especially the ones on the run—belongs within the praise of God.

And this tells us something profound about Christmas: The good news is not merely that heaven is opened after death. The good news is that God has entered our world now, in its complexity and beauty and brokenness, and calls us to see each other through the lens of divine dignity.

When we behold a newborn child, something softens in us, even if only for a moment. When we hold a baby, we instinctively protect, cherish, and guard that fragile life. This is how God sees every person.

This is why tyrants fear babies—because the truth they embody threatens every lie of domination and cruelty. This is why, from the beginning, the kingdom of God grows quietly, through tenderness rather than force, through vulnerability rather than violence.

“In all their distress, he too was distressed,” Isaiah says. “He had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect,” Hebrews adds.

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus reminds us.

And so, as we continue to reflect on the mystery of Christmas, we are invited to let these truths reshape our hearts.

Some of us come today carrying our own fears: for a child, a diagnosis, a parent, a relationship, a world we barely recognise. Some of us carry hope. Some of us carry exhaustion. Some of us carry grief.

The God who fled with Mary and Joseph knows these experiences from the inside. The God who became a child knows our humanity without shame. The God who enters the world as refugee, healer, brother, and Saviour is with us still.

And the call that flows from this story is both simple and demanding:
To resist narratives that dehumanise.
To stand with the vulnerable.
To make room for the stranger.
To lift our eyes with the psalmist to see creation as God sees it.
To remember, with Isaiah, the steadfast love of God even in uncertain times.

This is the kingdom Jesus came to announce, the kingdom he embodied, the kingdom entrusted to us.

May these twelve days of Christmas be for us a time not only of celebration but of courage; not only of comfort but of commitment; not only of wonder but of compassion.

May Christ—our brother, our refuge, our hope—give us strength to live in this complicated world with tenderness, justice, and joy.

Amen.