We spend the first Sunday of Christmas with the Holy Family. The passage we read and reflected on in church this morning, Luke 2:22-40, follows Mary, Joseph, and the week-old infant Jesus into Jerusalem, for Jesus’ presentation in the temple. The elderly prophets Simeon and Anna unexpectedly appear on the scene to affirm Jesus’ identity as the Messiah of Israel and to speak words of blessing and foreboding over his parents, particularly Mary. It’s a rich passage with several exegetical mines to dig, but on this very cold final day of 2017, as I sit alone in my apartment in New York City, my family on the other side of the country and my partner on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I’m drawn to what this passage offers to those for whom the word “family” does not offer unequivocally warm fuzzy feelings: those for whom, for reasons of loss, disappointment, separation, abuse, or neglect, “family” is connected to something much more ambiguous, even painful. In this way, I’m inclined to think this passage has something to offer all of us.
The sermon I heard in church this morning helpfully pointed out that, considering the social gender norms in the historical context from which Luke wrote, it is a bit surprising to find Simeon addressing Mary rather than her husband, focusing his attention on the unique pain that will befall her as the mother of one who will change the world. In a society where women live on the sidelines, Mary gets to be seen. Luke’s subversive narrative choice should prompt us to reflect on who it is in our own communities that we have not adequately turned our attention to, those people on the margins of our own society who carry a Christ Child just waiting to be recognized, welcomed, and celebrated.
It’s a challenge for Christians, during this holiday season—a time that for many is inextricably associated with family, when advertisers vie to capitalize on the nostalgia and idealization of the perfect family moment—to ask ourselves who is included and who is excluded from these family ideals? Which families, in our culture, get to matter? Who gets to be seen?
A few days before Christmas I stayed at the hospital overnight as the on-call chaplain. When my pager went off at 5:00 am and I read the call-back extension, might heart sank. Labor and Delivery. Fetal demise. In these cases, my job is to comfort the mother and her family, provide counseling on disposition/burial options, and gather the information about both parents that will be required for the death certificate. These are the calls I dread the most, though they are often some of the richest in terms of holding a space for parents who are wrestling through the helplessness and ambiguity of an unexpected, staggering loss.
Looking up the patient’s chart, I saw that she was my age exactly. The nurse told me she was expecting me, that she was very receptive to pastoral care. I walked down the hall, past the sounds of women in labor, around the corner to the room at the end of the corridor, where they always try to put any woman who has experienced a miscarriage, distancing her from earshot of the shouts and laughter of other families celebrating. I knocked and entered, a young African American woman lay in the bed wide awake, inviting me to approach. Her mother was in the room with her, but fast asleep. As we talked, her voice remained unwavering, but tears fell steadily down her cheeks. She was a believer in Jesus, she told me, so she knew that everything happens for a reason. But it was hard. Especially at this time of year, when she was anticipating seeing family and knowing how disappointed everyone would be. Her mother’s first grandbaby. I prayed with her, repeating her belief that there was an unseen plan behind her suffering, but asking for God’s mercy and comfort to come to her in her pain. In my own heart, I wrestled silently with my own discomfort with the thought that this woman’s suffering could be part of something orchestrated by God, but I could press alongside her toward the hope that there is an incomprehensible good at work behind even the most absurd of devastations.
After this visit, I found myself repeatedly mulling over this woman’s acknowledgement that such a loss was particularly hard “this time of year.” A time when we celebrate birth. When we celebrate family. True, events like this fell jarringly out of place in the pristine, holly-jolly expectations we place on the Christmas season. But I could not help but feel that this woman and the baby she had lost were somehow in closer connection to the Holy Family than any smiling, idealized (and probably white) husband-wife-and-two-kids combination in a holiday TV commercial.
The sterilized Nativity Pageants and Renaissance paintings that have come to define our mind’s-eye image of the Holy Family have effectively distracted us from a detail that the author of Luke intends to keep forefront: these people were poor. The sacrifice at the temple of “two turtle doves, or two young pigeons,” makes explicit that their means limited them to the smallest possible acceptable offering permitted in the Law of Moses. We forget that, just one week earlier, the child’s teenage mother went through the bloody, painful ordeal of giving birth in a filthy livestock stall. Were we to translate this family into a twenty-first century analogue, you can bet no one would consider putting them in a feel-good TV commercial. They are not the kind of family that our “family values”-loving culture finds it easy to value.
Recent studies reflecting racial disparities in reproductive health outcomes shed further light on how our society tends to value certain kinds of families more than others. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention found in 2015 that, nationwide, black babies die at more than twice the rate of white babies. In New York City, a black woman is twelve times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than a white woman. These disparities hold up even when accounting for factors such as economic status and education level. Attributed dually to prejudice within the healthcare system as well as the generally higher levels of stress that black women experience in society, the statistics are a grim testimony to an underlying social assumption that some lives matter more than others. Not all families are created equal. At least as true today as it was in Jesus’ time.
A few decades later in Jesus’ life, he would preach a sermon—the more famous version recorded in Matthew but the more socioeconomically explicit version belonging to Luke—proclaiming,
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh. […]
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep (Luke 6:20b-21, 24-25).
It might be tempting to conclude from this passage that suffering is part of God’s plan; that it is meant to prepare or refine us for something greater to come. But I think that Luke’s narrative presents something a little more straightforward than that. When Jesus speaks to “you who are poor,” he is speaking to his own people. The poor are close to God because, as Jesus reveals, if God were to come to us in human form, God would be poor. God would be hungry. God would weep. And, as the sermon’s list of “woes” seem to indicate, if these experiences are far from our own lives, we had better sit up and take notice.
If Simeon had not been filled with the Holy Spirit, if Anna had not spent the better part of a lifetime praying and fasting in the temple, would they have missed it? Perhaps we who are well educated and well fed should not be too hard on ourselves if, reading this passage, we have enough self-awareness to be sure that we, in their place, would not be able to look into the face of that fragile, one-week-old infant of a poor, travel-worn, Galilean couple and see the salvation of the world. But with the first Sunday of Christmas comes a new year, comes a chance to try again. Because the empty hands of the poor are not a threat to our own security, but a promise of God’s incalculable abundance. Because the aching arms of a mother who never got to hold her child are already held in solidarity with the Mother of Christ, who felt a “sword pierce [her] own soul” at the untimely death of her own child. And because our own lonely, dissatisfied hearts are ready to be turned once again by a God who shows up in the unlikeliest of places.
Thanks be to God.
