January 1, First Sunday after Christmas Day: Matthew 2:13-23

The little sneak got away is my first thought after reading this story of the flight into Egypt. Jesus got away. All those other boy babies didn’t.

Mary and Joseph hear Jesus’ hunger cries, his babbling, and then his first words. They cheer when Jesus pulls himself up for the first time. They clap and hold their palms open to urge him to toddle toward them on unsteady feet. They delight in his delight at the shadows of the fig leaves on the floor of their house in the late afternoon. They sing him lullabies and play patty-cake. They gaze at him with wonder, not because he is the Messiah but because he is their son. Jesus is spared. All those other families are wrecked.

“God abandoned him,” Liz said. Liz and I were standing beside the hospital bed of her 55-year-old husband Frederic. Frederic had woken early that morning, left his wife sleeping in bed beside the warm imprint from his body, gone to the furnace room of their basement, and put a rope over an exposed beam. When Liz woke up she went to the kitchen and heard Frederic in the basement. She called to him. Frederic came part way up the stairs, shielding from her view the white length of rope. He told her he was just going through some old boxes.