Jesus the man

1^st Sunday of Christmas

Isaiah 63: 7-9

Hebrews 2: 10- 18

Matthew 2: 13-23

I think it the letter to the Hebrews that provides the meat in the sandwich today.

Isaiah talks about the presence of God that saves us, and Matthew’s gospel narrates one of the early examples of terror and jeopardy that marks the life and history of Jesus but it is the letter to the Hebrews that expressly and definitively stresses the full humanity of Jesus.

Just for a bit of historical context the visit of the Magi it is thought happened about two years after the birth of Jesus. The Holy family were by now living in a house as it says in verse 11 and is also the rationale for Herod’s instruction to kill all boys born in that area who were two or under.

Hebrews is emphatic that Jesus shares to the full, the nature of the human family to which he belongs. We are his brothers and sisters who pray to the same heavenly Father.

He shares fully the experience of suffering. death, fear and temptation.

For the body the mind and the emotions can’t be separated. Jesus was not as some early theologians said simply God walking around in a human body who was impassable – not feeling the trauma of what was happening to him.

Jesus would not only die, he will share the fear of death.

He will not only suffer, he will feel suffering as testing or tempting him.

This is true for all humanity. It is not just the physical fact of death that haunts us, it is the fear of it, as an unknown, that end which casts its shadow back into our lives and mocks it as being ephemeral.

It is not suffering alone that is hard to bear; it is the effect of that suffering on our sense of who we are – we can feel diminished as human beings through it.

Suffering and death are felt as a scandal that prompts people to cry out to God for salvation.

Jesus’ total identification with them offers that salvation.

Because Jesus shares our suffering and death and passes into glory he provides the route for all his brothers and sisters to do exactly the same. Because he shares our death we will also share his resurrection.

Salvation also means that evil itself has been overcome by God, providing an endless spring of hope in the human heart for all who believe.

Hebrews also casts Jesus as our great high priest, again because of his full identification with humanity, as the only sacrifice worthy or necessary to forgive all our sins and present us as righteous before God. A once for all sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

Jesus is our brother, who blazed a trail for us to follow in life and showed us that humanity has a future life lived in glory after this physical life ends.

So even when horrors like the murder of the innocents in Matthew’s gospel occur due to the propensity to evil that exists amongst all people we know from the example of Jesus that this can never be the final word because good triumphs over evil and light casts out darkness and as St. John says, Love casts out fear..

Ultimately the church is a community of hope.