The Winter Lamb

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas Eve), A.D. 2017 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Bethlehem, the House of Bread. It’s a relatively small town with a great weight of history behind it.

It was from Bethlehem in days of old that a young shepherd boy became Israel’s most celebrated king: David, son of Jesse, beloved of the Lord and slayer of giants. It was to David God gave His inviolable promise, that a Child of David’s blood would rule over the people of God forever. Thus the sages say that the Messiah would arise from Bethlehem.

But a thousand years after David, so much time and tragedy having passed, life in Bethlehem went on rather as it always had. Bethlehem was known for two things: baking and shepherding. You’d hardly believe it if you could see the place today, all rocks and steep hills. But somehow the sheep manage to graze. They have a talent for finding grass in every nook and crack and cranny. And a good thing too, because the sheep of Bethlehem were important. They possessed a biblical destiny.

See, every year in the spring faithful Jews and proselytes the world over would flock to Jerusalem for the Passover, the most important of all the Hebrew holidays. And every household needed a Passover lamb for the feast. It was the blood of the lamb, you will recall, that marked a household as God’s own in the Exodus, so that their sins would be forgiven and judgment might pass over the family without harm.

But it made no sense for thousands of pilgrims to bring their lambs with them. No, they all had to buy one once they got there. And the lambs of Jerusalem, the lambs for the Passover, all came from Bethlehem just to the south. There’s only one breed of sheep indigenous to the Holy Land, and it’s been there for 5000 years. Unlike European sheep, which lamb when the weather warms, the sheep of Israel drop their lambs midwinter. Thus, they’re just the right age for Passover come the spring. None of this is coincidence.

And so, in midwinter, the shepherds of Bethlehem would keep watch over their flocks by night, to keep safe those special winter lambs. There was even a watchtower built on a hill for that purpose. According to the Talmud, the Messiah—that prophesied Son of David—would be born within sight of this tower. Born on the outskirts of the House of Bread. Born in the City of His forefather David. Born to be the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

And so it is to shepherds that the angels first proclaim Christ’s birth in the night, singing in heavenly chorus over the rocky fields in which they graze their sheep. Singing, because that’s what angels do in the Bible when they stand in the presence of God. Singing, because God has now been born on earth, and the music, along with the rest of Heaven, faithfully follows.

They don’t build barns in Bethlehem. The area is covered in caves, and when things get chilly, or the lambs simply need shelter from the wild, the flocks are gathered in caves, there to safely spend the night. This is where the manger lies, in which the infant Christ is laid. Not beneath a roof of wood, but under an arch of stone, within the bones of the earth, where sheep may suckle lambs beneath the watchful eye of the shepherds’ tower—until that day, when they are taken from their mothers, and led to Jerusalem.

Every lamb born in Bethlehem is destined to die in Jerusalem, destined to mark the people as God’s own, destined to free us from our slavery to sin and to death. And so every midwinter Christmas points to Passover come the spring. We call it Easter in English, but really it’s the Passover of our Lord.

Christmas is a time of joy, of peace, of blessed celebration. So joyous, in fact, that we often feel pressured to make it perfect. We sweep our fears and anxieties under the rug. We put on a happy face even if we are wounded or mourning or lonely. But that’s not true joy. That’s a counterfeit Christmas, a holly jolly hoax. True joy must be honest, must be free to embrace our sorrows, for that is precisely where Jesus meets us—not in our feigned perfection but in our wounds.

Christ was not born in a palace, surrounded by sensual delights. No! When God became Man, He dared to descend from the invulnerable realm of ideas into this bloody theater of history, to change it and redeem it from within. He came to a poor but loving couple, in a cave reserved for sheep, in the midst of a Middle Eastern country wracked with conflict and bowed beneath the blade of an occupying western power. Not exactly Hallmark.

And He came because we are broken. And He came because we mourn. He came to fulfill every promise of God and every desperate hope of humankind. He came to give Himself for us, that we might all be one in Him. In Christ God knows, we know, what it is to live in a divided, angry country. God knows what it is to toil honestly, anonymously, for 30 years and more. God knows what it is to suffer things you don’t deserve for people whom you love. God knows because He’s with us in it all.

That’s the real gift of Christmas: not saccharine, sappy sentiment, but a God we can see and touch and feel; a God who sweats and bleeds and dies; a God who is willing to go to any length, all the way to hell and back, to love you back to life when the weight of all the world has pressed us into the grave. Tonight that God is born for you! Born to free you, born to claim you, born to raise you from the dead!

And yes, He knows He’s going to die. And yes, He knows that we’re the ones who do it. But still He chooses to be born, tonight, for you. Because He loves you.

And when He rises in the spring, there will be no power in Heaven or earth—not the darkness of winter, not the ice and the frost, not all the accusations of the devil and our own tortured conscience—nothing and no-one will be able to prevent Him from raising you up from the dead to a life of righteousness, joy, and bliss unlike any we have ever known here below! And every tear will be dried and every injury restored and every godawful tragedy somehow, miraculously made right.

And then, my brothers and my sisters, it will be Christmas forever.

Come to Bethlehem, the House of Bread, and receive the living God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.