Great

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas Eve), A.D. 2018 C

Many ages after God created the heavens and the earth, when man and woman were formed in God's own image; long after the great Flood, when God set the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant; 21 centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; 15 centuries after Moses led God’s people to freedom; 11 centuries from the time of Ruth and the Judges;

A thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the 65th week as Daniel's prophecy takes note; in the 194th Olympiad; the 752nd year from the founding of the city of Rome; the 42nd year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; in the Sixth Age of the world, all earth being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God, Son of the eternal Father, willing to hallow the world by His coming in mercy, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea.

Tonight is the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, God made flesh.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

They called him King of Kings, Son of God, and Savior of the World. But this was no Prince of Peace. His name was Alexander of Macedon—Alexander the Great—and he was born to trample the jeweled thrones of the earth beneath his sandaled feet.

Said to have been fathered by Zeus, who came to his mother as a python, Alexander in the span of a few short years conquered the whole of the known world, often defeating armies 20 times the size of his own: Greece, Babylon, Israel, Egypt, Persia, India. Had he known of China, he surely would have pushed his armies yet farther east, hoping to conquer the rising of the sun.

He died young, barely into his thirties, from a wound to the side, and perhaps a bit of poison. And as his generals gathered around his deathbed, begging to know who would inherit his empire, who would inherit the world, he spoke but one word: Kratistos! “To the strongest!” And they laid him to rest in full armor, floating in a bath of honey, within a crystal-clear tomb of quartz, that he might be preserved and reverenced for all time. And then the wars of the generals began.

One can hardly overstate the importance of this man, at once murderer, myth, and monster, who bent the known world to his will, and earned his godhood through oceans of other men’s blood. Caesar wept at the tomb of Alexander, for he knew that he could not compare. Pompey styled himself “the Great” in hopes of being seen as his spiritual successor. But there would never be another Alexander, the son of some dark god, bred for war.

He’s the reason the Bible’s in Greek, by the way, so that we read the words of Christ in the tongue of Alexander. And in the time of Christ, another Alexander was exactly what everyone wanted the Messiah to be.

They all knew that He was coming; the ancient sources are clear on that. The Bible had prophesied the coming of God’s Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, for a thousand years. He would be the one true King, the heir of His ancestor David. But He would not fail as David did, along with all the other kings of old. This Messiah would be different. He would appear as though a Son of Man, but would in truth be so much more: a cosmic Messiah, a heavenly King, eternal Son of the eternal Father. And it wasn’t just the Hebrews who were expecting Him.

There were pagan prophecies of the Christ. “A Hebrew Child will silence all the oracles of the Roman gods,” sayeth the Tiburtine Sibyl to the Emperor Augustus. “A King is to appear, to whom men must do homage in order to be saved,” wrote Cicero in his De Divinitate. Someone was coming. Someone from the East. Someone from Judea. The heavenly Offspring, according to Virgil, returning to the Virgin, descending from on high.

And we wanted Him to be a killer. Oh, not an unjust killer, mind you, but a killer of those who deserve it, a killer of evil, of the oppressor, of the irreligious. That the Judean people expected a warlord is made clear not only by the succession of would-be Messiahs ground beneath the boot of Rome, but also in the violent uprisings that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Judeans throughout the earth.

We wanted an Alexander! Someone who would liberate God’s people by the sword, who would avenge Israel against those who had wronged her, who would drown the Legions of Rome in the sea! Give us an emperor; give us a warrior; give us a Savior so hard and so cruel that He will force the world to be good again, force the wrongs to be made right. And to hell with anyone who got in His way!

So what do we get instead? A Child born in a manger. A humble Holy Family on the run. A newborn Babe who will grow in due time to fulfill all the wildest promises ever made by God to His people, and infinitely more. And He is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. For all the boots of the tramping warriors, and all the garments rolled in blood, shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

Christ is born this night, not to free one people from oppression but to free all peoples from sin: to confront the worst of our violence, our vengeance, our hatred, and to conquer us from the inside out; not with the sword, not with armies of angels raining down brimstone from above; but with healing and forgiveness and resurrection and peace. He is not the sort of King who will clear the land of lions. He will make the lions to lie down with the lambs.

And we shall hate Him for it. We shall hate Him for daring to come in so meek and mild a manner. We shall hate Him for not being Alexander, for not bathing the world in our enemies’ blood, and we shall punish Him in the worst ways we know how: with the Cross, and the lash, and the thorns, and the spear. And we shall murder our Messiah, for whom we have waited for so very long, and cast Him down to the pits of the dead, unmourned, unadorned, and unloved.

We will do all of this and do it with glee, for we are Alexander’s children, the children of some dark god bred for war. And Christ will take it all within Himself, and drown our sin in the ocean of His love—a mercy so deep and wide and boundless that it is terrifying to behold.

Nothing we can do can stop Him. Nothing we could think of could even slow Him down. We stripped Him, we beat Him, we tortured Him, we crucified Him, and He just got back up again. And He forgave us. He forgave us! Who is this Man? What is this Man, that He would forgive us, that He would love us, that He would raise us up from the dead, after all that we have done! What can we do against a love like that? What can we do against a mercy that swallows the world?

Alexander we could kill. Caesar we could kill. Hatred and murder have been our go-to solutions since Cain took a stone to his only brother’s head. But this Messiah, this Christ, this Jesus, He just swallows it up! All of our anger, all of our wrath, all of our hells—even death itself—and He just keeps coming. He just keeps healing. He just keeps rising.

Make no mistake, my brothers and sisters. A King is born this night: King of Kings, Son of God, and Savior of the World. And He is not another Alexander. He is something infinitely more powerful, and infinitely more frightening. He is the love of God made flesh, with healing in His wings and absolution in His Blood. And He will hunt you. And He will find you. And He will raise you up from death unto eternal life in Him.

And you cannot stop Him. And you cannot kill Him. And you cannot ever make Him cease from calling you His own. No matter how we sin, no matter how we rage, no matter how we tell ourselves we really just don’t care—our salvation is born this night.

And when all the Caesars, all the Herods, all the Alexanders the Great, lie mouldering in their graves, this and all worlds shall be conquered, by the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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