First Sunday of Christmas
December 28, 2025

A Tale of Two Christmases

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor

Psalm 148
Matthew 2:13–23

As a child of the 1980s and a fan of the zany world of professional wrestling, I will not forget March 1987, Wrestlemania III, where in the title match Hulk Hogan, at the height of his fame, took on Andre the Giant, whose real-life gentle and compassionate demeanor belied his menacing 7ʹ4ʺ frame. As the combatants made their way through the stadium, the television broadcaster enthusiastically uttered, “Now the immovable object meets the unstoppable force.” 

Early in Matthew’s Gospel, on this fourth day of Christmas, we have a classic case of an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. The question is which one will prevail? The word Christmas means “feast of the anointed one” — the Christ. In this story, the object is King Herod, anointed by Rome, and the force is King Jesus, anointed by God. 

These two rivals for earthly rule are quite different from each other. First, think of them as the fruit of two very distinct family trees. 

Herod’s lineage isn’t mentioned in scripture. But from scholars both ancient and modern, we know he came from the Hasmonean dynasty ruling much of what we know as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan today. Antipater and his son Herod traced their rule back just a few generations to the Maccabees, a Jewish family who temporarily wrested the land from Greek imperial forces. The Hasmoneans were of Jewish background but also descendant of other desert tribes like the Edomites. But Herod was proclaimed king of the Jews not by his own people, but by the Roman Senate. Rome was the true authority, and Herod their client. 

In temperament and spirit, Herod was closer to Saul, the Israelite’s first king, who was prone to bouts of rage and paranoia. Herod walked a fine line upholding Jewish and Roman power, but over time his own personal weaknesses, his vanity building projects, his penchant for cruelty, all tore at his ability to do so.

By contrast, Matthew gives us a thorough genealogy of Jesus offering not only a genetic but a spiritual lineage. It is filled with biblical insiders, tall figures like Abraham, David, and Solomon, but also outsiders like Ruth of the Moabites as well as the marginalized, like Rahab the prostitute and Tamar, who being denied her rights in marriage had to plot her way into acceptance and blessing. It included religious reformers like King Josiah. This is a lineage of suffering servants and daring leaders, which culminates in Jesus.

Secondly, these two anointed ones wield different instruments of power. Herod has his armies and wealth loaned to him by Rome’s good graces. He also has influential connections to the Temple’s religious leadership, but he’s not a particularly religious fellow nor does his penchant for killing rivals win him friends among the priests. 

Jesus is armed with no garrison of weaponry. He has no friends in high places. He is a mere baby of an itinerant, impoverished family scraping together a living. Jesus’ dependency upon his parents and the kindness of strangers like the magi is all out in the open. 

These differences of heritage and power set Jesus and Herod on a collision course that will take a lifetime to unfold. But it begins tragically here in this passage in the slaughter of the innocents. This is where we taste the bitter fruit at the Christmas table.

Scholars question if there was indeed such a wide-scale murder of children in a major city like Bethlehem during this time. The archaeological evidence has not surfaced such an event of such magnitude, but such brutality was not out of character for Herod. This is the jealous, conniving ruler who had several members of his own family killed to preserve his stature. But this is not so much a story of what precisely Herod did as it is about where power in the hands of such rulers inevitably leads. 

·  ·  ·

And now in a few verses from Matthew we glimpse the horror of Herod’s fury unleashed and we are all powerless to prevent it. No one forced his hand. But as observers we can’t help but ascribe to ourselves some guilt as we witness such suffering. Though Jesus, Mary, and Joseph evade capture, this is not a story of celebration. It is a different, more wrenching Christmas where, like Rachel, we weep for those who bore a loss for which there is no consolation. It is one in which the magi’s goodness did not completely win the day.

I know many of you have arrived at such a point during this past year. You have witnessed difficult things and question whether you have done enough to prevent them. You have watched loved ones wrestle with their addictions and felt unable to stop it. You’ve seen relationships falter despite your efforts. You watched loved ones slip from this world into the next, wishing you could turn back the clock. You have watched coverage of parents being taken from children, citizens deprived of rights and dignity, and wondered what could you do about it. In these moments, your strength finally buckles and you find it next to impossible to accomplish the good that your heart desires. As the psalmist asks, “from where does your help come?”

·  ·  ·

Watching youth soccer as a parent observer, I once saw a young girl let what would be the deciding goal in a game slip through her grasp into the net. As the reality of failure dawned upon her, she ran to the sideline during a time-out and right into the arms of her mother. Face covered in her shoulders in shame as she spilled her regret in tears, I could faintly hear the soft whisper of her mother say “I love you.” If you’ve ever watched competitive youth sports, it’s a fairly common occurrence, but here’s what struck me about that affirmation. 

It was not “I love you even though you’ve disappointed me.”

Not “I love you and you’ll get ’em next time.”

Not “I love you and you’ve just got to work on these fundamentals.”

In other words, not a love that is conditional upon optimum performance or simply a warmed-over pep talk to induce a different future outcome. What that mother offered in her choice words was a reminder that this child was themselves the desired outcome. Full stop.

So it doesn’t hurt for us who have known struggle despite our best efforts to be reminded that our worth is not fully measured by outputs or outcomes. And when someone, whether a parent, mentor, or friend does so, it becomes a moment of what Christians call mercy.

I used to think mercy was a kind gesture with no practical benefit. It was something you pleaded for to avoid pain in a fight. Mercy was as optional as rounding up your purchase for charity at the grocery store checkout counter. But now I’m starting to believe that mercy is much than these trivialities. It is foundational to the rule of Christ and the New Creation that starts with him. 

In Herod’s world and our society, power is gained through reciprocity and driven by transactional relationships. Success is for the tenacious, willing to unlock another new skill, work twelve-hour days, and outwit the competition in order to achieve outcomes that reflect our input. It is a meritocracy in which we strive with heart, soul, and strength to measure up in the eyes of others. These are not in and of themselves wrongs. But there is a limit to where our merit and excellence carry us. There are days of sorrow our best cannot prevent.

That is where mercy creates an opening. A break with a world that simply makes cold calculations. 

Mercy’s openings are often undetectably small. But there are times when the size of an act hides the extent of its power.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a name that many of us have come to know because of his widely influential writings on faith. A martyr of the church because of his stand against Nazi Germany, he was imprisoned for two years before his execution. During that time, he engaged in much reading, reflection, and writing with his family and friends. What quickly becomes evident reading his published letters is the casualness with which he frequently mentions his letters coming and going — which begs the question, exactly how did they make it out? After all, prisons aren’t known for making escape of persons or their effects easy. 

Somehow Bonhoeffer was able to befriend prison guards. He speaks to this in July 1944, writing in a poem, “Who am I? They often tell me … I would talk to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 347). 

The miracle is that these guards, whose names we’ll likely never know, represent a government we have rightfully been taught to disdain for evil and disreputable acts and who were nonetheless open to disobeying orders and smuggling Bonhoeffer’s unredacted correspondence to his friend Eberhard who buried them in his backyard and later published them so that millions might ponder how to seek Christ in times of social upheaval and trial. The actions of these anonymous guards did not change the outcome of Bonhoeffer’s execution, but they did create a ripple in the fabric of history. 

The Holy Family found themselves on the run in Egypt, in the very land that their ancestors fled from the terror and oppression of Pharaoh. What they found there evidently was not an oppressive arm but an outstretched hand, one that we will also never know. The text never mentions them. But I wonder with curiosity what the people who took in Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were thinking about their actions? Did they think their singular acts of mercy, providing a bed for lodging, milk, and bread for food, mattered? Were they aware of the consequential life of the child they safeguarded? They did not set out to save the world, only to offer a small opening of possibility for those in front of them.

·  ·  ·

Amos Oz, Israeli poet and peace activist, once suggested three kinds of people in a time of crisis. The first seeks to avoid or run away from suffering. The second only writes letters to the editor about why other people caused the crisis. Oz advocated for a third, whom he said “bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don’t have a bucket bring a glass, and if you don’t have a glass use a teaspoon, everyone has a teaspoon. … I know a teaspoon is little and the fire is huge, but there are millions of us and each one of us has a teaspoon.”*

I believe mercy is what we were meant to fill those teaspoons with. A million small acts of mercy have the effect of not only dousing the flames of suffering, but also jamming the gears of corruptive power, breaking open a world that has been closed by Herod’s cold and limited logic of outputs and accumulation. In this way, mercy contrasts unrighteous Herod, who would kill his own rather than relinquish power, and the righteous Jesus, who gives life to those beyond his own family, kin, or country. 

A teaspoon of mercy is the coin of the realm for God’s anointed one. Mercy is the currency of God’s beloved community. An investment of mercy might yield in another season or another lifetime or maybe never at all. But that’s not the point. Some coins are just meant to shine. Some virtues are their own reward.

In Bethlehem of Judea in Nazareth of Galilee, mercy is crowned in the face of a holy infant, tender and mild. May mercy reign in our hearts too. Amen.

*Quote from an Oz address: https://www.92ny.org/archives/amos-oz-teaspoon-small-fire-large-many-us-everyone-us-teaspoo

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church