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Jesus begins his public ministry upon hearing of John the Baptist's arrest. This initiative doesn't mark a break from John's work but rather its continuation. Jesus proclaims the same message John preached: "The kingdom of God is near. Repent." Yet their approaches differ. John, more hermit than herald, draws people to desert places. Jesus moves outward, entering people's lives where they are.
In today's gospel, we witness a pattern of role transitions. Jesus assumes John's prophetic mantle in his own distinctive way. He then calls Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John, whose roles shift dramatically as they follow him. Their responses are striking in their immediacy. Simon Peter and Andrew "immediately left their nets and followed him" (Matthew 4:20). James and John do likewise: "Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him" (Matthew 4:22). These role transitions demand radical disruption of ordinary life—life shaped by familiar goals and purposes. Jesus knows John will not walk free from prison. He commits himself to continuing John's ministry, answering a call that becomes his vocation. In this calling, he flourishes and makes all who encounter him flourish. Simon Peter and Andrew abandon their nets—a symbolic act that transcends mere career change. They're reordering their entire lives, adopting a new pattern shaped by Jesus himself. James and John leave not only their boat but something more: their father. This isn't severance from family but expansion of what family means. Psychology speaks of "role-lock"—the tendency to play roles we find most comfortable in group settings. These familiar roles develop first in family systems, our earliest experience of group dynamics. The challenge is that we often export these family roles into every other relationship and community. Family members and family systems themselves may reinforce this pattern, keeping us locked in roles that maintain comfort—though not necessarily health. Jesus, Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John break free from their role-locks. Their individual responses ripple outward, impacting entire systems. Vacuums appear where they once stood. Such absences can feel threatening. They can also open space for hope. In this new year, as change continues and we all age and—God willing—mature, let us examine both our lives and the systems we inhabit. What roles do you currently play? Consider generational shifts: as elders depart, those who follow must step into elderhood. That's a calling. In your workplace, what's changing or missing? Might this be your invitation to assume a new role? And here at St. Agnes'—what shifts do you observe? What might God be calling forth from you in this season? Have you ever been scapegoated, or scapegoated someone else? Scapegoating occurs when a community projects its problems onto a particular person or group, treating them as the embodiment—even the cause—of what's wrong. Think of it in family terms: the "black sheep," the one who somehow carries the family's dysfunction, shame, or unresolved conflict. That person becomes the explanation for everything that's broken.
Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat. His teaching challenged religious authorities. His table fellowship with outcasts violated social boundaries. His healings on the Sabbath defied sacred conventions. He wasn't the only teacher causing disruption, but he was the most vulnerable—a carpenter's son from Nazareth with no institutional power, no wealth, no political connections. An easy target for a community looking for someone to blame. In today's reading from Acts, Peter recounts how the authorities "put him to death by hanging him on a tree." But notice the larger pattern: just days before his crucifixion, crowds shouted "Hosanna!" as Jesus entered Jerusalem. Within a week, those same voices demanded his execution. What changed? Not Jesus—he remained consistent in his identity and mission. What changed was the narrative. Once religious and political leaders successfully cast Jesus as the problem, the crowd's perception shifted. The scapegoating mechanism did its work, and the scapegoat was led to slaughter. This pattern didn't die with Jesus. It lives in every narrative that requires an enemy, a villain, an "other" to make sense of our world. We see it in families, churches, politics—wherever communities avoid examining their own complicity by locating all evil outside themselves. These narratives shape not just how we see others, but who we become. Are we living in narratives of "us versus them"? Of perpetual victimhood? Of righteous exclusion? Our faith names this pattern precisely because of what happened to Jesus. But Christianity doesn't stop at crucifixion—it doesn't simply validate scapegoating as inevitable. The resurrection is God's resounding "No" to this death-dealing mechanism. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God exposed and undermined the scapegoating structure itself. The one we killed as guilty stands vindicated. The system's verdict is overturned. Peter proclaims in Acts that "everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." This is resurrection logic: instead of needing scapegoats to manage our guilt and shame, we receive grace. Instead of projecting our brokenness onto others, we're invited into healing. Instead of narratives that require enemies, we're drawn into a story of reconciliation. We're called to live as resurrection people—to recognize scapegoating when we see it, to refuse participation in it, and to practice the alternative narrative Christ embodied. This is the work of Epiphany: allowing Christ's light to expose the deadly patterns we've accepted as normal, and choosing instead the life-giving narrative of grace, mercy, and mutual flourishing. The Christmas season invites us beyond celebrating Christ's birth to nurturing Christ's growth within us. Consider what it means to spiritually bear Christ—not as observers of Mary's story, but as participants in it. When we place ourselves in Mary's experience, Jesus is no longer a distant historical figure or seasonal decoration. We become the ones carrying divine life, responsible for its development.
Today's gospel reveals what happens after birth: the frightening discovery that the twelve-year-old Jesus has gone missing. Mary and Joseph search frantically for three days before finding him in the temple, engaged with teachers, growing in understanding. This moment foreshadows Christ's death and resurrection, but it also reveals something crucial about spiritual life—the Christ we birth must mature, and that maturation requires intentional seeking. When we look honestly at contemporary Christianity, we see what happens when this maturation is abandoned. Many claim Christ's name while pursuing agendas that contradict his teachings. They've given birth but failed to nurture growth. The Christ within them remains infantile, undeveloped, lost. But notice where Mary and Joseph find Jesus: in the temple, in his Father's house, absorbed in learning and dialogue. The Christ within us matures not through mere possession of faith, but through active engagement—seeking wisdom, asking questions, remaining in places where God dwells and transformation occurs. The gospel concludes with a critical detail: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor." The Christ we birth must likewise grow. This means our own emotional, mental, and spiritual maturation. It means developing discernment that can distinguish genuine discipleship from its counterfeits. It means Christ becoming found in us through intentional spiritual practice and moral formation. The structures of injustice in our society are sustained by spiritual immaturity—by Christians who remain infants in faith. Transformation requires those willing to do the hard work Mary and Joseph did: to notice when Christ goes missing, to search persistently, and to commit to his ongoing growth within us. St. Luke’s account of the nativity is remarkably understated. It is spare in detail, sober in tone, almost matter-of-fact. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for the census, the inns are full, and they find shelter wherever they can. Given Emperor Augustus’s decree, crowds are flooding into the town for registration. The world is moving under imperial command.
Popular imagination often fills in the gaps. We picture Joseph and Mary knocking on door after door, turned away again and again, rejected at every threshold. Yet Luke never tells us that. What we know is simpler and, perhaps, more unsettling: like everyone else, they are swept up in the movement of empire, obeying orders, doing what they must, making do with what they can find. And perhaps this is precisely the point: the stable is where Caesar’s command does not reach. On the margins of imperial decree, beyond the reach of Rome’s authority, God enters the world. Luke’s nativity also follows a familiar pattern: the birth of a savior marked by signs and wonders. Stories like this are found in every culture. Harry Potter survives the killing curse as an infant. The future king of Korea emerges from an egg. The infant Siddhartha Gautama takes seven steps at birth, lotus flowers springing up beneath his feet, and declares his spiritual destiny. Human beings have always told stories like this to say: “Pay attention—this birth matters.” But on this Christmas Eve, the gospel will not allow us to be mesmerized only by wonders and signs. The shepherds are indeed guided by an angelic message to the child, the Messiah, the anointed one. Yet Luke goes further. He dares to call this child “Lord.” This is not just a religious honorific. “Lord” is the word used in our Christian translations for the divine name in the Hebrew Bible—the sacred tetragrammaton, YHWH, the name that is not even spoken aloud. Luke is telling us that in this infant, the God of Israel is present. The shepherds are led to an infant lying in a manger, and they are meant to see God there. This is the scandal at the heart of Christian faith: God revealed in the most vulnerable form of human existence. It is a radical humanism that overturns our usual picture of divinity. An infant has no fixed identity yet, no achievements, no résumé. When we look at an infant, we see nothing but exposed human need—the need for shelter, for protection, for food, for tenderness, for constant care. Mary treasures all this and ponders it in her heart. That is her courage and her faith: to see the divine from the manger to the cross, to hold both together in one heart—the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and the man stripped and nailed to the wood. She does not yet know where the story will lead, but she keeps watching for God in this vulnerable life. Others will also watch to see how Jesus “turns out.” But his ending will not look like the end of a hero’s tale. He will not die on a throne but on a cross. He will die like a criminal, executed as one. The vulnerable infant becomes the condemned man. Here Christian ethics are stretched to their breaking point: can we see God in the executed criminal? Can we see God in the one the world has judged, discarded, and cast out? If we cannot see God there, then we have not yet understood what we celebrate at Christmas. The incarnation confronts us from the very beginning, because it asks us to see God in the most fragile form of human life. The resurrection is God’s unbreakable “yes” to that same humanity—God’s faithfulness to the very flesh in which God chose to dwell, even in those whom society calls worthless or despicable. If God is found in an infant laid in a feeding trough, and in a man hung on a cross, then God can be found in every human life. And here is the challenge, and the call, for us. Those who cannot see God in the vulnerable will find it hard to believe in the hope of the resurrection. Our Christian vocation is to see God in every human being, to look for the trace of goodness even where it seems hidden or lost. And when goodness seems absent, we do not give up; we help to cultivate it. We create spaces—gardens of grace—where each person can grow into the image of God they already bear, and where their flourishing helps others to flourish as well. This is the daily work of resurrection: to tend, to nurture, to protect, to call forth the divine life in every living being. At Christmas, we see that work beginning in a manger. In Jesus, God teaches us how to see: how to see the divine in the human, the holy in the vulnerable, the glory of God in the face of a child. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
April 2026
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