Christmas Carols and Crying Babes

The horrors that attend the coming of Christ:

...What doesn't get noticed as often is how much fear and Christmas go together. The best Christmas stories are rooted in fear and, at their very best, even a sort of terror. The original story, of course, contains not only the heartwarming icon of the Holy Family in the stable, but also Joseph's confusion and fear over the Holy Pregnancy. That terror, whether you read it as Joseph's doubts about Mary or (as Jerome did) as Joseph's doubts about himself, is not the stuff of a Kodak moment.

It is, after all, about a man contemplating dumping his completely vulnerable wife in deep fear and doubt. It requires nothing less than an angelic visitation to keep the Blessed Virgin from facing the abandonment and rejection that her Holy Child will one day face in full strength. The story passes from annunciation, through near catastrophe, to happy resolution as Joseph takes up his role as "son of David" and takes his place as father and guardian of the Christ.

That's not the last time we will see that pattern of joy, fear, and happy resolution. The tale of the escape of Jesus, even more, is a tale that passes with alarming swiftness from joy to terror to happy resolution. Your average Best Christmas Pageant Ever doesn't tend to include a scene where a bunch of kids in plastic armor march on stage and then begin to methodically dismember a clutch of baby dolls. But that's an integral part of the original Christmas story. It's also the basis of the most heartbreaking of all Christmas carols:

Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young to slay.

It is from this horror that the Holy Family flees and finds safety in Egypt. The Christ, at the beginning of His mission as well as at the end, is delivered from death and the dragon that would devour him and the Woman. The Church remembers this element of terror in the Gospel story by immediately following the birth of Christ with feasts that celebrate not only the Slaughter of the Innocents, but the murder of St. Stephen, the first martyr; the murder of St. Thomas a Becket, and the first white martyr; and St. John, who had to endure the murder of his brother James, the first apostle to be martyred. All these stand as reminders that the point of the gospel is that Christ has come to break the power of the kingdom of the final earthly fear: death.

In the same way, the art about Christmas contains an element of fear as well...

...That, in the end, is the point of the Christmas story all along. It is expressed in the beautiful legend that the cradle was made from the same tree as the wood of the cross. The Evangelists see everything -- including the birth of Jesus -- as related to the ultimate truth about Him: that He is born to die and rise for us. The passion and resurrection of Jesus are imprinted on every aspect of reality, from the miracles He performs to the stories He tells to the very circumstances of His birth.

So the Eucharistic Lord is laid in a manger in Bethlehem -- that is, a feed box in the House of Bread, because it is His destiny to be the Bread of Life broken for us. He is lost for three days and found at the Temple, because He will be lost for three days in the grave and then the Temple of His body will be found alive again. The darkness and fear of the hellish dragon who seeks to devour Him as a child is the same darkness and fear that will swallow Him completely on the cross -- and perish when He destroys darkness and fear in the Resurrection.

It is why He is heralded by a star in the darkness of a fearful night -- for hell is real, and our fears of it are justified. But the baby was, after all, born to save us from the fires of hell.