Christmas pageants may do more harm than good. I recognize that this might be an unpopular opinion, but on this eleventh day of Christmas, let’s press the so-called Christmas story beyond the limits of a cute play presented each Christmas Eve to elicit our coos and ahhs.
The first problem with the Christmas pageant story as we know it is that is conflates two very different Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth. The second problem is that I have yet to see a pageant that is brave enough to tackle the darkness of the Christmas story. A Christmas pageant that would dare to mention the massacre of the Holy Innocents would create a riot the likes of which no church has ever seen. In all fairness, not even today’s Gospel reading dares to mention that tragic event. In fact, it jumps right over that passage.
But having been a bit hard on Christmas pageants, I should mention that there may be some value in a pageant, if only we were to rewrite the script. By rewriting the script, we would do everyone a huge favor, if not by coddling their imaginations, at least by being honest. Sometimes the comfort and solace we need the most is found not in papering over uncomfortable stories but in diving deep within them. That’s where the gospel resides.
If we were to write a different, more honest Christmas pageant script for the ages, we could call it “The Christmas Story according to the Scriptures.” The real meat of this pageant script would draw heavily from Matthew’s Gospel. Now, this is slightly difficult because there’s no birth scene in Matthew’s Gospel. There’s just a simple line noting that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea during Herod’s reign. But already we are wading into troubled waters, and we have moved well beyond the cozy stable with its eclectic menagerie. Mentioning the name of Herod is to name the one who shall not be named.
Our pageant according to the Scriptures should start after the birth of Christ, when Herod is seeking the child to destroy him. It would be a bit hard to act out Joseph’s dreams, but they would be necessary, too. In Matthew’s narrative world, dreams are important, because people actually believe that God might speak to them in dreams.
And Joseph certainly believes that God speaks in dreams, which is why he takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt. This is a journey taken in haste and with great urgency. All is not well in the year of Jesus’s birth. Joseph, Mary, and the infant Christ wait things out in Egypt, that land where their ancestors had suffered oppression under Pharaoh, the Herod of his own day. And in the hard-edged world of this Christmas story, the Holy Family isn’t free until the death of Herod. Someone’s death is someone else’s freedom. It’s a harsh, bitter world. Things are not as they should be, and Christmas pageant audiences across the country are asking for their money back.
But before Herod dies, he has flown into a maniacal rage, murdering all the boys who are two years of age and younger in and around Bethlehem. This is a world in which cruel tyrants lose their minds as they lose their power. This is a world where innocent children are slain because a grown man fears a little child. This is a world full of lies and cunning and deceitful manipulation. And still, after Herod is gone, Joseph is warned yet again about the threat of Herod’s son, who has succeeded him as ruler. Only then, after much wandering and fleeing do Mary, Joseph, and Jesus settle in Nazareth.
You can see that we have already stepped beyond the bounds of a Christmas story that is child appropriate. We are well beyond the confines of the manger. There are things in this pageant that we should want to shield our children from until the last possible moment. When they are old enough, they will learn that this is the Christmas story according to the Scriptures. They will learn all this when they finally realize that they live in a bitter world just as full of evil tyrants and savage despotism as the world in which our Lord was born.
In this Christmas story according to the Scriptures, the narrator would have to be an adult, and this adult would know all too well that life is still full of paranoid Herods and hideous atrocities that we can never fully explain. But our narrator would also know that even in a world full of Herods and searing injustice, God still reigns as King, and God is still working his purpose out. Because of this and throughout the pageant, our narrator would give voice to Matthew’s consistent refrain: This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets.
Only an adult who has known grief and read the news headlines and gaped in horror at the way humans treat one another could say Matthew’s words with any credibility. This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets. This, after all, is the pageant according to the Scriptures. And the narrator of this pageant would understand that Matthew isn’t cherry picking verses from the Old Testament to justify his story. Matthew is interpreting the story of our salvation through the lens of the cross. This is the Christmas story according to the Scriptures.
This pageant shows us that Jesus’s story is Israel’s story and our story, too. This is why the Holy Family goes into Egypt from which God delivered the Israelites of old. If the Savior of the world has come, he will deliver the whole world out of Egypt and into freedom. This pageant according to the Scriptures shows that all along, throughout the epic story of God’s people, God has been preparing something wondrous for the whole world, that it might be made whole again. This pageant holds both the realism of a sinful world with the mystery of dreams and surprises. This pageant traces the persistence of a family that will follow God through thick and thin, believing that God is with them the entire time.
This pageant according to the Scriptures demonstrates that God stays with humanity for the long haul. This is a God who has persisted with a stubborn people, who for a time believed God to be angry and fickle. God waited with them until they could see that God was never angry with them. God simply wanted to be in relationship with them. This God sent messages through the prophets, which were not heeded, but God never gave up on this chosen people. This God stuck with humanity all the way into Bethlehem. And this God went with them back into Egypt, and God brought the whole world back into the Promised Land once more. And this God is still with us as we, too, struggle through a world that is unwell. God is with us even when innocent children are massacred and as refugees wander homeless. God is with us all the time, for as evil threatens and misfortune prevails, those who follow God’s dream for the world will get up and go, time and again, just like the Holy Family on the move.
The Christmas story according to the Scriptures does not offer easy answers, nor will it attempt to explain suffering and evil, but it says quite clearly that God is with us in the valley of the shadow of death. As Matthew told us, This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets. The Christmas story according to the Scriptures refuses to settle for a simple, romanticized pageant, because ultimately such a plot is not good news at all. Such a plot is bad news for those who can’t summon happiness on a whim. It’s bad news for those who use temporary Christmas cheer to drown out their long-term sorrow. It’s bad news for all who are grieving and who must pretend as if they shouldn’t be sorrowful this time of year.
The good news according to the Scriptures is that God is truly with us in Jesus. God is with us so intensely that God is with us even unto death on the cross. God has been with us for the long haul, and Matthew shows us this. The pageant according to the Scriptures is about a Savior who humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might share in the divine life, and this is a mystery so profound that no ordinary Christmas pageant will suffice. For without a cross, there is no Savior who humbles himself to share our humanity because the cross is what happens when divinity reveals itself in human time.
There may be a time and a place for saccharine, ordinary Christmas pageants. But one day, when our children grow old and tired, they will yearn for a pageant according to the Scriptures. And they will rejoice with us that the story of our salvation has burst the bounds of a manger in Bethlehem. They will rejoice that the God who came to us in Jesus is with us for the long haul. And that is the good news according to the Scriptures.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 4, 2026