An homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, for the Sunday after Nativity, 7534/2026, by Priest Paul Siewers. (Russian icon above of the Flight to Egypt; the Righteous James the Brother of the Lord is the figure on the left.)
Today is the fifth of the Orthodox 12 days of Christmas, during which the Church focuses on aspects of the early life of Jesus Christ, through Theophany Eve, which will be a week from today.
Today we commemorate the Righteous David the King, Joseph the Betrothed, and James the Brother of the Lord. They all relate to the early life of Jesus.
King David, His ancestor according to the flesh, marks Jesus as fulfilling the royal line of Israel, Joseph the Betrothed is Jesus’ stepfather and early protector in his human family, and James is Jesus’ stepbrother who represents how Israel, fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ, became the Church. For James was the first Bishop of Jerusalem.
These three figures in Jesus’ family according to the flesh are also representatives of the blossoming forth of the Orthodox Church as Israel at Christmas time.
King David in his repentance for his grave sins and crimes prefigures Confession, and in fact he is mentioned in our prayers because of this. James the Brother of the Lord according to Tradition authored the earliest form of the Divine Liturgy, still used sometimes by the Church. As a Bishop who according to tradition was called by our Lord in a vision, James also was a prototype of the mystery of ordination in the Church. Joseph the Betrothed prefigured marriage in the Church. For while he was Mary’s betrothed and not her actual husband, in the betrothal and in his chaste role as protector of the Theotokos and the baby Jesus, Joseph prefigured central aspects of Christian marriage. James in his Epistle in the Bible supported Holy Unction, another mystery. King David is recorded in Scripture as being anointed three times, prefiguring the mystery of Chrismation, for the anointings symbolized consecration and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, foreshadowing the ultimate fulfillment of the Davidic covenant in Jesus Christ. The Apostles according to Church Tradition were baptized by Jesus, and so James likely was as well, representing the new Christian mystery of baptism also.
James appropriately authored the Epistle of James in the New Testament, which bears testimony to the need for works alongside faith, and so refutes aspects of Protestantism. Likewise, James’ situation as Bishop of Jerusalem presiding over the apostolic Council of Jerusalem refutes false aspects of Catholic ecclesiology. And the Protoevangelium of James attributed to him upholds traditions of the life of the Theotokos important to the traditions of the Church.
So in all these ways these figures from Jesus’ family represented foreshadowing or first sprouts of the mysteries, teachings, and ecclesiology of our Orthodox Church, which became Israel fulfilled starting at the original Christmas time.
Today’s Gospel reading relates this Christmas season to another dimension, that of the persecution of the Church by Herod who attempted to kill all the young boys in the Bethlehem area to extinguish the light of Christ. Such persecution is also seen in the martyrdom of James the brother of the Lord, who was plunged to his death from the roof the Temple by the Jewish religious leaders who had rejected Christ, motivated in part by James’ success at bringing many Jews into the Church in her first years.
Yet there is another layer to our Gospel account of the flight into Egypt found in Church tradition as well, which likewise relates this season’s account of Jesus’ early years to His Crucifixion and Resurrection. When Mary and Egypt and the baby Jesus, and other family members, fled to Egypt, tradition says they were waylaid by thieves seeking to rob them. One of the thieves stood up for them and vigorously told the others to leave them alone, which they did. That young thief, according to Church Tradition, later was one of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus Christ at Golgotha. He is known to the Russian Church as Saint Rakh, or the Wise Thief. He pled to our Lord to remember Him in His kingdom, as we remember at each Liturgy. Our Lord said, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.” It is because of this that we have the diagonal foot rest on the Orthodox Cross, reminding us of how we participate in the Crucifixion with the Wise Thief, God willing, asking for Jesus Christ’s help, that we may participate in His Resurrection also.
The hymns of the Church describe how “in a moment” the Wise Thief found Paradise, how he “stole Paradise,” and how he recognized “the hidden God” on the Cross beside him. In Russa, the figure of St. Rakh became common on the northern door of the iconostasis. There, the image of the Wise Thief personified the gateway to Paradise, his likeness facing out toward the wilderness of human life as on Golgotha. His image backed on panels of northern pine from the forest of the Russian lands, adjoined Paradise in a sense as the Holy of Holies, the Altar, from whence comes Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. A 17th-century icon from the Solovetsky Monastery in Russia shows the Wise Thief at the gate to Paradise, guarded on the right by a Seraphim angel, much like the position of the thief on the north gate of the iconostasis. On the icon with the Wise Thief, Christ is at the gate in a mandorla or heavenly circle. The Wise Thief stands in Paradise with the symbol of the three-barred Cross amid the plants of Paradise, guided by the Angel toward the advancing Christ returning from the Harrowing of Hell. Fittingly, the setting of this icon in the Solovetsky Monastery became infamous in the twentieth century as the prototype prison camp of the Gulag Archipelago, in which many faithful lost their lives under atheist-communist rule. The icon depicts a portal to freedom more powerful than even the worst tyranny.
So commemorations in our service today, together with the Gospel Reading, link us from the Christmas season all the way to the Orthodox Cross and iconography, and the modern persecutions of the Church. That’s the deep interconnectivity of our Church Tradition.
Like the Wise Thief, King David, Joseph the Betrothed, and James the Brother of the Lord were righteous because they in the end made right choices, despite various degrees of rocky histories. Joseph the Betrothed, a humble carpenter, was the least so in that he led a pious life and agreed to be the older guardian chastely of the young Virgin Mary. But he was, according to Tradition, and as depicted in iconography, tempted of the Devil nonetheless. Joseph’s steadfastness made him a witness to the realization of Jesus Christ as Fully God and Fully Man, the Church’s unassailable answer to all ancient and modern heresies, from Deism to Atheism to Islam.
David, the author of most of the Psalter, including Psalm 50, a key Psalm in Orthodox Christian services, lent his name to a title of Jesus Christ as the “Son of David,” the King of Kings. So God made allowance for penitence. James the Brother of the Lord, Joseph’s son by his deceased wife, also a descendant of David, may initially not have been in the 12 Apostles, as even Jesus’ own family had their doubts about Who He is. Yet he chose to be faithful and was chosen by our Lord to be the first Bishop of His Church in Jerusalem. According to tradition he was with the baby Jesus and family on the flight to Egypt as well.
Like all these figures remembered from our service today, related to the family life of our Lord, we today as a Church family can learn at this season of new birth to choose faith and to distance ourselves from our passions. There is no such thing as a pride parade in Orthodox Christianity and there is no such thing as a humility parade either, which would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, we must learn like the Righteous of old in the earliest days of the Church not to identify ourselves with our passions. This Christmas season, let us experience more of emptying ourselves in the light from the new birth of Jesus Christ in our hearts. In a sense we can feel Christ born within us, but more properly as the Orthodox hymn tells, we have put on Christ, in the sense of dwelling within Him. For Christ is not a kind of toy within our heart, but rather, as the Bible tells us, in Him we live and move and have our being.
When we realize this from our heart, we then can really let our light shine in Christ’s new commandment, loving our neighbor more than ourselves, because of our whole-hearted and whole-bodied love of Christ. May we experience Him born once again amid our Church family today, and may the Righteous David, Joseph, and James from Our Lord’s family help inspire and pray for us, together with St. Rakh the Wise Thief. For they are part of our family, too.
Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
***
The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew,
§4 [2:13-23]
When the wise men departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Arise, and take the young Child and His mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.’ When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed into Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ‘Out of Egypt have I called My Son.’ Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked by the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth and slew all the children who were in Bethlehem and in all the region thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, ‘In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted, because they are no more.’ But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, ‘Arise, and take the young Child and His mother, and go into the land of Israel, for they are dead who sought the young Child’s life.’ And he arose and took the young Child and His mother, and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus reigned in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither. Notwithstanding, being warned by God in a dream, he turned aside into the region of Galilee. And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene.’