I went to midnight mass last night. The priest was saying that the
people in the world put aside their resentments and divisions when Jesus
was born. I had no idea where he was getting that. Herod certainly
didn’t put aside his ambitions in the Gospel of Matthew, for Herod saw
the recently born Jesus as a rival to his throne and tried to kill him.
I thought of a Bible study group that I attended years ago. We were
going through the Gospel of Luke. The group leader was saying that, the
way that he long saw the Christmas story, people at Jesus’ birth are
all happy and are singing songs together. In reading Luke, however, he
was seeing a different picture: people’s reactions were, “This is
strange stuff.”