Matthew 2:13-23
New International Version (NIV)
13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” 14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” 16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: 18 “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” 19 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.” 21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.
Our Gospel for today is a bit unsettling because we feel we are still in the Christmas season, and we still have a little of that Christmas buzz on, yet we learn how endangered, how threatened the Christ child was. But through dreams, Joseph knew to flee with his family to Egypt. An earlier verse in Matthew explains how also through dreams, the Magi, the Wise Men, who had been instructed by King Herod to find the Christ child, knew not to return to Herod to say where he was. And later again through dreams, Joseph knew when it is safe to return, and he knew to settle in Nazareth, thus fulfilling the prophecy that the Messiah would be a Nazarene. So the story heartens us and reassures us that God's plan will proceed.
In today's Gospel, as a matter of drama, Jesus is actually a minor actor, someone simply to be protected. It is Herod who is the main earthly player. He is the menace, and he shows himself to be a monster. When the Wise Men do not report back to him, when they just return to the east by a different route, Herod knows he has been outwitted, and he gives the order that means so many deaths in Bethlehem. Throughout Christian history, Herod has been justly reviled for this act, although it is not clear he was the worst monster in the ancient world; that was quite a competition after all. But it is certainly monstrous what he does here: All those children gone.
This is certainly not what we expect from a Christmastime story. It starts out well enough with the escape of Jesus and his family. But then we have this atrocity: The Slaughter of the Innocents, as the event came to be known. So this is a terrible juxtaposition with the setting side by side of rescue and massacre. Matthew is the only Gospel in which this incident appears, but it was nonetheless a frequent theme in medieval art. Many paintings depicted the slaughter, all quite disturbing. These paintings tend to show a substantial number of infants taken, often the ground is covered with them. But historians have estimated that, based on the likely population of Bethlehem at the time, the number lost was probably no more than twenty and possibly only around ten. Still, whatever the number, it was a horrible act. Maybe the medieval artists simply intended to emphasize the dreadfulness of the crime. Strangely, our Gospel itself does not even venture a number, as if it is simply too much to bear. (I remember that is how Rudy Giuliani put it so poignantly on the morning of September 11th when asked to estimate the number of casualties.) So instead of figures, the text does no more than set out the parameters of the assigned killing, that is, those male children who have not reached their second year.
Maybe it says a lot when the description of the Slaughter ends on this eerie note of Rachel, the Old Testament matriarch, crying from her grave. Now as much as I can, I try to read about other religions and how common spiritual themes carry around the world. And in many early religions, particularly the Native American belief systems, the Earth was considered the Mother. And often the Earth Mother would feel pain for evil done. And here we have Rachel crying out like a mother from her grave, from the Earth, which strikes me as being in that spirit. It also reminds us of Genesis when Cain killed his brother Abel, and the blood of Abel cried out from the ground to God. Anyway, this all goes to underline the depth of the tragedy we witness.
I have a very personal recollection of this particular Bible story. When I was about six or seven, my parents took me to the movies. I don’t want to sound too prehistoric, but back then, in our little town, we only had one movie theater and, hold on to your hats, it had only one screen. And needless to say, the theater was not in a mall. From my research, I’ve determined that the movie we went to see was probably the Biblical epic King of Kings, released in 1961. And by the way, that didn’t mean we saw the movie in 1961, since our theater was always a little behind in its showings. Believe me, in those days, Hollywood did not wait anxiously for the weekend’s opening take from Burlington, Wisconsin. The movie starred Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus. If you’re a connoisseur of movie Jesuses, you might recall him as kind of like the “surfer Jesus,” and reviewers did pan him as being too much of a pretty boy, too young-looking, even though, in fact, he was in his thirties at the time.
Now movies from that period were not terribly graphic. For example, I can remember in King of Kings when John the Baptist gets it. They had a close-up of him in his cell, they panned up to the face of a guard standing over him, the guard pulls out this large sword, probably like a scimitar, you hear this ominous music, the guard raises the sword, and then they switch to another scene, so you know it’s lights out for John. But one thing that was so terribly graphic and so terribly disturbing for me at least was the depiction of the Slaughter of the Innocents. I remember it as a nighttime scene, which is always scarier in a dark movie theater, especially when you're little, and they showed Herod’s soldiers carrying little babies over their heads out of these huts with screaming women running after them. I well remember how much I was bothered by that scene, and I remember telling my mother about how I felt. And I don’t think I was ever that truly disturbed by a movie again until about forty years later when I saw Saving Private Ryan with that horrifying opening scene of D-Day.
In early Christianity, these children in Bethlehem were known as the first martyrs of the Church, as if they had been sacrificed to save Jesus. But when you read this section over and over, you may actually come up with a more awful conclusion. You see, the conventional understanding is that when the Wise Men did not return to Herod and specifically identify the Christ child, the way Judas later identified Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Herod was then forced to eliminate all likely suspects, all potential contenders for his throne. But the text says he felt he was “outwitted” by the Wise Men. Not just that he was “disobeyed” or “ignored” by the Wise Men; Herod was “outwitted.” Could it have been that Herod thought that the parents of the Christ child, Joseph and Mary, had been “tipped off” by the Wise Men, as opposed to the angel of Lord, and that Herod assumed they were already gone, had already gotten away from Bethlehem? In that case, the slaughter was simply meaningless terror, a lashing out, which makes the story even less palatable as far as any overall heavenly plan is concerned.
Why would God allow that to happen? Why does he save his son but leave all the other sons to their fates? Why does he leave them in the hands of this monster? What kind of plan is that? Isn't it all senseless? But then, is that kind of senseless terror so strange in our world? Even in modern times in the Middle East, we know Saddam Hussein ordered poison-gas attacks on whole Kurdish villages. There had to be many children lost in those attacks. We know that in 1982, the Syrian regime massacred 20,000 of its own people in putting down an uprising. Again, many innocent children must have been lost.
We’ve certainly known senseless terror in this country as well. Even before September 11th, there was April 19th, 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing. Lately, of course, we tend to worry so much about foreign threats, about people who seem to be speaking Arabic, or women with scarves on their heads, but we need to remember Oklahoma City and the evil amongst us. For like a Herod or a Saddam, an American can unfortunately be quite capable of killing large numbers of fellow citizens. But what I always find so painful in remembering Oklahoma City was that nineteen children were killed, who were in the day-care center on the bottom floor, and some of them very small children too. And also so horrible at the memorial service was the mother holding a picture of her only two sons who were lost. Again we can hear Rachel crying. So in a way that was our own slaughter of the innocents.
But again why do we have to hear about these tragedies in Bethlehem or Oklahoma City so near to the time of Christmas when we are supposed to have so much joy and hope? Well, unfortunately, we too often see joy and sorrow mixed up. And after all, we are often told how we can’t really separate the story of the babe in the Manger from the story of Christ on the cross. And there were signs of this even in the Christmas story: One of the gifts of the Wise Men was myrrh, which is meant for one who is to die. So should we be surprised to find great earthly sorrow tied up with the Christmas story?
So it's always there; it's all foretold; it's all God's plan. God did save his son but not those other sons in Bethlehem. God's plan, however, did proceed with Christ's ministry and with the Easter story, when God did give up his son to die, his only son, not as an infant, but on that day in Jerusalem on the cross.
Okay, so that's God's plan, but what is our comfort, what is our solace when we read about or, worse yet, live through awful tragedies such as these? We have no easy answers in this life of sorrows. Why does God seem to stand by while the innocent suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? These questions linger; there is always the mystery. You know when I was in law school, our toughest class by far was Constitutional Law. It's a subject taught by the most distinguished professors and is the most intellectually demanding. And of all the subjects in law school, I think it is the most—dare I say—“theological.” One day we were going over a very dense case and having real trouble with it. Our professor, a nationally renowned scholar, looked around the room and sensed our difficulty and said, “If you're confused, you're in the right room.”
I say to you now if you're confused by our Gospel, if you're confused by Christianity, if you're confused by God, you're in the right room. But unlike me who only left the classroom confused, you leave here maybe confused but at the same time enlightened, enlightened by the blessing of his promise. When God sent his son to his death, it was for all of us, and we know we have the promise of everlasting life, for on the cross Christ destroyed death. That is what is promised us. And while it is undeniably hard during times of grief to focus on that promise, that promise of everlasting life remains. And it is a warm comfort to know that Christ, in giving up his life, died to save all the children of the world, whether they are in Bethlehem or in Oklahoma City, and whatever madman takes them.
And if I could be permitted just one more one-liner, the great writer Robert Louis Stevenson, once said, “The duty of a Christian is not to succeed, but to fail, and to fail cheerfully.” I've always loved that quotation as it has an almost Buddhist or Zen quality to it. But how do you fail cheerfully? Maybe you fail cheerfully by knowing that you have that promise of everlasting life from Christ's death on the cross, as do your loved ones. And by that good news, we can draw strength during our own times of crisis and even when we suffer vicariously by reading the paper or watching the news of all these tragedies around the world. This promise will carry you through all those dark valleys. So, when you leave here today, you leave with that, with that promise, that promise that will be kept. Now may that peace which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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