It’s only been a few days since we joined Mary and Joseph beside the manger, welcoming the little Lord Jesus along with angels and shepherds. Only a few days since that holy night of wonder and mystery, where the Word of God became human and lived among us. Only a few days since we heralded the beginning of his eternal reign, of peace on earth and goodwill to all favored by God.
But now, this first Sunday of Christmas, the shadows of this earthly realm return with a vengeance. This world that could not make room in the guest house for Jesus is now determined to push him out of it. The agent of the world’s rage? Herod the Great—the Jewish client king of Judea.
Here is the cold reality of 1st century Palestine that Herod ruled over. It was a world of intrigue, lies, and blood. At this point, Herod had ruled for nearly 30 years. An astute politician, he changed sides in Roman power struggles and gotten away with it, including with the emperor Augustus. He kept revenues flowing upward to Rome. He financed massive building projects, including a major expansion of the Temple. And he was unafraid to get his hands dirty. Herod’s ruthlessness was so notorious that a saying seems to have circulated: “I’d rather be Herod’s sow than Herod’s son.” In fact, the Jewish historian Josephus reports that Herod was so concerned that no one would mourn his death, he concocted a plan to have several political prisoners murdered the day of his death, so that “he would have the honor of a memorable mourning at his funeral.”[1]
So, the massacre of defenseless children is in line with Herod’s character, as it is in line with the character of our world. We live in a world where children are often treated as expendable and exploitable. Everywhere you turn, children are monetized and sexualized on social media and television. They are kidnapped en masse and removed from their parents in as quasi-official government acts worldwide. Many are killed by acts of public violence or in military campaigns. While we may not be individually at fault for these horrific acts, we do collectively bear responsibility for them. They are part of this world’s larger anti-human campaign, a campaign seen in all destructive ideologies that want to elevate a leader or the state or a corporation or a commodity or a technology above the flourishing of humanity. Even at this late stage of life, where a disease is rotting Herod from the inside-out, he is determined to keep his throne at all costs. If he thought he needed to massacre the whole town to preserve his power, he would have done it.
Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t try to explain away this horrific act. It doesn’t try to tell us why God would warn Joseph and wouldn’t warn the other loving parents of Bethlehem. It doesn’t justify their slaughter. There is nothing sensible or redeemable about it. Rather, Matthew points back to Jeremiah, who spoke in poetic language of another mass murder, that time at the hands of the Babylonians. Jeremiah shows us the weeping matriarch Rachel, mother of Joseph and Benjamin, weeping for her children because they no longer exist. The image of weeping Rachel haunted Matthew, as it haunts us today. With such destruction, such grief, such incomprehensible loss, we can wonder if God has abandoned us. If we are left to our own devices.
But Jesus, even as a toddler, brings a new reality in. This reality utterly overturns the old. Jesus is a new kind of King of a new kind of Kingdom. This Kingdom is radically different from the realms we know on earth. It is based on generosity, not greed. It is based on shalom, not violence. And it is based on love, not fear. There’s a thing about this love. It makes us followers of Jesus painfully vulnerable, just as it made our Lord vulnerable. We never operate from a position of strength—at least not as the world defines it. We can’t establish this Kingdom by our own power. Neither can we control it or co-opt it for our own use—and those who have tried and are trying to co-opt it soon find that they can’t cage the gospel. The gospel message is too intransigent, too wild, too stubbornly resilient. No army can repress it. Just ask the Romans, or the Tokugawa shogunate, or the rulers of the former Soviet Union. No propaganda film or re-education camp can neutralize it forever. No, this new reality of God with us in Jesus the Messiah breaks into our world—a world hellbent on going its own way—and re-claims it for Himself, forever. And this reclamation is done, not by an army. Not by a revolution. Not by violence or even the merest threat of it. The reclamation and redemption of this world is done through the power of self-giving love, a love that was willing to be born into this world, a love that was willing to go to the cross. And in that cross, Jesus, who has others die for him first, makes complete his identification with the vulnerable ones of this world.
Things may seem pretty dark in our world now. But whatever happens in the years to come, we know that Jesus has redeemed this world for his Father God. And that includes us. That includes you and me. Our reading from Hebrews reminds us that we are Jesus’s siblings. That is what we become in baptism. And because we are baptized; because we are fed by his Word and his Supper, we are empowered to live as Kingdom people. Kingdom people are led by love, not just in the abstract, but in the particular—perhaps beginning with the particular person you are sitting next to today. Kingdom people know that love casts out fear. And Kingdom people know that a deeper reality exists than the one we are propagandized to know. That reality is the realm of God, His realm, where His love steers both the stars and the human heart. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 17, chapter 6. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-17.html.