Matthew 2:13-23 "The Slaughter" Scott Hoezee

Last week I heard of a member of our congregation who was sore distressed to receive a post-Christmas email from a friend who celebrated the fact that she and her family had managed to have, as she termed it, "a Jesus-free Christmas." That kind of sentiment is properly disturbing to us. Most of the time these days that kind of thought expresses a generic contempt for the Christian faith--a contempt that, in this country at least, is probably borne less out of someone's actually having had horrid experiences at the hands of Christian people and more out of a generalized despising of organized religion in all its forms.

But suppose you had a been a Christian believer in the mid-first century. Suppose you were observing Christmas and the birth of Jesus the Savior in whatever way the earliest church celebrated the season we now just came through. But suppose that in the midst of marking Jesus' advent, you ran into a Jewish couple who trembled with rage at the very mention of this Jesus whose birth Christmas marks. Suppose further that upon inquiring what accounted for their vitriol and disdain, you discovered that the Jesus whose birth you get so excited about had been the cause of their own child's death. "Our two-year-old precious son died because your Jesus was born. We hate what you call Christmas. For us it is a season of death, a grim anniversary of our little one's violent demise at the hands of King Herod's thugs."

What would you say? It's a far-fetched scenario, I grant you, but the biblical fact of the matter is that there were parents in the area around Bethlehem who really did weep over their slain toddlers and infants. What's more, it was relatively easy to connect the dots that would trace the sequence of events that led to this infanticide directly back to Jesus, the son of Mary. What do we make of this? What could we have said to grieving parents whose children died because Jesus was born? These are not easy questions, and this is not a pleasant story. But as we wind down our holiday season this night, we ignore this part of the Bible's larger Christmas narrative at our peril.

So we'll begin our reflections on this with the well-known larger context. Some while after Jesus was born, Matthew (and Matthew alone in the gospels) reports that some quacky astrologers from Baghdad, in the course of preparing their weekly horoscope column for the Baghdad Daily News, somehow managed to get at least one thing right in their otherwise wrong-headed pseudo-science of getting the hang of the future by reading the stars: something new and glorious was happening over in Judea. It looked to them to be a heavenly portent that a new king had been born. We don't know how or why on this occasion these charlatans got this right. The fact that even these Persians did get it right and ended up bowing at the infant Christ's cradle is used by Matthew to give an early hint of the global reach of the salvation Jesus would eventually accomplish.

But we have to assume that it was somehow the Spirit of God that led these Magi, these magicians from the East, to get it right. Of course, ultimately that fact only serves to complicate this story even more. After all, the Magi were despised figures in Israelite and Judaic circles. There are even passages in the Old Testament and from the inter-testamental period that warn God's people away from such figures. So if they got something right on this one occasion, it must have been God's doing. But that means that it was God who kicked off the very series of events that led to the slaughter of all those children. If we wanted to explain things to some grieving first-century parents whose child had been murdered by Herod, God's role in getting this particular ball rolling would make matters a bit more tense for us.

The real problem, however, stemmed from the fact that these Magi did the unspeakably dangerous and dumb thing of tipping off King Herod. This particular monarch named Herod was among the ancient world's most despised despots. He was, in the last analysis, insane and dangerous. In the years prior to the birth of Jesus and the appearance of these Magi, Herod had murdered no less than three of his own sons. Why? Because he feared they had designs on usurping his throne. Herod's proclivity to violence was so well know that even Caesar Augustus once privately told someone that it was safer to be one of Herod's pigs than one of his sons! Historians believe Herod came to power around the year 37 B.C. When some of the Jewish leaders of that day initially protested Herod's presence in the area of Judea, Herod responded by rounding up a large number of Pharisees and then having them flogged and killed.

If ever there was a person whom you would not want to inform that a new rival king might be in the neighborhood, it was this ruthless, reckless, and brutal man. One can only imagine the spike in Herod's blood pressure once those innocent bumblers from Baghdad asked him, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know where the new King of the Jews is these days, would you?" I don't doubt that upon hearing that, Herod excused himself long enough to go outside to throw up. He then played the Magi like a cheap violin, proffering faux desires to worship and honor this new king himself if only the Magi would be so kind as to forward the little monarch's home address once they got it themselves.

Matthew tells us that God intervened to prevent Herod from finding out that vital piece of information, but it is exactly that fact that led to this dreadful mini-holocaust of babies. If Herod couldn't use a rifle to put a single bullet through the skull of this new king, he'd take the shotgun approach and blast away at every child under the age of two that was anywhere near the general area he knew the Magi visited.

Scholars think that based on population numbers and other such statistics back then, the number of children killed may have been between twenty or thirty. But our compassion for the parents who lost children should not be the less just because we're talking about a score of children and not hundreds or thousands. If you lose a child, your grief is not different in case that child was one of a dozen or one of the tens of thousands as we've seen in that dreadful southeast Asian tsunami. Grief is grief.

One of my college professors once said that these children were in a real way the first martyrs for Christ, and in one sense that is true, but in another sense it is not. After all, these children did not die because they chose to stand up for and witness to Jesus. They died because they had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the Christian tradition we have often referred to the advent of God's Christ as having come "in the fullness of time." We refer to it that way as a way to say that God's providence had arranged Jesus to arrive here at just the right time. But for those murdered babies, the time could not have been more wrong.

Herod did it to protect his precious throne and his stranglehold on power. Like all the rulers of this earth, however, it was all in vain. Herod himself died before any one of those children would have been in Kindergarten. Historians say Herod died a slow and horrible death from some putrid bowel condition. He rotted from the inside out, which not a few would say was only apropos since he had been rotten to the core all along as it was. But just that fact about him made Herod an emblem of sin, of even the original sin that had infected the heart of this world ever since that day Eve and Adam decided to stage their own attempt at usurping a throne: God's throne.

If we connect Herod with all that has from time immemorial been wrong with this fallen creation, then we can begin to see how, in one sense at least, it is not surprising to see this creation react so violently to the advent of the One whose mission in life would be to wipe sin from the face of the planet. Herod feared that somewhere out there in the Judean countryside, there was someone in diapers who posed a threat to all that he stood for. He wasn't wrong. No, Jesus would never have the kind of political aspirations that would have threatened Herod's position as king. But in the longest possible run, the greedy, self-centered sin that was the fuel in Herod's political engine would be done away with through the redeeming work of God's Christ.

Even Matthew's reference to Jeremiah's words about Rachel weeping for her children at Ramah ties in with humanity's larger, sinful rejection of God. After the Israelites had so long rejected their covenant God, the time came when the Babylonians were allowed to wipe out Israel and enslave its people. Ramah was one of the main shipping-off points for the refugees being sent to Babylon. Ramah was also very near the burial site for the Israelite matriarch Rachel, and so in the passage Matthew quotes, the prophet Jeremiah pictured Rachel weeping for her children as they were deported from the Promised Land. It was a sad portrait that Jeremiah used vividly to illustrate what always happens when sin gains the upper hand and God is rejected in the bargain.

Ultimately, sin is also what has led to every rejection of God's Christ that has ever happened. No sooner is Jesus born and sin rears its ugly head to threaten him and, in the end, to wreck sad mayhem on the life of this creation. Earlier I asked you to imagine celebrating Christmas in the first-century church. I don't know just how they marked Advent and Christmas then but I do know that over time, we have come to make this a season of happy cheer, of goodwill toward all, of glittering lights and the eyes of children that shine with wonder and delight. In short, we despise sadness, and most especially death, over the holidays.

In an episode of the TV series M*A*S*H some years back, two doctors and a nurse desperately try to keep a fatally wounded soldier from dying on Christmas Day lest the man's wife and children back home forever after have to associate Christmas with their loved one's death. When the man expires just before midnight anyway despite their best efforts, Dr. Pierce moves the clock hands forward twenty minutes and then puts December 26 on the death certificate. "No child should have to connect Christmas to death" he says in defense of his unethical faking of a medical record.

If we're honest, we all feel the same way. That's why one commentator once compared tonight's passage in Matthew 2 to an obnoxious and most unwelcome guest at your Christmas party--the kind of person who talks too loudly and who spills eggnog all over your nice Persian rug. The so-called "Slaughter of the Innocents" is about as un-Christmasy a Bible passage as we could imagine. But maybe that's not Matthew's fault but our own. Maybe it is our conception of the true meaning of Christmas that needs revising, not Matthew's narrative.

The only way life can ultimately triumph through the work of that little Babe of Bethlehem is if first death is met squarely and head on. We can't get at the joy of Christ unless we encounter the sorrow, too. That's the part the world doesn't accept, and we dare not let them co-opt us into thinking the same way.

Last month we witnessed a different kind of Christmas tradition that has become an annual event in this nation: we saw again all the protests that got lodged about this or that nativity scene that was on, or too close to, public property. Sometimes when we hear that, even we Christians tend to respond, "How could anyone be against something so pretty and beautiful and hopeful?" Maybe the people who protest such things are more in touch with the deeper challenge that the Babe in the manger presents than we ourselves are at times. If you don't want your world turned upside down, if you don't want to be assailed for your sins and proffered a bloody salvation on a cross as the way to have those sins forgiven, then you won't want to see the manger scene. God's grand and cosmic challenge to sin and selfishness, to violence and greed, is very much on display at Christmas.

But we still haven't answered the question I posed at the outset this evening: what would we have said to a first-century Jewish couple who was furious about the birth of this Jesus seeing as it contributed directly to the death of their own child? For myself, I would want to weep with the parents first and foremost, the same as we should all grieve all the various ways by which the innocent of this world get caught up in violence altogether too often. Only after I demonstrated my compassion for these people would I dare to say anything else.

When I did get around to saying something, I would confess my own confusion as to why this had to be. For reasons I find difficult to fathom, I'd have to say that somehow their child gave his life to save Jesus' life. In so doing, though, the One who would ultimately give up his own life to save everyone else was spared. The story does not end in death. At the end of the day, life triumphs because the very little Jesus who elicited this firestorm of hatred from the sinful of this world found a way to unmake hatred and violence from the inside out. By letting himself get caught up in this world's web of violence and deceit, of death and destruction, he managed to defeat these powerful forces in a way brute force itself could never have done.

Our world is still filled with the weeping of Rachel at Ramah. Who among us could keep a dry eye when watching the news and viewing the photos from Sri Lanka and Thailand this past week as parents searched in vain for little ones washed out to sea? The innocent still suffer. The brutal still flex their muscle in ways that brings heartache to the meek and mild. I don't know why the helpless, hapless, precious ones of this world suffer the way they do. There are no easy answers to parents in grief in the first century or now. After 2,000 years of theological reflection and doctrinal development, there is still no good answer to that most basic of all Job-like questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? I don't know exactly.

What I do know is that Jesus' birth right in the middle of such suffering is the only hope we've got for now or any future time. As we said last Sunday morning, the fact that Jesus advented right here on this earth, this life, replete with all that vexes and annoys, grieves and hurts us, that tells us that it was not for angels and heavenly realms that Jesus came down here but for precisely all the Rachels of history who weep without end. As we begin this new year, we take a deep breath in grim anticipation of all that could and will go wrong on the world scene. Until Christ shall come again, we know it won't get better finally. But if that Child of Bethlehem is who Herod and those Magi dimly suspected he just might be, then hope endures through even the darkest of times.

I don't know why those innocents died back then when Jesus was himself but a baby. But the fact that Jesus was himself a real human baby tells me the end of the story is life. That's not an easy truth and it is not meant to squelch Rachel from her well-earned weeping. But it is to say that when we've cried ourselves out in this old world, there will be One who will wipe every tear from every eye. That has to be true. And it is. Amen.