Slaughter of The Innocents

Today we stand on the precipice of a new year. And that in many ways is very exciting! It’s a clean slate with new possibilities and potential growth. But we are also filled with the reality that upon reviewing our previous year, things perhaps did not go as we had planned. There was, in fact, a mix of both good times and bad that accompanied us along the way, success and failure marked 2017, and we must come to terms with both of those things, to make sense of them and to move forward. And by moving forward, we are also filled with a renewed sense of hope and confidence, a determination that this year, things are going to be different, things are going to change for the better. This is our year! And for the briefest of moments everyone will sound like a Cubs’ fan.

We also find ourselves in a rather short season of the Church, one that lasts a mere 12 days, the Christmas season. It is supposed to be about celebrating the birth of Christ, and in a similar way to the anticipation that we feel for a new calendar year, Christians are to dwell in the joy and hope that we feel for what God might do in our midst once again through the Messiah that is Jesus.

Yet the story that we read today from Matthew’s Gospel does not fit very well with our cultural assumptions about the joy of Christmas and a renewed determination to make things happen. If anything, the story makes us feel disturbed and unsettled, it leaves us asking why? Why are innocent children murdered? And what does this possibly have to do with the story of Christmas? Regarding this story, one of my seminary professors once said, “Perhaps no event in the Gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children.” And so we are rightly appalled by what we read in today’s story. And yet we must still come to terms with it.

This story, traditionally called the slaughter of the innocents, occurs a mere 13 verses after the traditional Advent story that we read describing the birth of Christ. From there things begin to happen fast. If you imagine it, Jesus has literally just been born. Mary is feeding him. He is an innocent little baby. Doing all the things that babies do. And then suddenly Joseph has a dream, and in it is told that King Herod, a king who is known for his irrational suspicions, lust for power, and violent episodes in which he killed even his own wife & son, this King Herod is looking for this new King of Kings, to kill him. The magi have told him that a new “King of the Jews” will be born in Bethlehem and he is of course frightened. He expects that his reign will be usurped, his power seized.

And so such a person easily makes the decision: to protect his power, to remain firmly in control, an innocent child must die. And so Joseph and Mary flee in the night as they are commanded to do by the angel. They flee not as a family of power or status, but as refugees, to Egypt; as parents filled with terror just trying to keep their son alive from a violent regime. This does not sound like they are God’s chosen family through which all of Israel will be redeemed. But now this story begins to sound an awful lot like something we have heard before.

You have to remember that Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience, a people that know their Torah stories very well. He is alluding to another story. We have an echo of another time in history when God acted to save God’s people. I’m sure you can guess by now….it’s the story of Moses. Once, there was another ruler, back then he was called Pharaoh. Who once went about killing Hebrew boy children, demanding innocent bloodshed for the sake of retaining power and smothering irrational fear, and yet one baby boy survives. Jesus is rescued just as Moses was plucked from the Nile River. Jesus comes from the land of Egypt, as a refugee, he comes in the manner of Moses, to set the people free from slavery to sin and death. It’s a grand echo of Exodus. Matthew is telling the story in such a way that we are meant to catch all these references & hints, he is trying to show that through Jesus, through this infant child, God is fulfilling the promises of the Old Testament. That Jesus is in fact the Messiah who will redeem Israel and even the whole world! Matthew tells the story to help us connect the dotes about what God is up to in the world, and about how the Scriptures are fulfilled.

So where does that leave us? What are we supposed to make of this story as we enter 2018? The first thing is this: Jesus comes into a world where innocent children still die. The birth of our Messiah King does not instantly do away with violence and greed and unspeakable horror. I wish that it did, it sadly, does not. God does not simply wipe out all human misery in the birth of Jesus, if anything, the history of the Early Church shows us that those who came the closest to Jesus experience the greatest suffering. Just look at Joseph and Mary – they experience persecution, displacement, and exile because of Jesus! They live in a world that is shockingly similar to our world. A world that is filled with innocent refugees just as Jesus lived as a refugee. In fact, according to the United Nations World Refugee Agency, we now have 65 million refugees worldwide, and that was at the end of 2016. That is more than then entire population of the UK. Joseph and Mary were fleeing violence, running into Egypt to seek safety. And today, people are running into Europe & the United States. People still flee violence.

At my last church, I would lead a regular trip to El Salvador where we would spend time with many local people in the village where we lived and worked. They would share their life with us and tell us their stories. I had the opportunity to hear many powerful stories of people who had fled to the United States during the civil war of the 1980’s and now today because of extreme gang violence. Their stories were difficult to hear, like today’s story, they always included that the people were directly threatened. Do this…or else! To stay in their homeland was certain death; to leave was only the possibility of life. In the stories I heard, nobody wanted to leave their family and community and everything they had ever known. Who after all would willingly makes this choice? The people I met were fleeing violence! Listen, I know immigration is a hot political issue these days, and I don’t want to make a big hairy deal out of this, but if we can’t agree that we should support people seeking safety and fleeing violence, regardless of political persuasion, if we can’t see Jesus in the face of an innocent refugee, then we have missed the mark. We need to look harder. For this year in front of us, for 2018, cannot be just about us. It has to be about something more. If it is just about us, then we have missed the year and we have missed what God is up to in our world. Which leads me to the second point.

The second thing to notice about today’s story is that the power of God enters the world the same way today as God entered in the time of Christ. God enters in the same way, vulnerably, through the life of a little baby, and you could miss it. Many did back in the time of Christ, they missed the most significant thing they were ever going to experience and it was staring back at them in the face. We could also miss it; because God doesn’t work the way we want God too. There is no manipulation or power play. We expect that God might take care of a cruel and bloodthirsty leader like Herod, but for some reason God does not. God wields a different kind of power, not the power of war, not the power of threats or preemptive strikes, it’s the power that is displayed through a willful suffering, it’s the power of love.

And finally, God doesn’t just enter through the vulnerable; God enters through regular folks like you and me. Mary and Joseph are ordinary people who noticed what God was up to and said yes. Yes, I want to be a part of that. You want to see God do something about poor folks in Waukegan or young single moms in Chicago. Go do it! God will be with you! You want better political action and candidates to vote for who you actually believe in. Go raise money and start going door to door. God will be with you! Because that is how God works; through ordinary people like you and me!

So I encourage you to offer up your life to the power of this love in whatever way you can. Think of all the possibilities and ways in which we could affect change. We, who have been given power and wealth and influence, we should go and use it for the Kingdom of God. Use it for the poor and the marginalized, for refugees and addicts, those who are suffering under the weight of injustice and oppression. So be a willing participant, be willing to stand up to fear and convention of the status quo, be willing to serve and listen, be willing to speak words of peace in the midst of violence. Not just for you, but for all those who sincerely need help. In so doing we embrace the full meaning of the joy of Christmas. This should be our New Year’s resolution. This is the power of the story for us today.