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. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
“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.”
--Matthew 2:16-18 NIV
In 2014, I went to Israel and Palestine on a Holy Land tour with a good friend and fellow minister. It was an amazing trip and a joy to visit places I had read about in the Bible all of my life. The town where Jesus was born was near the top of my list of must-see sites. I was excited to see in person what I had always heard about on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, Bethlehem ended up being one of the least enjoyable experiences on the trip.
On the day we traveled to the Church of the Nativity and St. Catherine’s Church (the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches built side by side over the site where tradition says Christ was born), it was packed with tourists. The holy site was filled with hundreds of Russian pilgrims whom our guide explained came down on cheap day trips to Bethlehem. The crowd jostled with one another to get down into the caves below the churches which contained chapels built centuries ago. I recall being crammed into the small space with dozens of pilgrims each trying to touch a silver star inlaid on the ground marking where Jesus was said to have been born. It did not in any way feel like the calm and peaceful manger depicted in Christmas carols.
Apparently in the scrum of pilgrims, I had walked right past without noticing an altar set up to honor “the Holy Innocents,” the boys of Bethlehem who were two years old and younger killed by King Herod as depicted in Matthew 2. The murdered children of Bethlehem are a part of the Christmas story that does not get read at Christmas Eve services. Just as I hurried on past the commemoration of these killed children on my trip to Bethlehem without seeing it, so also do we usually hurry through the Christmas stories in the Gospels without realizing all was not heavenly light and angelic choruses around Jesus’ birth. The shadow of a violent ruler lingers over the events of the nativity. A reason I like the tradition of celebrating Epiphany a couple of weeks after Christmas is it allows time to reflect upon this horrible part of the Christmas story.
Historians generally tend to doubt that Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s children really happened, because there is no mention of it outside of Matthew’s Gospel. Even so, from what we know of Herod he was ruthless in dealing with threats to his power and carried out similar bloody killings which are well-documented. The killing of children to eliminate a rival claimant to the throne fits what we know of Herod from sources outside the Bible.
Bible scholars argue that one of Matthew’s intentions with his Gospel is to present Jesus as a new Moses who reinterprets the Law in his Sermon on the Mount just as Moses received the Torah on Mt. Sinai in Exodus. They see the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem and the holy family’s flight to Egypt as a deliberate parallel of Pharaoh killing Hebrew infants in the Exodus story and Moses’ later flight into the wilderness. Whether one chooses to believe the massacre depicted in Matthew 2 actually happened or not, countless innocents have been killed not only in the times of the Bible but also in every time down through history until the present. We live in a violent world.
This story of terror is an important part of the Christmas story, because it acknowledges that Christ entered into a world of pain and violence. From Jesus’ birth through his bloody execution on a cross on to the violent persecutions faced by the early church, the story of Jesus does not ignore the violence of our world. The light of Christ, the promise of Emanuel that God is with us, shines into a world of shadow filled with forces opposed to God’s reign of love. The Gospel presents the scandalous idea that God’s power made present in the weakness of a newborn child was greater than the power of the despots and dictators of Jesus’ day and every day.
This week many of us are shaken by the images of a violent mob overtaking our nation’s Capitol Building. Only this morning did I read a message from a woman in one of the former churches I served who fled Nazi Germany as a child. She expressed terror at this week’s events which paralleled what she remembered from her youth. It is a time to be concerned for our country and to empathize with the many people around the world for whom similar events are commonplace in their countries. We have much work to do as a nation to repair our shared pursuit of the common good.
For Christians looking for hope in anxious times, the story of the killing of Bethlehem's children in Matthew 2 occurring at the same time as the epiphany of God’s presence in Christ remind us that Christianity is not a fantastical escape from reality but a means of existing inside a reality which is sometimes terror-filled. Herod died and remains a relatively minor figure in history, but Jesus Christ endured. So also, every despot and dictator throughout history has also died and their empires which seemed eternal crumbled in time. So also will those who practice violence and terror in our day pass away. Their actions may cause terrible consequences in our present, but they will not endure. We remember that as important as a responsible and just government may be, our ultimate security is found in the God who created us and who does not abandon us. The light of Epiphany shining in the murderous shadows of Jesus’ day still shines in our day. The God we trust goes with us even when our paths take us into the shadow of death.
Grace and Peace, Chase
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