Lectionary Readings (full text from Matthew)
In the name of the Word made flesh: Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today’s Gospel text is a tough one. Perhaps the toughest one. It’s often called the “Slaughter of the Innocents,” and it troubles me every time I read or preach on it. As the preacher, I had a choice on which text to preach today. And, truth be told, the appointed readings for today would have given me an easy way out. The assigned verses for today skip 16 through 18, the part about Herod’s rage and murder. But we can’t just cut out the hard parts of the story – either in the Bible or in our lives. The story of Christmas is incomplete if we only tell the pageant and crèche version of it. The whole of the story is not “silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright” because there’s also the Coventry Carol, “Herod the king, in his raging, charged he hath this day. His men of might in his own sight, all young children to slay.”
There are implications to Christmas. When the Word became flesh things changed and there is, inherent in our faith, a collision of kingdoms. A sentimental faith will fade away faster than Frosty the snowman. A faith that cannot absorb and wrestle with a tough text like this one is not a faith worth our time. It’s a tough text, yes; and it’s also a needed one. Because Jesus was not born into a greeting card, he was born into the brokenness of this world, the messiness of our situations, the heartaches of our lives.
When an issue like this comes up – a miscarriage, divorce, cancer striking down a young parent, a global pandemic, the death of a child, crushing depression – we often ask the question “why?” The theological word for this is “theodicy” coming from the roots theo for God and dike for justice. Essentially, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why do bad things happen? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with often. I’ve got probably about 3,000 pages of books in my office on the topic. But I’ll save you the time. What they all say is this – we don’t know why evil and suffering exist, but God is with us in all things.
The problem with asking “why” is that there is no satisfying answer. That’s what the entire book of Job is about – how do you account for evil? And, after 42 chapters, in the end, we don’t. “Why” is a very natural question. Why didn’t the other parents in Bethlehem get a warning? Why didn’t God lead the magi to Bethlehem directly without alerting Herod to the birth of this child? Why did she have to get on that flight? Why did he take that route to work? Why didn’t she reach out for help? Beloved, if I knew the answer, I’d tell you. But I don’t know.
Wrestling with questions of theodicy is one response to grief and evil, and it’s a part of the process. We don’t need to berate ourselves about that. Another response though is Christmas – Emmanuel, God with us.
William Sloane Coffin was the minister of the famed Riverside Church in New York in the 80s and one of his most well-known sermons was given shortly after the death of his 24-year-old son in 1983. He said that people tried to assure him with platitudes; they were speaking to the “why” of the automobile accident, but that wasn’t a question he was asking.
In the sermon, he tells the story of yelling at someone who came by with a quiche who was talking about the “will of God.” He snapped, “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road… The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, ‘It is the will of God.’ Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”
Some of you have lived through unspeakable tragedies and some of us will in the future. If I can say just one thing into that grief and loss is that God’s heart breaks with ours. God is with us in Jesus. When dreams turn to nightmares, Jesus is with us. As we heard from the prophet Jeremiah, “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them.” In our suffering, in our pain, in our laments of “why?,” the love of God is always with us in Jesus Christ.
At this parish, I know that we often hear about St. Stephen being the “protomartyr,” meaning that he is the first martyr of the faith. With apology to our patron, these young children of Bethlehem were, in fact, the first martyrs for Christ. The word “martyr” means “witness” and, indeed, their deaths reveal at least three important truths.
The first is that evil is real. Most of us are familiar with the Christmas narratives of Matthew and Luke, but many have also read part of Revelation 12 as a description of the nativity of Jesus – “And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth so that, when she gave birth, he might devour her child.” I know there are more atheists than there used to be. And not believing in God is a tragedy because we miss out on a grace, peace, and love that is beyond all comprehension. But not believing in evil is perhaps even more dangerous because it opens us to being caught or conscripted by evil.
A 5th-century bishop commented that the devil saw what God was doing in Jesus and used Herod’s narcissism and violence to try and stop it. Herod was a horrific ruler. In Greek, the words for “pig” and “son” are nearly identical. And so there was a saying about him, “Better to be his hus than his huios. Since he was Jewish and wouldn’t eat pork, the pigs were safer than his sons, several of which he murdered due to his insecurity. Sadly, Herod was not the first tyrant in history, and he is not the last. The atrocities committed by dictators cannot be laid solely at their feet. As much as we might want to say, “There are just some bad people out there,” that is to dismiss the reality that evil is a force like gravity which pulls on us. It’s why when Herod is described, we can immediately call to mind people just like him.
Dismissing the idea of evil though also lets us off the hook. Matthew records earlier in chapter 2 that, “When King Herod heard of the birth he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.” We, too, fear the unknown and never have the full story. I’m not suggesting that any of us are Herod-like, but we are all complicit in evil. There’s a version of the Confession that has us to pray: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” Think of how many times our political leaders have committed acts of violence and said it was a “necessary evil” done for our own good.
The Holy Innocents confront us with the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth that evil is real and it is something we are wrapped up in. This is why Jesus taught us to pray, “but deliver us from evil.” The hymn “God of grace and God of glory” puts it as “Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore.” In these times, we would do well to bold pray “deliver us from evil” and anticipate God answering that prayer through our own courageous witness and repentance.
The second thing that the Holy Innocents witness to is what our response to evil might look like. In the face of evil, we are easily tempted to render evil for evil, which St. Paul expressly warns us against in Romans 12. Rather, what Jesus tells us to do is to turn the other cheek. This isn’t getting any easier.
Last month, I read a book about a class that the great theologian of the 20th-century, Karl Barth, taught. Barth didn’t teach preaching, but in response to the rise of Hitler, he felt that he had to offer a class on the subject. Thankfully, we have the notes from a few students in that class and can reasonably reconstruct what he said. Now, his advice can sound repugnant at first, but he’s on to something. Barth’s response was to “preach as if nothing happened.” He told students that there are lots of places can turn to for the news and commentary, but precious few where they can hear the Word of God. By focusing on God instead of the evil, he said that we rob the evil of its claims for eternal significance; we starve it ideologically by refusing to feed it with our attention and anxiety. The Church’s job is to be the Church – to be the living embodiment of Christ. In all of Barth’s preaching, he never mentioned Hitler, and yet he was one of the clearest voices of opposition to the Third Reich. By focusing on the Word of God made flesh, Jesus, he let that Word call all other words into question. In John we read, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” Our witness is focus on that light, not the darkness. This is how Matthew tells the story, simply noting “When Herod died the work of God continued.”
In whatever evils you might be thinking about, whatever heaviness you have in your heart, our task is the same as it always has been – to receive and reflect the relief of Jesus. The message of grace does not go stale. The priority of love is never lessened. What our world needs more than anything right now is for us, the Church, to be the Church – to be a place where we can practice the fading art of forgiveness, a place where it is okay to not be okay, a place where we come to serve and not to be served, a place where we can learn to ask better questions, a place where our differences do not divide us, a place where hope and healing are found around the Cross of Christ.
And the last witness we receive from the martyrs of Bethlehem is connected to the previous point. In that sermon I referenced earlier, Coffin thanked his congregation for the support he had received and said, “For if in the last week I have relearned one lesson, it is that love not only begets love, it transmits strength.” One of you gifted me a book at Christmas called “The Amen Effect,” written by the Rabbi Sharon Brous. She writes about the “power of saying ‘Amen’ to one another’s grief and joy, sorrow and celebration with our very presence.”
We heard in Ephesians that “we know what is the hope to which God has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” In other words, our hope is found among one another. This is what it means to be the Body of Christ. As St. Paul writes elsewhere, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep” and “Bear one another’s burdens.”
Life is not intended to be lived alone. Our joys are to be shared and celebrated and our burdens are also to be shared and consoled. We do this in the Church not because we’re perfect people who always respond perfectly and know how to fix things, but because we know how to say “Amen” and let that be enough. We don’t have to answer unanswerable questions, we don’t have to make everything okay because we trust that Jesus Christ is making all things well. If nothing else, we are to be a place of solidarity – where we stand with and for one another. Matthew doesn’t tell us how exactly the families of Bethlehem made it through the days that followed, but I know they made it through together.
Returning to Coffin’s sermon one last time today, he said that what God gives us is “minimum protection and maximum support.” If I’m honest with you, I’ll tell you that I’d like more than minimum protection, but not at the cost of maximum support. And, thanks be to God, maximum support is what we have in Jesus Christ – the gift of God’s very own self for us and for our salvation.
The Slaughter of the Innocents is a hard text, and it gives us no answer other than the one we see each Sunday as we gather in this beloved community: “In this place I will give peace.” We receive this peace in knowing that when we encounter evil, we are not seeing the will of God, but the face of the evils which are an enemy to God. We find this peace in one another, a people who can bless one another with a simple “amen” that says, “you are not alone.” And we are given this peace in Jesus whose love makes all things well. Amen.
