Readings: Isaiah 63.7-9 Hebrews 2.10-18; Matthew 2.13-23
This morning, four days after all the jolly celebrations of shepherds adoring the baby angels have heralded, we come face to face with the other side of the Christmas story. The murder of innocent children by a tyrant who finds his ego threatened by the message of seers from afar.
As so often when reading the Bible, we are left wondering with many questions we want to ask about how and why! If the wise men were indeed so wise, wise enough to follow a star from distant lands across the desert, why on earth were they not wise enough not to go to the current king, Herod,infamous for his brutality with message of a potential rival! What did they imagine would happen?!
But I am perhaps speaking with hindsight! A palace is the obvious place to enquire about a royal birth! And they do wise up on finding the baby! Now they heed a dream and do not return to Herod as requested, with directions as to how he himself might find the new king! Joseph also warned in a dream to flee, escapes with mother and baby before the wrath of Herod can destroy this child. But Herod’s wrath will not be denied, and all Bethlehem’s infant boys are put to the sword. Why did God spare the infant Jesus but not the infants of Bethlehem? Where does this leave our understanding of God?
However much we may recoil at this massacre of the innocents, as we know only too well from our media, ruthless brutality is a clear and very real dimension of life – of our lives. On August the twenty-first this year we saw images of small bodies laid out side by side wrapped in white shrouds,the foam around their mouths still visible on the faces of many. The horror of such images called forth world-wide revulsion, and following the real threat of action from the leaders of the nations,President Assad of Syria became willing to dispose of his chemical armoury. Too late of course for those small children and their families.
So what of those Bethlehem infants two thousand years ago who lost their lives for the sake of wise men visiting the infant Jesus? Historically there is not much evidence for this horrific event actually happening. But this is not the purpose or ‘truth’ of the story, the truth it speaks to us regarding God and the Christ-Child.
Matthew’s deep concern is to present Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: he is the Jewish Messiah, who, according to Matthew as seen by the prophet Hosea, ‘will come up out of Egypt’. This baby is the new Moses who both comes up out of Egypt and leads his people into freedom. Moses, whose own survival as a baby was highly tenuous. The Egyptian Pharoh has equally ordered the slaughter of baby boys as the people of Israel increase in number, and Egypt feels threatened by the growing strength of its slave race. Matthew’s massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem reinforces his message that here too, is a mighty prophet of God who also survives massacre, and who will also lead his people into freedom.
Rachel weeping for her children is a reference to Jacob and Rachel’s descendents many generations later, taken into exile in Babylon. This child Jesus follows in Moses’ footsteps, but he is greater than Moses, and his rescue will encompass this last enslavement too. Later in the transfiguration on Mount Carmel as Jesus journeys to his final Passover in Jerusalem, it is none less than Moses and Elijah who will meet with him to strengthen him for all that lies ahead. The infant Jesus will come to lead the exiles and all people into freedom.
So how is all this accomplished: God’s promise of freedom, with death and exile still aplenty all around us? The question of suffering is not one for which we have any conclusive answer.
Evil is perpetrated across the world. Tragedy will always be a part of life. For the reality is that life and human life are the product of a conundrum we humans – as yet are quite incapable of resolving:
the reality that for life to exist at all there needs to be both order and regularity and unpredictability and chance. In the midst of this maelstrom freedom and creativity become possible. Freedom to promote either good or evil. And while there are tyrants we may point the finger at, we need never to forget our own propensity to contribute to the suffering of the world. Jesus has come to rescue us from that propensity. To offer a new way, and the grace to follow his way, that we might turn away from self-centred pursuit to build a world where all may prosper. The Christ-Child reaches out to us with the possibility of transformation.
The conservative priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio, head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, was passive if not at times complicit, in the face of brutal repression including torture and disappearance, during the time of military dictatorship in his adopted country, seemingly deaf to the cries of the poor.
At the age of fifty he underwent an extraordinary conversion: from traditionalist authoritarian who bitterly divided his country’s Jesuits, to become an icon of radical humility. The new bishop and then archbishop shocked those around him as he now began to take wide consultative counsel before making his decisions. Paul Vallely, one of his biographers, records his own testimony to the pain of having made grave errors, but out of these failures, and his willingness to acknowledge and learn from them he grew in humility, and authenticity – and power.
Not only this March was he elected the next pope, significantly choosing the name Francis, he has just been declared Man of the Year by Time Magazine, voted by their readers as the person with the greatest impact on the world through 2013. Witness his modest lifestyle, his passionate concern for the poor and outcast, and his desire to turn the thinking of the Church towards the well-being of its people rather than the rigid establishment of its power and authority.
Pope Francis was open to conversion which is not merely a flash of light in the moment, but an on-going turning around of our lives. Conversion which requires effort and vigilance and continuing prayer and reflection. This is why week by week we bring our sins before God, seek forgiveness, and grace of the Holy Spirit to restore our lives, to grow in holiness, build goodness and well-being into the future, our own futures and that of others.
This is why we do so together in church, for we cannot achieve this transformation alone. We hear God’s word to us both in liturgy and sacrament – and receive grace from one another. And sometimes, as Joseph and those wise men, God whispers to us in our dreams. Words of promise that our mistakes, both honest misunderstanding, and calculated self-serving, our mistakes are not the end of the story, neither personally nor for our world. Change is possible. Life can be lived differently. Amen.