1st Sunday after Christmas, Year A

“God’s liberators never come into the world in peace.  Moses had Pharaoh.  Jesus had Herod.” Anna Carter Florence begins her chapter on King Herod this way, in her excellent book A is for Alabaster. Matthew’s gospel draws plenty of connections between the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures, what we often call the Old Testament and the New Testament.  In today’s gospel passage alone, Matthew mentions three events in Jesus’ infancy that he calls a fulfilment of something said by a Hebrew prophet.  Matthew is drawing thematic connections as well.  Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses.  God sent Moses to free his people from slavery, and God sent Jesus to free his people from sin.  But those in power do not want others to have freedom.  Pharaoh orders the death of every Hebrew baby boy.  Herod sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.

As Florence says, “The extravagant violence, the atrocious arrogance, of these rulers is shocking.  So is the body count, which is a direct response to perceived insubordination.  When Pharaoh saw that he’d been tricked by the midwives (who said the Hebrew women were vigorous), when Herod saw he’d been tricked by the wise men (who went home by another way), both men reacted with explosive rage.  They ordered the mass killing of infants and children—to eliminate threats to national security, they claimed.  But being duped in their own throne rooms was probably the catalyst.  Rulers who think they’ve been made a fool of are the most dangerous threats of all.”

The more I read of history and the more I read of the news, the more I think she’s right about how narcissistic and vindictive rulers can be.  Although there are no mentions of this slaughter outside this passage, the scholar William Barclay points out, “Bethlehem was a comparatively small place, and in a land where murder was so widespread, the slaughter of twenty or thirty babies would cause little stir, and would mean very little except to the broken-hearted mothers of Bethlehem.” These families are not rich or powerful, and the rich and powerful are the ones historians write about.  But what history does record of Herod is his predilection for murder.  As Barclay points out, Herod “had no sooner come to the throne than he began by annihilating the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of the Jews.  Later he slaughtered three hundred court officers out of hand.  Later he murdered his wife Mariamne, and her mother Alexandra, his eldest son Antipater, and two other sons, Alexander and Aristobulus.  And in the hour of his death he arranged for the slaughter of the notable men of Jerusalem.”  It would be very much in keeping with his usual pattern to slaughter the innocents in Bethlehem.

In the end, Pharaoh and Herod do not succeed: baby Moses and baby Jesus were saved. As Florence reminds us, “Moses’ mother built a little ark.  Jesus’ father had a dream.  The children were spirited away to safety and went on to grow up into the roles they were destined to take.  It might well have gone otherwise, as it did for all the other families.  But Moses and Jesus were spared.  And a shadow of death will always fall across their stories of rescue and survival as infants, because of the bloodshed that erupted around them.”

“Some stories in the Bible are hard to read but are given to us to tell all the same, Florence says.  She goes on, “We tell them to keep from forgetting, because selective amnesia is one of the things mortals are best at.  It’s why the National Museum for Peace and Justice in Alabama, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and similar places were created: to remember, with fierce resolve.  To mourn.  To reflect at the deepest levels.  To insist that the truth is told. To honor.  To pray. When we visit these places, we are changed.  We aren’t bystanders anymore, if we ever were, and we can never be that again.  We are witnesses, and it remains for us to decide what kind of witnesses we will be.  This story in Matthew is a similar kind of place.  It’s a text of terror and an account of murder—and lest we forget, it’s been given to us to tell.  Not to explain or cover or justify or defend.  Simply to tell, with as little embroidery as possible, so the truth can do its own work.”

“Jesus would have known this story.  As he got older, his parents must have given it to him to tell and know for himself—that once, he’d been a refugee in Egypt, because it wasn’t safe for him in Israel.  Like Moses, Jesus spent a good part of his growing-up years in the in-between spaces.  It must have made him sensitive to what an outsider feels.  It must have helped him understand what an immigrant faces daily.  And it must have underscored what a gift his life was and how that gift could never be taken for granted.  Other families in Bethlehem had suffered terribly when he was born, with no angels to warn them about any of it.  Jesus was painfully, inextricably linked to those slaughtered innocents.  He was a survivor of terror and violence.”

Florence points out that once every three years, the lectionary hands us this story in Matthew on the Sunday after Christmas.  The she asks, “But what would it be like to tell it every year?—to sit down together on the last Sunday of the calendar year and quietly read it aloud?  What would it be like to remember those who have died in the name of Jesus, those who have died in the name of the God they worship, those who have died under conditions of terror or violence, those who have died in the cause of liberation?  What would it be like to covenant together, every Christmas season, to remember?”

This remembering makes a difference. I think of the way Canadians remember the fourteen women who were killed in the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre.  I think of the way our parish, every year near Remembrance Day, reads the names of the parishioners killed in World War I and World War II.  I think of the remembrances of the children who died in Residential Schools and were buried in unmarked graves so their names would be forgotten.  I think of Red Dress Day to remember the  Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I think of the Vigil in Rotary Park that Nancy LeBlanc organized, and that many parishioners attended, to remember the names and the stories of people in our community who have died from homelessness.  

Florence says, “We won’t know the names of every person who has died, but we will know some.  And as the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements have shown, it is powerful and essential work to say the names aloud, again and again.  Say their names, learn what we can of their stories, and work to change all that permitted and even sanctioned their deaths.  Join with others who are lifting up more names every day in acts of protest and faith.  This is work the church at its best has always done as part of its mission.  Remembering the martyrs and recounting their stories—including this story in Matthew 2—inspires us to be instruments of peace.”