The darkness around us is deep.
(Read Matthew 2:7-18)
Once you start reading it for yourself, you’ll discover the Bible is not a G-rated book. It’s not even PG or PG13. There are stories in the Bible that our best Directors and most advanced CGI special effects could never capture the horror of. Such is the story of Herod tucked into the opening chapters of Matthew’s gospel. The “wise men from the east” come to Jerusalem asking, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star…and have come to worship him.” Herod, we are told, is terrified.
His advisors tell him that Bethlehem is said to be the birthplace of the promised Messiah. He sends the Wise Men, asking them to leave no stone unturned, and to report back to him when they find the baby king so that he too may go and join them in their worship. Warned in a dream not to report back to Herod, the Wise Men return home by another route. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream. There’s a lot of messages from angels in dreams in our story, which we’ll talk about another time. The angel warns the young family to flee to Egypt, “for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
That’s chilling. To hear the most powerful man in your world is hunting for your child who’s not yet able to speak – this one, cradled in your young wife’s arms. Assassins are on their way to Bethlehem to find and murder him, and most likely Mary with him. When Herod realizes the Wise Guys have given him the slip, he seethes with rage. And he gives orders to kill all the little boys two-years old and under, in Bethlehem and its surrounding hills.
The bond between a mother and her young child – there’s something primal about it. The touch, the smell, the need for both of them to be near each other. So, to have an infant ripped away, perhaps killed before their parents’ very eyes? No scene, no words, could capture the soul-shattering grief, the evil of it. The piercing cries of the mothers of Bethlehem refusing to be comforted, because their child is no more.
How did this story ever get sanitized into a “silent” night, with “no crying he makes?” Church nativity plays always have Wise Men, but have you ever seen a reference to Herod? How do you explain that young children actually were a part of the original story? In a role no child in this world should ever have to play. It’s closer to the scenes we are seeing in Gaza today; these are real people.
King Herod understood something about Christmas that many of us miss. There can only be one king. And if Jesus is the King, Herod understood what that meant – he couldn’t be king any longer. It was bend the knee or eliminate your rival. Herod would stop at nothing to stay on his throne. We are less direct in our efforts to stay on the throne of our lives. But as you get older you may come to realize that there is one character in the Christmas story to which each of us can relate. Herod’s choice is still our choice today. What are you going to do with the news of this King?
The slaughtering of the innocent babies in Bethlehem reminds us that Christ’s coming is a threat to the Powers of this world, who will rage before we relinquish our desire to rule. The darkness around Christ’s coming is deep. There’s blood all over this story right from the start.
You’ll meet these unnamed children one day. They won’t remember that terrible day. But they’ll tell us, as the writer Frederick Buechner said, “to live without him is the real death… to die with him [is] the only life.”