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The Feast of the Name of Jesus, 01/01/2017
Sermon on Matthew 2:13-23, by Paula L. Murray
13Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
16When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: 18“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
19When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, 20“Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” 21Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. 23There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazorean.” (NRSV)
Years ago in an office of a psychology departm ent of a California university, I listened with fascination to my faculty advisor’s confident assertion that in two weeks he would have trained his soon-to-be born son to sleep through the night. Heaven help me, I laughed. Faculty advisors are sometimes called doctoral fathers (or mothers), which should tell you how important they are to a graduate student’s success or failure. It was so hugely arrogant of this man to think that he could overcome a newborn infant’s essential needs with a couple of weeks of behavioral shaping that the laugh just burst out of me. The man had the power to kill my infant career and believe me, he knew it. But he had no power over the physiology of his own child or of the God who created the little boy and his nature. I could tell that my faculty advisor was miffed at my clear lack of adoration of his obvious greatness that morning, but he held it together as our meeting came to its conclusion. That was not the case later in the year, when his initial annoyance was overmatched by a tired frustration as each succeeding sleepless night proved my point over and over again.
As arrogant and sure of himself as my faculty advisor was, he had, thankfully, nothing on Herod, called the Great, the villain of this morning’s Gospel story. My advisor was supremely overconfident, but he was also afraid of the impact a newborn’s sleep schedule would have on his ability to do his job as a new professor seeking a more prestigious post at Stanford. Herod’s arrogance is surely fueled by his position and the power over the life and death of his subjects in Judea that position gives him. But he, too, was afraid of the infant king whose birth in Bethlehem of Judea had long been prophesied. Wicked old Herod’s own advisors read him the passage from the prophet Micah that threatened a change in Israel’s leadership. “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days.”
Israel never vested its kings with any hint of divinity. Long a confederation of the twelve tribes, Israel understood its king to be YHWH, the Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth. Even after the institution of a monarchy and the anointing of the first king, Saul, Israel was taught that YHWH is God’s king, and all human kings no more than servants of the Most High God, called to be steadfastly faithful to Him. Over the history of the two kingdoms of Israel, the standard by which kings were judged was not their administrative or military competence, but their faithfulness and obedience to God and His Law. That Law applied to kings even as it applied to the subjects under their rule. So, as we recall, King David could be called to repentance by the prophet Nathan for committing adultery with another man’s wife, lying about the relationship, and effectively murdering that man by exposing him to danger.
The Law, in principle anyway, also constrained Herod, ruler of Judea generations after King David. In truth, the greater constraint against Herod’s unrestricted use of power was provided by the Roman Emperor, Caesar Octavian, whose title Augustus, given him at his instigation by the Roman Senate in 27 bc, declared him to be divine and worthy of worship. In practice, Herod could get away with legendary acts of brutality so long as he did not seek to overset Rome’s possession of Judea or get in the way of Rome’s ability to collect taxes. Consequently, Herod was, even in that brutal era, an especially brutal man, who put down any and all threats to his power and his reign with extreme measures. This included the executions of his own wives and sons, leading to the quip that as a Jewish leader, it was safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.
It is not at all out of the realm of the possible that Herod plotted the death of our infant Messiah or ordered the deaths of every boy child two years and under after it became clear that Jesus was nowhere to be found. Since there are no newspaper reports of the massacre dating back from 4 BC, the approximate time of Jesus’ birth, some academics have denied that this event happened. Arguments from silence are always logically incoherent, because something cannot be proved from nothing. This is especially the case in a culture without historians or journalists in the modern sense of those professions. But the act of slaughtering helpless infants and toddlers is entirely in line with a paranoid, delusional ruler who murdered the sons he had dangled upon his own knee.
The question for disciples of Jesus Christ is not the authenticity of an account of the murder of helpless babes ripped from their mother’s arms. We take that on faith. What likely matters to most of us is that as we listen to this horrible story we are still in the middle of the celebration of Jesus’ birth. True, the gift wrap has been ripped off the gifts and the return-o-rama has begun at the local Penneys or Walmart; there might be a quarter cup of eggnog left in the fridge and just enough of the Christmas cookies to keep the football crowd happy this afternoon. But it is just New Years, as those of us nursing aching heads could assure us, and Epiphany, the traditional ending of Christmas is still five days away. The dreadful tale of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents brings to a very abrupt end our celebration of Baby Jesus’ birth.
At least it would, if the story of the holy Infant’s birth is nothing more than a sentimental story that gives us an excuse to indulge in an orgy of overspending and partying. The Church could choose not to read the 13th through 23rd verses of the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew at all, much less during this holy season. But we read it to remind ourselves that Jesus wrapped human flesh around his sinless self precisely because this is the kind of world in which children die at the hands of arrogant and heartless tyrants. We often trivialize the depth and reality of sin, including our own, and the evil it wrecks on the world. But sin is more than eating the last half dozen Christmas cookies before everyone else gets up. When we sin however trivial we think our sin is, we participate in that evil. When we sin we are darkness to Christ’s true Light, and our end is death and not life.
This is not the end God wants for us. The Lord Almighty is “gracious and full of compassion,” he has remembered his holy covenant and sent his Son for our redemption. He did not let humanity stew in its undeserved arrogance or let fear lead us to listen to those “lesser angels.” The Child whose parents fled with him to Egypt for his safety is our shelter from a world still darkened by sin and death, and our only true hope for its peace.