Matthew 2:13-18

13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared
to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother
and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going
to search for the child to kill him.” 14 So he got up, took the child
and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where
he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord
had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he
was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and
its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the
time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through
the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted,
Because
they are no more.”(NIV)

CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS WITH THE INNOCENTS

A well-known Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz has Charlie Brown with
great bewilderment in his face reciting as his part in the Christmas
service the closing lines of today’s text: “A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and loud lament!” What could such lines mean and what could they
have to do with Christmas?! Many a preacher has said the same thing,
leading some to avoid this text if at all possible. Not only does the
text appear only occasionally when December 28, the Feast of Holy Innocents,
falls on a Sunday, but even this year when that happens, most pastors
will rather choose for this day the text for Christmas I from Luke, the
nice familial story which ends with Jesus obeying his parents and growing
in wisdom, stature and favor. Today’s text, by contrast, is filled with
trouble.

On the other hand, it’s fascinating how rich in allusion and imagery
these two stories are. The world’s greatest artists, names like Giotto,
Corregio, Peter Bruegel the Elder, Veronese, Caravaggio, Donatello, Fra
Angelico and Watanbe, have all found the story of the Flight to Egypt
and the Slaughter of the Innocents fascinating. Matthew has created powerful
stories for us that have deep roots in the Old Testament and offer resounding
words about rescue and salvation. The characterization is often poignant,
and the God it describes may seem strange to us, but we would have no
other.

A God Away from Home

The first story is known as the Flight to Egypt. Whom do you think,
of all the people in the world, loves this story most today? Perhaps
it’s too obvious. Of course, it is the Christian people of Egypt. Today
a minority, but once the great majority, Egypt’s Coptic Christians love
the fact that when Jesus was on the run, it was safe to come to Egypt!
They have made so much of these few verses that dotting the Nile today
there are ancient pilgrimage sites, Christian resorts if you will, which
remember the places in which the Holy family sought refuge as it fled
King Herod. There are so many sites that the Egyptians calculate it took
several years for Joseph, Mary and the child to make all the stops. Finally,
however, Herod died, and it was time to return home. In Ma‘adi , a suburb
of Cairo, there is a church along the Nile which preserves a Bible in
a glass case that one day came floating by the church. As the curious
priest checked, so the story goes, to see what passage lay before him
on the opened page, you can almost guess what it was: “Out of Egypt I
called my son.” The faithful still stand in line to see this affirmation
of Egypt’s place in the Christmas story.

Of course, Joseph has been here before—and so has the son. In ancient
days, another Joseph came to Egypt and finally was carried out, at least
his bones were, along with his long-suffering son, the faithful people
of God, back to their ancestral roots in Caanan. This is really an ancient
story, an archetypal story, told over and over, of the God who not only
rescues his people, but goes before them, walks along with them, shares
their suffering and enables their redemption. Matthew tells his modern
version with such grace. Poor Joseph. He never asked for all this. His
wife! His wife’s child! But there is this dream that Herod is out to
kill the child, and Egypt is a safe haven. In the middle of the night,
when such things are done, gentle Joseph, the carpenter who never wanted
to leave Nazareth, becomes a pilgrim, a wanderer. The child he rescues
is a wander too, a “son of man” with no place to lay his head (Mt.8:20).
This story continues into our own time, and we know it too well. The
sons of men are too often wanderers and their God is away from home.
It may seem strange to us, such a God, but we would have no other. In
a lovely poem about this ongoing exodus, German poet Arnim Juhre gives
his version of the Josephslegende (my translation) and our God:

Joseph fled from Budapest,
dreamed of child murder,
street riots and persecution.
Although the border was already mined,
he fled to the West with his wife;
for she was pregnant.

Another Joseph jumped into his boat,
shoved off from Port Said,
rowed and said to his wife:
The masters of this world
fight over a little body of water.
In the distance ship artillery rumbled.

In Cairo and in a village in Austria
boys were born on Christmas Eve.
No star stood over their quarters,
and the shepherds on the fields of
the world
saw hosts who were earthly.

And God said to Joseph
in Cairo and in Austria:
Fear not!
I see that you are in exile.
I too am away from home.

A God Crying in the Night

The next story is usually called the Slaughter of the Innocents. It
is the one that gives most scholars trouble because there is no secular
reference to this incident and it has no counterpart in Mark or Luke.
Perhaps it never happened, they worry. Furthermore, tradition has created
a mountain out of a molehill here because Bethlehem was just a little
village. The Orthodox tradition which remembers 14,000 infant martyrs
on this day is surely wrong. Would a king really be so paranoid that
he would give orders to kill innocent victims under two years of age,
pretenders to a throne or not? We do know this much, to quote George
Bush, Herod “was an evil man.” It is the kind of thing he was capable
of doing. He drowned his 16 year-old brother-in-law, killed his uncle,
aunt, and mother-in-law, his own two sons, and some three hundred officials
he accused of siding with his sons. (Pfatteicher, Festivals and Commemorations,
1980, 470) . Herod is the kind of person whose jealously, hatred, and
anger puts people on the run. Where the Herods of this world are, the
cries of mothers rise up to heaven. It happened with the Armenian children
in Turkey in 1915. It happened with Spanish toddlers at Guernica in 1937.
It happened with little girls in Dachau between 1939 and 1945. It happened
with Kurdish children in Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq and with those small bodies
carried in coffins in Northern Ireland. There are many Herods and they
wear many masks. Their tasks neither began nor ended in Bethlehem.

The touching thing in Matthew’s telling of the story is that he remembers,
in all this crying, Rachel. Rachel of old. Do you remember her? She was
the beautiful girl that Jacob wanted when he had to settle for Leah.
She was the one he was entitled to after seven more years of work and
who bore him his two favorite sons, Joseph and Benjamin. She was the
one who crying out in agony, dying, gave birth to Benjamin and generations
to come. She, the mother of generations, long dead, weeps symbolically
in the Hosea quote, as Jewish children are hauled off into captivity
in Babylon—and in many Babylons to come. And Matthew thinks it appropriate
to have her weep again here in Bethlehem (where, for that matter, women
still weep at her tomb today). Rachel is always weeping, along with all
mothers of the world. And it never seems to stop. And God weeps with
them.

On Wednesday night, Diane Sawyer’s Prime Time show was an hour’s footage
of a visit to Africa by TV talk show hostess and actress, Oprah Winfrey.
AID’s-torn Africa! Terrible statistics in so many countries in which
whole adult populations die as children who are HIV+ are left to fend
for themselves—against robbers and rapists! This is far worse than Bethlehem!
In some countries, half of the population is HIV positive, and millions,
millions, are dying. Of course, Oprah Winfrey is only one person, one
childless mother, and a very rich one at that, who invited 50,000 children
to celebrate Christmas under “white” tents. She symbolically celebrated
Christmas with the “innocents” of the world. Clothes, food, toys, presents
for all. And it’s not just a one-shot gift. She paid some teachers salaries
for several years, so children can have hope. She created $10 million
in endowments to help care for children for years to come. Of course,
in terms, of the immensity of the problem, it’s only a drop in a bucket.
Yet the responsibility is not hers alone. It belongs to all of us. In
the background, one can hear Rachel weeping for the mothers, the fathers
and the children, “refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Oprah
was weeping and so was I.

The Meaning of Christmas, Several Days Late

This seems a rather dismal message for the Sunday after Christmas, but
perhaps we have to get over the frenzied buying and giving celebrations
before we can get down to Christmas‘ real meaning. Matthew wants to tell
us in this text that we get to hear only once ever few years, if the
preacher will let us hear it, that if we’re looking for a God who is
going to come in power and glory, the triumphalist’s friend, to judge
and destroy the Herods of the world so justice, peace and prosperity
can reign, it isn’t going to happen. Not in our time! Not in any time!
God will not come with preemptive wars to stamp out terrorists, electric
chairs and lethal injections to snuff out evil men and women, vigilante
packs avenging justice on their terms. He comes in the still small voice,
in the vulnerable form of a child trapped when soldiers come to murder,
in the form of a man trapped in a despicable rat hole, in the guise of
victims everywhere. This God, strange to say, is away from home, is with
the least of his brothers and sisters, is always and only friend of sinners,
powerless and weeping children. And we celebrate his presence among us,
celebrate Christmas for real, to the degree that we affirm “innocents” in
their desperation, their hopelessness, their final hours. Even more profoundly,
we celebrate Christmas for real– we meek souls receive him still– when
we realize that we, in our own spiritual poverty, in our own psychological
holes in the ground, desperately want a God who is Emmanuel, a God who
is with us even in the worst of times. He is with us in our loneliness,
our hopelessness, our fear. He is with us in our shame, our bewilderment,
our exile. He spreads the great white tent of his love over our sin and
calls us innocent along with all the alienated and abused in this world.
This is a text filled with trouble, but it helps us come to terms with
the only peace the world can bring. This is a story about a God who shows
up in the strangest places, but we would have no other.

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
Concordia University at
Austin,
Austin, Texas
dzersen@aol.com