The Aftermath of Christmas

Christmas 2A: Matthew 2:13-23

Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University once observed that the greatest enemy of the Gospel is not atheism, but sentimentality. Perhaps there's no time when we're more susceptible to this danger than at Christmas with the stories about the birth of Jesus. What parent hasn't gushed with pride watching their child play a shepherd in a bathrobe or an angel with a coat hanger halo? It's difficult to read words like "they wrapped him in swaddling clothes" and not melt into a puddle of sentiment and demotion.

Perhaps that’s why the church decided to appoint this Gospel lesson for today, the second Sunday of Christmas. Just when we were basking in the warmth of holiday cheer, we are reminded of just what kind of world we live in, what kind of world that Jesus was born into in “the time of King Herod.” It was a time of violence and tough political realities. Kings and emperors had near absolute authority and would stop at nothing to maintain power— even if, as we just heard, that meant killing a whole village of babies.

While secular historians may not have mentioned the massacre that took place in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago, no one acquainted with the life of Herod doubts him capable of such a horrendous act. Scarcely a day passed during Herod’s reign without an execution. He killed two of his brothers-in-law, his own wife Mariamne, and two of his own sons, when he suspected them of scheming against him. His murderous behavior is said to have provoked Augustus Caesar to remark that it would be safer to be Herod's pig than to be his son. So cruel was Herod, in fact, that five days before his death, he ordered the arrest of many prominent citizens and decreed that they be executed on the day he died, in order to guarantee a proper atmosphere of mourning in the country. For such a despot, a minor extermination procedure in Bethlehem posed no problem.

Indeed, in Herod’s mind the command to slaughter Bethlehem’s infants was probably an act of the utmost rationality. When Herod heard that a possible new royal contender had been born in Bethlehem, he sought to preserve his authority and rid himself of any possible threat, even one posed by an innocent, helpless infant. And just to hedge his bets, he killed all the baby boys up to two years of age in and around Bethlehem.

I have never seen a Christmas card depicting this state-sponsored act of terror, the gruesome tragedy we in the Church remember as the “massacre of the innocents.” But it too was a part of Christ’s coming, part of the Christmas story. Then again, we can’t hold Hallmark and American Greetings completely responsible for the omission. Even those of us in the church rarely get the chance to hear this part of the story. We are used to seeing Christmas pageants that include angels and shepherds and even wise men. But as soon as the wise men exit the scene, we yell "cut" and stop the story right there. The only problem is that the Christmas story doesn’t end there, with wise men and shepherds and stable animals all bowing before the Christ-child, giving thanks to God. It ends instead with swords dripped with children’s blood, and towns filled with weeping, wailing and loud lamentations.

As unconscionably horrific as this action was, what happened in Bethlehem was nothing that hasn’t happened thousands of times before and that will happen thousands of times again– political persecution, bloody oppression, hateful massacre of children, weeping mothers, refugees fleeing with little more than the clothes on their backs into a strange land. Herod may have died two millennia ago, but there have been plenty of “Herods” after him—Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong—just as there are plenty of Herods today in places like Sudan, Darfur, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Gaza. This is the world Jesus was born into, the world he came to save.

Though, it’s hard to see how this baby was going to do much saving. I mean, really—the one who will save his people, has to be saved from a petty regional king? For that matter, why did he come as a baby in the first place, helpless, powerless and subject to the tyranny of others? Why didn’t he come as a powerful warrior-king, like David or Samson…or Arnold Schwarzenegger?

I suppose this just goes to show what kind of Savior he will be, the kind of Savior he is. Jesus is Immanuel, Matthew tells us, “God-with-us,” and if that means anything, it means God is with us in the ugliness of our world. For there is no point in arriving in comfort, when the world is in misery; no point having an easy life, when the world suffers violence and injustice! God came down to be where we are, to be with us in our suffering and pain. By becoming human, God gave up the privileges of divinity to share in our lives and in history, to live as one of us, to share fully in humanity, and be subject to all that we are subject to. Because God became human, there is no part of humanity, no aspect of human experience that is devoid of God’s presence—no suffering, no tragedy, no depth, no height that God has not experienced in Jesus and thereby given meaning and holiness by his experiencing it. God, Jesus, has been wherever we have been—sadness, joy, grief, anger, fear, vulnerability—Jesus has experienced it all and is able to share with us in whatever place we find ourselves.

The birth of Christ then does not remove the power of evil from our world or exempt believers from suffering. Rather, he offers us, not a way around suffering, but a way through it, redeeming our suffering by suffering with us. This is the good news of the Incarnation, of God become flesh in Christ Jesus.

This is good news especially for those for whom Christmas is not all sugarplum sweetness and “Joy to the World.” Those suffering loneliness or regret or loss, those in prison, those on their death beds, those struggling with addiction, the poor and the neglected, those persecuted for their faith and those who are refugees. To them Jesus says, “I am Immanuel. I am with you. You are not alone. Together we will get through this.”

Sure, in the face of suffering, of evil, of all the rotten and horrific and truly tragic things in this world, this message of God-with-us can be hard to hear. It can seem like God is not close at all, that He’s abandoned us, that his promise of grace and peace has been broken. Yet it is precisely in times like these that we see God’s work most dramatically, as God brings beauty out of tragedy.

Such is the case in the life of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. On July 11, 1861, his wife Fanny, the great love of Longfellow’s life, was clipping some long curls from the head of her seven-year-old daughter, Edith. Wanting to save them in an envelope, she melted a bar of sealing wax with a candle to seal the envelope. Somehow the thin fabric of her clothing caught fire, and she quickly ran to her husband’s nearby study for help. Longfellow tried to staunch the flames but ultimately he failed. His Fanny died and he was so badly burned he couldn’t attend the funeral. He forever wore a long beard after that on account of his burns. That Christmas in 1862 he wrote in his journal, “A ‘merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.”

He suffered disappointment again the next year when his oldest son, “Charley”, quietly left their Cambridge, Mass, home, and enlisted in the Union Army much against the wishes of his father. Charley came down with typhoid and malaria, and so was fortunate to miss the Battle of Gettysburg. But at the Battle of New Hope Church, in Orange, VA, the young Lt. Longfellow was hit in the shoulder and the ricocheting bullet took out some portions of several vertebrae and nearly paralyzed him. Longfellow traveled to where his injured son was hospitalized and brought him home to Cambridge to recover.

During the Christmas of 1864, a reflective and sad Longfellow sat down and began to write the words to a poem. In it he acknowledges the challenge of suffering in this world and also his confidence in God’s saving power even in the midst of the ugliness of the world:

And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Longfellow’s words became the lyrics to the well-beloved carol, “I heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

Our gospel lesson today, in all its horrific reality, shows us that, even though we’d like to end the story of Christ’s birth at the manger scene, when we don’t let the story continue, when we don’t turn the page from peace and joy to suffering and fear, we will miss the whole point of Christmas. For, we are living in the aftermath of Christmas, in a world that often sees God’s kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace as a threat, a world that has people who still massacre the innocent in order to further their agenda, a world which, despite everything that is broken and warped and contrary to the way God wants it, God still loves. God loves his creation, us, so much that God is willing to come down in our midst and become one of us in Christ. God is willing to endure all the sufferings and hardships that we experience in this life, to endure opposition and suffering and even death so that we could have what God has always intended for us: life, real life, life in communion with God, God with us here now and in the age to come, life eternal.

To celebrate Christmas truly is, therefore, to embrace God’s incarnation for all that it means, to recognize in it the lengths God was willing to go, the privileges and security He was willing to give up, to be with us. To celebrate Christmas truly means being willing to turn the page and to open our eyes to the stark reality of suffering and terror in our world where the Herods of the world are intent on killing the innocent. And finally to celebrate Christmas truly is to share with others in their need and suffering as Christ shared with us in ours.

May God grant you the grace to know God is with you where you are in your sufferings and the grace to not turn your eyes from the misery and horrors and suffering of the world, and instead to look upon others in the light of Jesus, in the alight of God who has come to be with us completely. Amen.