The massacre of the innocents

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. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “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.” Matthew 2:16-18

I’ve just finished a book about twentieth-century tyrants, and pretty grim reading it was. They’re all there, the people you would expect - Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin – plus several others from beyond Europe and therefore perhaps less well known to many of us – Kim Il-sung, Mao Zedong and “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

The tally of people massacred, killed in war, tortured or starved to death and generally treated with gross injustice and sheer cruelty is simply staggering. You find yourself shaking your head… How can human beings do such terrible things to their fellow-human beings?

But the fact is that they can – and, as what’s going on in Ukraine reminds us every day, they still do. It’s a thing called sin, and all of us are infected with it, though thankfully most of us manage to contain within civilised bounds our tendencies to jealousy, hatred, vengeance, ambition and the rest.

Well, Herod the Great, whom we meet in Matthew’s nativity story, would have been very at home in their company. So we shouldn’t be surprised at the story of “the massacre of the innocents” here in Matthew 2. Hearing a rumour from the magi of a new “king of the Jews” born in Bethlehem, he goes into full paranoia mode and orders the murder of all boys under the age of two in Bethlehem. No such child will be allowed to live!

Herod is one of those Bible characters known to us also from outside the Bible, and this action is fully in tune with other atrocities we learn about elsewhere. He murdered various members of his own family on suspicion of plotting against him – including even his favourite wife Mariamne. It was said that you were safer to be Herod’s hus (pig) than his huios (son). When he knew he was dying he ordered the killing of the leading citizens of Jericho, to make sure that there would be plenty of weeping and wailing at the time of his funeral.

So killing off a few babies (Bethlehem was just a “little town”, so there wouldn’t have been a very large number) would have hardly raised an eyebrow: all par for the course.

A vivid story, the truth of which need not be doubted, even by the sceptical. Yet it doesn’t generally feature in traditional Christmas plays and other activities, does it? As so often, the Bible strikes us with its honesty, even when it comes to recording terrible things. And that should warn us about the danger of airbrushing such things out of the story: Christmas is emphatically not just a cosy, schmaltzy, sentimental tale, nor simply about presents, eating and drinking (probably too much) and all the rest we associate with a “traditional Christmas”. Far, very far, from it!

This world is full of pain. And while it would obviously be wrong to include stories like the murder of the Bethlehem baby boys in Christmas presentations, it is equally wrong, as adults, to turn a blind eye to such things. Whatever else Christianity may be, it is a serious and honest faith, looking suffering, whether man-made or “natural”, fair and square in the face. How serious are we about life in general and our faith in particular?

People ask questions about suffering: If God is a good and loving God, why does he allow terrible things to happen? Why do some of us sail reasonably comfortably through life, while others seem to be unfairly dogged by hardship and injustice? Would it have been better if God had never created the world at all? - we never asked to be born, after all. Why should the mothers of Jerusalem be picked out for such terrible grief (Matthew 2:18)? – or, today, the women of Afghanistan or Iran?

There are no final and fully satisfying answers to such questions, but that is no reason why we shouldn’t cry out, Job-style, for some kind of answers. God’s shoulders are big enough to take whatever we may feel we need to throw at him; and that includes our confusion, frustration and hurt – and even (why not?) our anger.

The story of the massacre of the innocents suggests many things. To my mind there are two which take us right to the heart of the gospel…

First, we have a God who suffers.

The whole earthly life of Jesus was bracketed by suffering, from this horror at the start, to the cross of Calvary at the end. True, Jesus himself didn’t suffer with the Bethlehem babies, but his story as a whole shows him immersed in the pains of ordinary men and women, climaxing in the cross itself. He is not a distant God, looking down on us with compassion but standing aloof.

Second, it follows that we should expect to share his destiny.

It’s a natural instinct to try and avoid suffering if at all possible. But we are called to “take up our cross” in order to follow him, to “weep with those who weep”. The joy and victory will be ours, for Jesus rose again and lives for ever more, but our present calling is to be patient and to confidently await that wonderful day.

Not an easy calling: but this, and no other, is the way of Jesus our Lord.

Father, I don’t ask to fully understand why terrible things happen. But I do ask to see them as opportunities to turn evil into good and darkness into light, to weep with those who weep - and to be indifferent to my own comfort and ease. Amen.

Soften my heart, Lord,/ Soften my heart. /From all indifference/ Set me apart./ To feel your compassion,/ To weep with your tears./ Come, soften my heat, O Lord,/ Soften my heart. Graham Kendrick.