Lord, open your Word to our hearts in this Christmas Season,
and our hearts to your Word always. AMEN.
That’s quite a challenging Gospel Reading for this first Day of the New Year, which we’re keeping as the Second Sunday of Christmas. Our Organists are good at reflecting the Gospel Reading in the Post-Gospel Improvisation, and you may have picked up something of the mood of the Gospel in what we’ve just heard Andy Lumsden play.
Last Sunday, Christmas Day, the Dean and the Bishop were given the accounts of the Birth of Jesus in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels to reflect on; and this coming Friday, the Feast of the Epiphany, Canon Roly may well, I imagine, consider the narrative of the arrival of the Wise Men as found in Matthew 2; and next Sunday, on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, Canon Andy, will be given the passage on that subject from Matthew 3; and, in case she’s feeling left out, Canon Tess was given the magnificent Prologue to St John’s Gospel to work with when she preached at the Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve. I think I may be forgiven for feeling that I’ve drawn the short straw this morning – and we’ll see whether you feel the same by the time I finish in a few minutes!
There is a logic, a chronological order, to the Gospel Readings for all of those Feast Days from Christmas to the Baptism of Christ – the Birth of Jesus, the arrival of the Wise Men at Epiphany and the start of Jesus’ public ministry after his Baptism.
So, where does today’s Gospel Reading, which includes the shocking account of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, fit in to that pattern. Why do we have this reading on this day?
Well, without going into too much detail about the three-year ‘Revised Common Lectionary’ we use for our Sunday and Feast Day Readings, the Sunday after Christmas has taken on something of the flavour of the ‘Feast of the Holy Family’, which has been celebrated formally in the Roman Catholic Church for just over 100 years, since it was instituted in 1921 by Pope Benedict XV.
In the other two years, the readings are taken from Luke 2, Mary pondering ‘all of these things in her heart’, and the Holy Family’s visit to the Temple when Jesus was twelve years’ old. So, the principal reason for having this Gospel on this Day, is that it deals with the safety and protection of the Holy Family.
It’s probably not a reading that you turn to very often, although you may have heard part of it if you happened to be at the Eucharist on Wednesday, the Feast of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents – it’s not one we turn to often, so I hope it is worth spending a few moments of reflection on it now.
The passage is in three parts – the Flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, and the Return from Egypt to Nazareth. A word about each of those.
Verses 13 to 15 tell of Joseph’s dream, and the warning to flee to Egypt. So, they got up, and fled by night.
This image is a bronze cast by a remarkable artist, Annette Yarrow, to be found in the lovely Saxon Church at Breamore, on the far side of the New Forest, where I served until last year, and where the artist lived – it’s one of the many good reasons to visit the Church. Notice the energy and life in the figure of Mary, and Jesus reaching backwards towards her, whilst Joseph looks urgently ahead.
I wonder at what point Matthew’s first listeners picked up the Exodus references in these verses: they are setting off for Egypt, just as another Joseph did, not of his own choice, many generations before; the Holy Family fled by night, escaping a violent and unjust King, just as did Moses and the Israelites; Herod is seeking to kill all of the male babies, as Pharaoh did in Exodus 1; and to make the connection as clear as daylight, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son’. There is much, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, which makes links with the Old Testament story, and this passage is part of that. Jesus is the recapitulation and fulfilment of the story of God’s dealings with the people of Israel.
But alongside those Old Testament references, surely, we can’t help but compare the images in this narrative with those we see on our TV screen of refugees all around the world, fleeing from similar threats from unjust authorities to their safety and ways of life. That same urge to find a place of safety as was in the mind of Mary and Joseph is in the mind of parents around the world. They need our prayers and our support.
The massacre of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, shown here in a painting by Poussin of about 1630, is one of the most troubling passages of the Gospel to read. So threatened was Herod by the Wise Men’s news of the ‘Child who has been born King of the Jews’ [Matt. 2:2], that he orders the killing of all of the male children under two years’ old. The timing is interesting, in that it gives some indication of the time-scale of the events around the birth of Jesus. So used are we to seeing innkeepers, animals, shepherds, kings and the Holy Family together in the stable, that we forget how long all of this must have taken – the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem in Luke’s Gospel, the journey of the Magi from the East in Matthew’s, the searching to find the child, the time it took for Herod to realise he had been tricked, and so on – all of this took up to two years.
There is, of course, the wider question about the authenticity of this event. It is not mentioned by the Jewish historian, Josephus, who records in great detail Herod’s other atrocities. It could rather be a part of Matthew’s theological agenda which I’ve mentioned already. But, for now, let’s assume it to be an historical event.
Why did these babies have to die? Was it part of God’s plan? Could God have prevented it? In my understanding, it was not part of God’s plan, but it is a symptom of our human need to cling to power, and to fear anything which seems to threaten our power and control. By fearing Jesus so much, Herod was demonstrating his, Jesus’s, power. The wonderfully-named St Quodvultdeus, an early 5th C. Bishop of Carthage, contemporary and dedicatee of Augustine of Hippo, struggled with these questions, in one of his sermons:
Why are you afraid, Herod, when you hear of the birth of a king? He does not come to drive you out, but to conquer the devil. But because you do not understand this you are disturbed and in a rage, and to destroy one child whom you seek, you show your cruelty in the death of so many children.
You are not restrained by the love of weeping mothers, or fathers mourning the deaths of their sons, nor by the cries and sobs of the children. You destroy those who are tiny in body because fear is destroying your heart. You imagine that if you accomplish your desire you can prolong your own life, though you are seeking to kill Life himself.
The urge to use violence in order to protect one’s own unjust rule is as strong today as it was in 1st C. Palestine. The horrors perpetrated on the people of Syria, or Ukraine, or the Uyghur Muslims of China, or persecuted minorities around the world, are testament to the continuing misuse of power across our world, and we see the same unjust power structures at play when there is domestic violence or when we hear of coercive control or of modern-day slavery in our own society. The chilling nature of this passage reminds us of the capacity for evil which lies in all of us, and the need to be aware of that tendency in ourselves and others.
The final part of this passage is the return from Egypt, once Herod has died, and tells of another of Joseph’s dream, his third in Matthew’s Gospel, and the choice of Nazareth as the place for the family to settle in safety, ‘So that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, ‘He will be called a Nazorean’’ [Matt. 2:23]. This is a puzzling verse, not a direct quote from the Old Testament, but one with many resonances, and it is quite possible that those who followed Jesus in St Matthew’s community were called ‘Nazoreans’, rather than Christians, and that the point of this verse is to remind the listeners that ‘Jesus followers bear the name that he bore’.
That’s quite a challenging Gospel Reading for this first Day of the New Year, and one which reminds of the plight of refugees, of the problem of suffering, and of the unjust use of power, in our own times. I hope, though, that the final verse may provide a chink of light in the darkness – ‘So that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, ‘He will be called a Nazorean’’. God does have a plan, and we are a part of it – we, ‘Jesus followers bear the name that he bore’, and, in the end, the Light will always overcome the Darkness.
As we reflect on this challenging passage, and what it says to us about the world today, I want to end with the priest, Malcolm Guite’s, Sonnet on the Holy Innocents, called, ‘Refugees’, as we see an image by Linda Richardson:
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.
For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.
Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
