I had the opportunity to speak at Okolona’s First United Methodist Church on December 29th. It was the day after the Feast of the Holy Innocents and it struck me once again that the Christian calendar isn’t bound to the same temporal limitations and expectations of the material world. So in between the story of the birth of Jesus and the visit of the Magi we have this story of the child’s flight to Egypt and Herod’s horrific response which happened after the wise men came to Bethlehem.
Here’s the text from Matthew 2:13-23
Now 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.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and 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.”
When 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. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “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.”
When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “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.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But 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. There 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.”
Out of several alternatives, I chose to simply take a look at the passage from the viewpoint of Joseph and “the child”, the Holy Innocents, and Herod.
Joseph and the Child
One of the first things I noticed was that Joseph responds to dreams. A lot. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph did as he was told by an angel of the Lord in a dream after he discovered that Mary, his betrothed, was pregnant. As Matthew succinctly puts in Chapter 1, Verse 24, “he did as the angel commanded”. Joseph took Mary as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until after she bore a son. And then Joseph named the child “Jesus”.
The next thing I noticed was that when Joseph was told to flee with Jesus and Mary to Egypt neither the Angel nor the Evangelist names him. He is referred to simply as “the child”. That’s also how the wise men refer to Jesus when they stop to ask Herod where they can find “the child who has been born King of the Jews”. Jesus isn’t mentioned by name again in Matthew’s Gospel until he appears to be baptized in the Jordan.
Maybe this was to help conceal his identity until the time for his ministry came around. Maybe this was to make it easier for us to understand the nature of the child as the fulfillment of the role that Israel had been destined to play in bringing God to be “with us”.
On the other hand, we are almost certainly meant to understand that Joseph the dreamer who goes to Egypt has a connection to that earlier dreaming Joseph, son of Jacob, and that “the child” would represent the children of Israel who would return from Egypt to serve as a “royal priesthood and a holy nation”.
But what about the other children?
The Holy Innocents
Writing about the sanctoral cycle, Laurence Hull Stookey, in Calendar: Christ’s Time in the Church, said:
[T]hree biblical commemorations where given special status by the unusual placement in the sanctoral cycle. The question seems to have been raised: “Who by way of honor should be assigned their birth days into eternity by being placed immediately after the celebration of the earthly birth day of their Savior?” The answer that evolved provides a concise glimpse into the nature of the calendar itself.
Stookey then goes on to note that Stephen the deacon and the first to be recorded as laying down his life for the faith is assigned December 26th as his “saints day”, while the Apostle John, generally accounted to be the “disciple whom Jesus loved” is given December 27th. Stookey notes that while Stephen may have been the first person specifically martyred for the faith, a host had given their lives long before in order that the faith might come into being. Thus, December 28th is designated the Feast of the Holy Innocents in honor of those children below the age of two who were slaughtered at the command of Herod.
My quibble with Stookey on this count is that I cannot accept that God would require the sacrifice of these children “in order that the faith might come into being”. I lay the blame for that and all such atrocities on the Herods of the world, then and now. However, I do agree that these innocents should be remembered as the unwitting saints that all such blameless victims of man’s inhumanity to man have been throughout the centuries.
I confess that I am still uncomfortable with the angel’s warning to Joseph alone. But then I am uncomfortable with all unexplained suffering of all innocents and ultimately put this down as a first lesson in what it meant for the Word to become flesh and dwell among us — that the first thing the child would have to contend with was the horror that humans all too often wreak on His creation. Malcolm Guite captures the sense of this in his sonnet on the Feast of the Holy Innocents:
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.
And that brings us to . . .
Herod
Just as Joseph the husband of Mary calls to mind Joseph the son of Jacob, Herod reminds us of Pharaoh who, like Herod, ordered the slaughter of innocent babes.
First, consider Herod:
Herod was “frightened” by the Magi’s news that a “King of the Jews” had been born.
Herod was disingenuous when he told the Magi that he intended to come to the child to worship him.
Herod was infuriated when he learned that the Magi had gone home another way to avoid giving away the child’s identity and location.
Now consider Pharaoh:
Pharaoh was frightened by the increase and strength of the Hebrews.
Pharaoh was disingenuous when he told Moses that he would release the Hebrews if the seventh plague was withdrawn.
Pharaoh was infuriated when he reconsidered having released the Hebrew people.
Turning once more to the sanctoral cycle, weren’t the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes frightened, disingenuous and angered by Stephen and the other disciples who were proclaiming that Jesus represented the fulfillment of Scripture and was the Messiah?
Now before we get too comfortable casting aspersions on Herod, Pharaoh, the scribes and the Pharisees, . . .
What About Us?
We’ve been studying Exodus in a men’s mid-week morning Bible study and of course one of the questions that always comes up is, “Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart?” We didn’t come up with an answer for this question that has stumped the scholars and commentators, but I do sometimes wonder whether that question stems from our resistance to the God who knows us right down to the marrow in our bones. We tend to want to shift blame, and what broader shoulders to bear that burden than the One who made us?
So, what about us whenever we erect barriers out of fear, or anger or when we act with less than complete honesty. Yes, we need to confront our fear and anger, but we also need to confront our tendency toward being disingenuous.
We do that when we try to fool the Eternal by disguising selfish motives in supposedly legitimate rationales. When we fail to equate the least of the world’s children, regardless of age, with our Savior, we are guilty of being less than honest with God and with ourselves.
I can’t help reading Matthew 2:13-23 without thinking about those innocents who languish in cages along our southern border or those blameless children in Forrest, Mississippi, who are spending Christmas and the New Year without their parents.
I understand that immigration is a much more complex issue than that of Joseph, Mary and “the child” moving back and forth between Judea and Egypt . . .
. . . or do I?