A sermon preached at
Bloomsbury
Central Baptist Church
9 December
2018
Exodus 1.6-2:10
Matthew 2.13-18
Jeremiah 31.15-17, 31-34
Last week, a group of us from church
went to
visit the Ashurbanipal exhibition in the British Museum.
In case you haven’t heard of him,
Ashurbanipal
was king of the largest empire in the world at the time
- the Assyrian Empire.
He was king for about 40 years, from 668 BCE - 627 BCE,
and was the
son of Esarhaddon, the grandson of Sennacherib,
and the
great grandson of Sargon II.
These four men presided over an empire
that
stretched from Cyprus in the west to Iran in the east,
and which
at one point it even included Egypt.
Its capital Nineveh (in modern-day Iraq) was the world’s
largest city
at a time
when the Greek city-states (like Athens and Sparta)
were
still in their infancy
and Rome
was just a small settlement.
Ashurbanipal wasn’t modest about being the king of the
Assyrian empire
– he called himself ‘king of the world’!
Quite a claim, but given the size of the empire,
it wasn’t
far from the truth.
One of the things that the exhibition left us in no doubt
about
was that
the Assyrians were a bloodthirsty lot when it came to war.
They were merciless with their enemies,
and brutal in their punishments.
And the significance of the Assyrians for us this morning
is that
they lie firmly in the background
to
the distressing story from Matthew’s gospel
known
as the ‘massacre of the innocents’.
There is a famous poem by Lord Byron
describing
the siege of Jerusalem at the hands of the Assyrians,
led by
Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Sennacherib actually never succeeded in destroying
Jerusalem,
but the
centuries of Assyrian attacks on the kingdom of Israel had an effect,
and entered
deep into the memory and theology of Israel.
How could it be, they wondered, that such a vicious,
murderous enemy,
could time
and again be victorious over the chosen people of God?
In 721 BCE the Assyrians had effectively wiped out the
Northern Kingdoms of Israel,
either
carrying people off into exile, or putting them to the sword,
and from that time on the focus of Israel’s story moved
to the
Southern Kingdom called Judah,
and the
area around Jerusalem.
Most of the stories and texts that have come down to us,
and are
found in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament as we call it)
were
preserved by the Southern tribe of Judah.
Many of the stories of the old Northern Kingdom
are, we
must assume, lost to us.
And in our reading earlier from the book of Jeremiah,
written in
about 586 BCE
at the time
of the fall of Jerusalem and the Southern kingdom to the Babylonians,
who
had succeeded the Assyrians as the dominant world power,
we heard
the great prophet
lamenting
the destruction of the Northern Kingdom
a
couple of hundred years before his time,
and
wondering before God
what
the future would hold for his own, southern kinsmen.
“A voice is heard in Ramah,’ he says,
‘lamentation
and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses
to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.”
The northern tribes are gone, their children murdered or
exiled,
and we’re next,
is the message of Jeremiah the southern prophet.
Interestingly, Jeremiah doesn’t leave it there,
despite his
reputation for doom and gloom.
You may have heard someone called ‘a real Jeremiah’,
meaning
that they are always miserable.
But when push came to shove, Jeremiah held out a hand of
hope
to his
readers in the midst of their distress.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said, ‘the northern kingdoms have
fallen to the Assyrians,
and Rachel
the wife of Jacob is weeping in her grave
because
the children of Israel are no more.
And yes, it looks like the one remaining tribe of Judah, and
its capital Jerusalem,
are going
to go the same way… but …’
‘Keep your voice from weeping,
and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the LORD:
they shall come back from the land of the enemy; 17 there is hope for your future,
says the LORD: your children shall come back to their own country.
The days are surely coming, says
the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the
house of Judah.
32 It will not be like
the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to
bring them out of the land of Egypt-- a covenant that they broke, says the
LORD.
33 But this is the
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel …: I will put my law within
them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they
shall be my people.’
And the thing is, Matthew knows all this when he quotes
Jeremiah
to help his
readers understand his story of the massacre of the innocents.
He knows that just at the point when all seems at its most
bleak,
when all
seems lost, and when evil has the upper hand,
God’s promise remains
that a new
way will be found
to bring people back to a life-giving relationship with
their God,
who has
not, after all, abandoned them.
And Matthew uses this reference to Jeremiah,
quoting the
first bit and inferring the rest,
to place his story of the birth of Jesus
firmly in
the world of the exile of Israel to Babylon.
It may seem as though Herod is all-powerful,
and his
murderous tyranny may seem unstoppable,
but God is at work, in a fragile refugee family from
Bethlehem,
to bring
about a new world
where
suffering is redeemed and love triumphs over hatred.
But it’s not the just the Exile that Matthew has in mind
here.
He’s
running more than one story at once, layer up on layer,
to
help his readers understand the significance
of
what they’re reading about Jesus.
So, in addition to the Babylonian Exile,
he also has
the Egyptian Exodus in view:
the much older story of the release of the people of Israel
from
slavery in Egypt.
Jesus isn’t just part of a story about bringing people home
from Exile,
he is also
involved in bringing them out of slavery.
Jesus isn’t just a prophet after the manner of Jeremiah,
he will be
a prophet after the manner of Moses,
leading his
followers in a new Exodus.
And Matthew makes all this clear in another of his
scriptural quotations,
this time
from the prophet Hosea.
Matthew says that Jesus’ and his family’s flight to Egypt to
escape Herod,
is ‘to
fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,
“Out of
Egypt I have called my son.”’
And so, with the Israelite slavery in Egypt held in one
hand,
and the
Israelite exile in Babylon held in the other
- two instances in the story of God’s people
when all
seemed lost to a violent and vindictive ruler -
Matthew uses these to frame the story
of Herod
and the massacre of the innocents.
Herod, he is saying to his readers, is just another Pharaoh,
he’s just
another Nebuchadnezzar.
Matthew’s readers would have known this, of course,
because by
the time Matthew’s gospel was written,
Herod had
been dead for about eight decades.
But Matthew’s point is about history,
it’s about
theology.
He’s inviting his readers to realise
that these
kind of rulers crop up from time to time in human history,
and that they can come from any nation,
from Egypt,
or Assyria, or Babylon,
or Athens,
or Rome, or even (like Herod) from Israel itself.
Any nation can produce its tyrant,
because
Herod is a product of the human condition.
When we were in Palestine recently,
I got a bit
obsessed with Herod the Great.
They didn’t call him ‘the Great’ for nothing.
He was, in
many ways, an astonishing ruler.
His building projects were incredible,
from the
hanging palace of Masada,
to the
Herodian Palace near Jericho,
to the
rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem,
to the
aqueduct of Caeserea.
He was a great military leader,
and could
be generous in his philanthropy.
He was loved and hated in equal measure by his subjects,
but he had
a violent and paranoid streak a mile wide,
allegedly
leading Augustus to comment that
it
was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.
He executed his own, dearly loved, wife,
and her
mother,
and his
brother in law,
and his two
sons Alexander and Aristobulus.
So, you know, with Herod,
you need to
take the great with the not-so-great.
But Matthew’s story of the massacre of the innocents,
whilst
having no corroborative evidence beyond the story in the gospel,
certainly
fits what we do know of the man.
We’re probably talking about twenty children here,
given the
size of Bethlehem at the time.
And it’s quite easy to imagine that Herod would choose
to execute
all the baby boys in a small town,
rather than run the risk that one of them might grow up
to pose a
threat to his dynasty and legacy.
When we were at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem,
a priest
came and unlocked a basement room for us,
and showed
us a collection of skulls and other bones.
Then, he showed us a cabinet, which had much smaller bones
in it,
and told us
that these were allegedly the bones
of the
children massacred by Herod.
I don’t think he believed it, and he certainly didn’t expect
us to believe it,
but they
were the bones of children,
and so
there was a truth in there about human mortality in infancy,
and
about the suffering of parents.
And then he showed us a painting,
which I
found more moving than I would have expected.
I didn’t get a very good photo of the whole thing,
which is
about ten food across,
but here’s a detail:
And the thing is, the significance of this story for Matthew
is not its
historicity, but it’s theology.
Because in his decision to execute the children,
Herod
immediately becomes Pharaoh,
trying
to wipe out the people of God;
and Jesus
becomes Moses, the baby who escapes
and
lives to bring freedom and life to those enslaved.
God is at work, says Matthew,
even when
it seems as if all is lost.
Jeremiah and Hosea bear witness to the fact
that God
does not give up bringing life into the darkness of the world.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably at this point
muttering in your head,
‘yes, well,
that’s all very well, but tell it to the mothers
of the
children who die at the hands of Herod’s soldiers’.
And here we face a very real question,
which we need
to confront head-on.
If Matthew wants to claim that God is at work
even in a
story as horrific as the massacre of the innocents,
then what
does that say about God?
After all, if God can send an angel to have a word with
Joseph
so he and
Mary can flee to Egypt,
why couldn’t that God do the same to all the others parents
who sat at
home that afternoon not knowing
that a
soldier was about to come banging on the door.
This is the question of theodicy, as theologians call it,
it is the
question of why God permits evil.
And I think Matthew is not blind to this question.
It is the same question we might ask of the Exodus story,
where
innocent Egyptian children die in order that Israel might be freed.
It is the same question e might ask of the Exile story,
where a
remnant survive to rebuild Israel,
but the
Northern Kingdom are destroyed.
And Matthew does, I think, at least begin to offer an answer
to this
problem of why God permits evil;
and he does so through his quotation from the prophet Hosea:
‘Out of
Egypt I have called my son’.
The key words here are the last two:
the
assertion that Jesus is the son of God.
You see, what is at stake here is what kind of a God do we
think God is?
Is God a
God of power, might, and authority;
a
God who clicks fingers and makes people jump?
Because if
so, then God has some very real questions to answer
about
how that power is used,
both
in history and the present.
But I think Matthew is inviting us to not see God in that
way;
It’s like Matthew
is saying to his readers: that isn’t God,
that’s
just a deified version of Herod,
it’s
Pharaoh, it’s Nebuchadnezzar, it’s the emperor,
but it is
not God.
Rather, Matthew places God in his story in the person of the
baby Jesus,
a human at
risk, on the run, helpless, innocent.
This is deep theology,
because it
questions our whole notion of who God is.
If God is an almighty God, all powerful, all knowing,
omniscient
and omnipresent,
then God
runs the risk of becoming a dictator God,
or worse, a tyrant God.
And Matthew doesn’t want his readers to see God in that way.
He’s been
casting his mind back to Moses and Jeremiah and Amos,
reflecting on
times in his people’s history
when
people have turned in a combination of worship and desperation
to
an powerful, nationalistic God,
who
they hope will fight on their behalf,
righting
wrongs, and slaying enemies.
And Matthew’s reflection is that when people worship this
God
things don’t
get better, they just get worse.
Because this God is just a projection of the will to power,
it is the
tendency to tyrannise and dominate, written across the heavens.
And Matthew wants to change the script.
The God he is proclaiming, through the pages of his gospel,
is not the
God of the land,
the
God of the people, and the God of the victorious.
Rather it is the God of the weak, the homeless,
the
stateless, and the victims.
The God who is made known in Jesus, God’s son,
is a
vulnerable God, a powerless God.
And it is this God that we are invited to worship.
If this makes us feel uncomfortable, then good,
because we
too like to make God after our own image,
to endue our
God with our hopes of power.
Our society is predicated on the use of power,
and we
collectively worship the gods
of
the market, the military, and the masses,
rejoicing
when things go well,
and
cursing and blaming when they don’t.
But the God who is discovered in the infant Jesus,
is a very
different God.
This is not a God who stops the suffering of the world,
and neither
is it a God who causes it.
Rather, it is a God who enters into it,
to
transform it from the inside.
To show that there is a different way of being human,
where
revenge gives way to forgiveness,
and fear
gives way to trust,
and hatred
gives way to love.
This is a God who dies to bring life,
it is the
God of the cross.
And when life is overwhelming in its terror and sadness,
at either a
personal, or an international level,
this is the
God who comes to us in the baby Jesus,
showing us that there is greater strength in vulnerability,
than in all
the armies of the world combined.
So when we find ourselves facing another Herod,
when evil seems
unassailable in our lives and our world,
we are invited by Matthew to hear once again,
that Jesus,
the helpless infant Jesus, is God’s son,
and that God’s plan for the salvation of all things,
including us,
rests in
the arms of a refugee couple from the middle east.
So as we struggle to find the resources
to welcome
even one refugee family to Westminster,
as we wrestle with big questions about the future of our
country,
as we
battle through our daily lives
with all
their complexities, stresses, depressions, and sadnesses,
we meet in Jesus the God who comes to us,
not in
power to fix everything,
but in
weakness and vulnerability
fully
entering into all that we face and hold.
And we hear the whisper of the ancient prophet:
Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears;
for there
is a reward for your work, says the LORD:
they shall come back from the land of the enemy;
17 there
is hope for your future.
No longer shall they teach one another,
or say to
each other, "Know the LORD,"
for they shall all know me,
from the
least of them to the greatest, says the LORD;
for I will forgive their iniquity,
and
remember their sin no more.
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