The Massacre of the Innocents

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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