I finally took my Christmas tree down yesterday afternoon. This has been an especially joyous Christmas for me, and I have really wanted to stretch it out as long as possible. As I took the ornaments off the tree, each of them reminded me of Christmases past—the Christmases in good times and the Christmases in more difficult situations. I took my time with the chore, wandering through memories of my children and grandchildren, soaking in the complex of emotions that seems to come only at Christmas time.
Ultimately, the tree was bare. I struggled to get the thing outside and to free it from the stand. At last, I dragged it triumphantly out to the curb to await pick-up. As I walked back to the house, I picked up the morning paper and stopped in my tracks when I saw the headline: Israel poised for ground attack in Gaza. I saw the estimates of the Palestinian death toll and the estimate of those who have been wounded in this last week. As I read, I thought about the word “wounded”. For most of us, the word brings television images of a man who’s been shot and leans against a wall, grimacing and holding the wound. As the veterans among us can tell us, war wounds are not that neat and tidy. Especially when the wounded person is a child.
I’ve tried to wrap my head around the reality of this war—fought in the land that’s holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims—but I haven’t been able to take it all in. I think I’m not alone in my experience. This story is too big for us to begin to contain for more than a few moments. We can’t hold on to the enormity of war, no matter how many times we’re confronted by its reality. Sometimes we turn off our awareness, as I somehow did in this last week. Sometimes one aspect of it connects us with it, as happened with me yesterday. In the blink of an eye, I was moved from memories of my own children and grandchildren to an awareness of the impact of this war on children who are also deeply loved by their parents and grandparents.
That awareness took me to this week’s lections. Our gospel portion today has an interesting omission. You may have noticed that it stops at verse 15 and begins again at verse 19. The first verses tell us of an angel warning Joseph in a dream to take his family to Egypt to keep the child safe from Herod. Then the next verses tell us that an angel appeared in another dream after Herod’s death, telling Joseph to return to Israel, that the people seeking the child’s life are dead. The verses in between tell a story that we usually only hear on December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
“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 he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.’”
We want to be safe. We want those whom we love to be safe. So we search for knowledge to control evil in our lives, we look for keys to keep it locked away from us, we look for knowledge that will protect us and the ones whom we love.
Many of us pray that knowledge will come to us as easily as it did to Joseph. The writer of Matthew’s gospel tells of three angelic visitations to Joseph and another unspecified warning in a dream. The first tells him to go on with plans to marry Mary despite her pregnancy. The second tells him to take his family away. The third tells him it’s safe to return to his home in Israel. A final dream warning sends him to Nazareth in Galilee. Joseph responds with courage to each of these messages. Can you imagine leaving in the night on the strength of words in a dream? Can you imagine the courage it took to go back to the land Joseph’s ancestors had struggled so hard to leave? He does as he’s directed. He provides safe haven for Mary and keeps her and the child Jesus safe from harm.
Joseph acts as he’s directed by the angels, and the Christ child is safe. But what about the other children in Bethlehem whose parents loved them and tried to keep them safe? Where were their angels when Herod was planning their death? Were there warnings that these parents ignored? Did God not care about these children? Or were these deaths simply an occasion when evil prevailed?
The question of why bad things happen to good people—why the innocent suffer—is never far away from us. I don’t know the answer to that question. What I do know is that God does not willingly bring affliction or grief to any of God’s children. Our lives are changed in moments by the seemingly random movement of microbes and weather patterns and even SUVs and by the unimaginably evil actions of people who use the gift of free will to destroy the lives of others. The evil that affects our lives is merciless, but the God who came to share our suffering 2000 years ago and today and next week and on and on to the end of the age—this God always meets us with mercy.
During this Christmas season, as we celebrate the coming of God to live among us—as we approach Epiphany and the manifestation of God’s light in the world, the story of the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem—and the headlines in our newspapers—keep us mindful that the darkness is never far from us. We live in a world where the choice for good or for evil is part of the birthright of every person. We don’t have perfect knowledge of the future and the ways our lives will unfold, but we do have a choice about the way we live. Today we have chosen to come to this place. We come to give thanks and praise. We come to be nourished at God’s table. We come to strengthen our connection to God who creates us and loves us. We come to touch hope through the resurrection given to us by Christ and to remember that the light still shines.
The light still shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Thanks be to God.