Epiphany: a Time of Light and Shadow

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious,
and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who
were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned
from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was
fulfilled:

     "A voice is heard in Ramah,
         weeping and great mourning,
     Rachel weeping for her children
         and refusing to be comforted,
         because they are no more."
     --Matthew 2:16-18 NIV

In 2014, I went to Israel and Palestine on a Holy Land tour with a good
friend and fellow minister. It was an amazing trip and a joy to visit places
I had read about in the Bible all of my life. The town where Jesus was born
was near the top of my list of must-see sites. I was excited to see in
person what I had always heard about on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately,
Bethlehem ended up being one of the least enjoyable experiences on the trip.

On the day we traveled to the Church of the Nativity and St. Catherine's
Church (the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches built side by side over the
site where tradition says Christ was born), it was packed with tourists. The
holy site was filled with hundreds of Russian pilgrims whom our guide
explained came down on cheap day trips to Bethlehem. The crowd jostled with
one another to get down into the caves below the churches which contained
chapels built centuries ago. I recall being crammed into the small space
with dozens of pilgrims each trying to touch a silver star inlaid on the
ground marking where Jesus was said to have been born. It did not in any way
feel like the calm and peaceful manger depicted in Christmas carols.

Apparently in the scrum of Russian pilgrims, I had walked right past without
noticing an altar set up to honor "the Holy Innocents," the boys of
Bethlehem who were two years old and younger killed by King Herod as
depicted in Matthew 2. The murdered children of Bethlehem are a part of the
Christmas story that does not get read at Christmas Eve services. Just as I
hurried on past the commemoration of these killed children on my trip to
Bethlehem without seeing it, so also do we usually hurry through the
Christmas stories in the Gospels without realizing all was not heavenly
light and angelic choruses around Jesus' birth. The shadow of a violent
ruler lingers over the events of the nativity. A reason I like the tradition
of celebrating Epiphany a couple of weeks after Christmas is it allows time
to reflect upon this horrible part of the Christmas story.

Historians generally tend to doubt that Herod's slaughter of Bethlehem's
children really happened, because there is no mention of it outside of
Matthew's Gospel. Even so, from what we know of Herod he was ruthless in
dealing with threats to his power and carried out similar bloody killings
which are well-documented. The killing of children to eliminate a rival
claimant to the throne fits what we know of Herod from sources outside the
Bible.

Bible scholars argue that one of Matthew's intentions with his Gospel is to
present Jesus as a new Moses who reinterprets the Law in his Sermon on the
Mount just as Moses received the Torah on Mt. Sinai in Exodus. They see the
slaughter of the children of Bethlehem and the holy family's flight to Egypt
as a deliberate parallel of Pharaoh killing Hebrew infants in the Exodus
story and Moses' later flight into the wilderness. Whether one chooses to
believe the massacre depicted in Matthew 2 actually happened or not,
countless innocents have been killed not only in the times of the Bible but
also in every time down through history until the present. We live in a
violent world.

This story of terror is an important part of the Christmas story, because it
acknowledges that Christ entered into a world of pain and violence. From
Jesus' birth through his bloody execution on a cross on to the violent
persecutions faced by the early church, the story of Jesus does not ignore
the violence of our world. The light of Christ, the promise of Emanuel that
God is with us, shines into a world of shadow filled with forces opposed to
God's reign of love. The Gospel presents the scandalous idea that God's
power made present in the weakness of a newborn child was greater than the
power of the despots and dictators of Jesus' day and every day.

This week many of us are shaken by the images of a violent mob overtaking
our nation's Capitol Building. Only this morning did I read a message from a
woman in one of the former churches I served who fled Nazi Germany as a
child. She expressed terror at this week's events which paralleled what she
remembered from her youth. It is a time to be concerned for our country and
to empathize with the many people around the world for whom similar events
are commonplace in their countries. We have much work to do as a nation to
repair our shared pursuit of the common good.

For Christians looking for hope in anxious times, the story of Matthew 2 and
the epiphany of God's presence in Christ remind us that Christianity is not
a fantastical escape from reality but a means of existing inside a reality
which is sometimes terror-filled. Herod died and remains a relatively minor
figure in history, but Jesus Christ endured. So also, every despot and
dictator throughout history has also died and their empires which seemed
eternal also crumbled in time. So also will those who practice violence and
terror in our day pass away. Their actions may cause terrible consequences
in our present, but they will not endure. We remember that as important as a
responsible and just government may be, our ultimate security is found in
the God who created us and who does not abandon us. The light of Epiphany
shining in the murderous shadows of Jesus' day still shines in our day. The
God we trust goes with us even when our paths take us into the shadow of
death.

Grace and Peace.
Rev. Chase Peeples