God risks his own life in sharing ours
Low Sunday is the first Sunday after Easter and I always liked to think that it was so called because it came after the high hopes and celebrations of the great festival of Easter Day - a sort of worldly anti-climax to the resurrection and the last day of the eight-day feast, or octave, of Easter. It's actually probably a corruption of the Latin "laudes" or "praises" sung that day. But it still works for me as a "low" day, a coming down with a bump at the end of the Easter holidays.
In the same way, the Sunday after Christmas is a bit of a low Sunday too. After the joys and exertions of Christmas Day, the tinsel, the ho-ho-ho, the time with family and friends, the feasting and merry-making, here we are, down with a bump on the Sunday after Christmas.
And the reading from Matthew for the first Sunday after Christmas certainly brings the Christmas story back to earth with a jolt. The Feast or Festival - if such it can be called - of the Massacre of the Innocents, when we are told that Herod as governor of Judea ordered the murder of all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem and its surrounding areas in an attempt to destroy the infant Messiah of whom he'd been told by the eastern astrologers. And how the young mother of Jesus and her husband Joseph escape into neighbouring Egypt, the kind of flight that terrified refugees in that region and elsewhere have been forced to make down the ages. This is all a long way from stars and angels and shepherds and gentle Lord Jesus and gold and frankincense and myrrh. And it's tragically much closer to the world as we know it, in which innocents are slaughtered in the pursuit of power or for apparently no reason at all, other than what we and our newspapers call "evil".
There is no historical record of this infanticide after the birth of Jesus actually occurring. Josephus (the Jewish historian who wrote much about the period) doesn't mention it (though Herod did commit unspeakable crimes, including the murder of his own sons). Just as there is no record of Luke's claim that Caesar Augustus put out a decree that all the world should be taxed and that Syrian governor Cyrenius required Joseph to go and register at Bethlehem. That story may be more to do with putting Jesus squarely into the House and lineage of David. Similarly, Matthew - writing predominantly for his Jewish audience of early Christians - is anxious to have the infant Jesus emerge from Egypt as a second Moses (and possibly to fulfil some dubiously translated prophecy of Hosea that the child Messiah would come from there). The device of fleeing a Herodian atrocity serves that purpose and, Gaza being part of Egypt in those days, it's a plausible narrative to have the holy family cross the Jordan into Egypt from Bethlehem.
Now, it's a dangerous game, this knocking down the historic events of the gospel. It can provide support for atheistic fundamentalism of the kind offered by Professor Richard Dawkins, which is an unimaginative creed in the extreme. It can be picked up by our newspapers as evidence that flaky priests (or even an archbishop) are denying the Christian story. But we don't devalue the nativity stories by suggesting that we're not to accept them at the literal, historical level - we enrich them in understanding that they were attempts to write back into the narrative of Jesus's birth some of the wonder and mystery of his life, ministry and, especially, his resurrection as the Christ.
I would go further - I'd like to suggest that we also enrich these narratives by asking ourselves what the apostles really meant by the telling of them. We need to understand that ancient societies, such as the Judeans, didn't share our rational, post-Enlightenment contempt for stories that were not literally, historically true - in fact, they believed stories could reveal a more profound truth than a simple literal record of events. (This is not so far from the most traditional and conservative of interpreters of scripture, who might argue the principle of Sensus Plenior - that scripture has God-given meaning of which the author may have been unaware).
So it must be with the story of the massacre of the holy innocents. Whether Herod actually committed this heinous crime in this instance, we know that he - and other despotic and barbaric rulers then and since - did commit similar horrors. One thing the story serves to show us is the sheer risk that God takes with his creation and his incarnation in that creation, with the birth of Jesus Christ and throughout a human history in which he is intimately bound.
To be born a baby to an oppressed race in an age in which rates of infant mortality were vastly higher than they are today, when the supposedly civilised world was run by local tyrants who could order the massacre of babies on a whim. This was a massive risk to take with a human life that would change the course of history forever.
Of course, it might be argued that the infant Jesus was to be protected from harm by the angels and the whole company of heaven, or by God Himself, so that he could fulfil his earthly mission. I don't think we should accept that. For the incarnation of the Christ to work, it needs to be what the Greeks called a kenosis, an emptying of God of his own divinity, to become completely human, entirely to share the human experiment. This is not to deny the divinity of the Christ, but this is also not a God on a gap-year, a Christ trying out life in human form, but knowing that his old man will bale him out if he gets into trouble - events in Jerusalem and just outside it on Golgotha some 30 years later show that this is not God playing at being human. As the writer of today's epistle to the Hebrews points out, it is the suffering of Christ that means he can bear our own - "he took on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham."
And in Matthew's gospel, at the beginning of Jesus's life, the story told of the massacre of the innocents is intended to show that God comes among us in the cruelties and mortal dangers of our existence, not as a sympathetic spectator but as a participant. Jesus is born into a world in which babies like him are murdered. That is a risk God takes with us.
And Emmanuel, God-with-us, sharing and bearing every aspect of the human condition, has yet more remarkable and powerful implications. Massacres of infants - I need hardly remind anyone - were not confined to the ancient world. As the people of Rwanda, Darfur, Sudan and Zimbabwe know to their terrible cost. As the people of Vietnam and Korea know. As the Jews of the 20th century know. As the people of schools in Scotland's Dunblane and America's Columbine know.
I know I'm not alone in doubting my faith when we read of such unspeakable events. And it's not just such awful, senselessly violent events that make me doubt God. At other times, I wonder how children who die in accidents or of illnesses make any sense of faith in God - how can a life cut short when it has barely started fit in to God's plan for the world? We priests are accused - understandably - of a cop-out when we reply "It's a mystery".
But it has to be said that mystery, something beyond our comprehension, is where faith begins. And, though our detractors would have it so, our faith is not a blind faith. The revelation of God in Christ means that the purpose of the gospel stories is to show us what God is like, to provide a glimpse into the mind of God. And what we see there is a God who has taken the risk of creating us, of releasing his creation even so that we can turn away and commit the most terrible crimes against each other and even against helpless children. But the gospel stories also show us a God prepared to embark on that journey with us. To be incarnate in his creation, a creation that he sets free to lose him and to find him again, taking the risks with us, in a world that tries to kill him, in a world that attempts to slaughter his innocence. He joins us in this dangerous and often cruel world, not as a passenger but as a participant and - precious comfort or precious little comfort as it may be for the bereaved in this world - a God capable of doing that will be capable of redeeming any and every life, however brief, and making it complete.