The Untold Story of Christmas
a sermon based Matthew 2:13-33
by Richard Gehring

            Christmas is over for another year.  All but a few of the holiday family reunions have taken place.  Pretty much all the presents have been unwrapped, and some have already been returned or exchanged for something more useful.  Many of us have already taken down our decorations and packed them away until next December. 
            Here in church there are also signs that Christmas is over.  The advent wreath has been packed away.  There are no poinsettias to be found.  And the announcements about Christmas program

rehearsal are absent from the bulletin.  But before we leave Jesus lying in the manger, adored by shepherds and wise men, and simply return to "normal life" there is one more story that needs

to be told.  It is a story that we all know, but one that we don't like to dwell on too much.  For it is a very violent and depressing story.  And after the warmth and sweetness and beauty of the Christmas pageant, we would just rather not be faced with the cruelty and shocking brutality of children being slaughtered.

            But we need to be reminded that Jesus did not remain peacefully in the manger.  Mary and Joseph weren't able to simply return to their home in Nazareth after the birth of their child and lead a

normal life.  The reality of the oppression under which they lived broke in on this family and forced them to flee, to become refugees in a foreign land.
            It is very difficult for us to know what to make of this rather gruesome story, so often we simply ignore it.  That, however, was not an option for Mary and Joseph and Jesus.  They had to deal with these events.  And if we are to remain true to the full gospel account of Jesus' birth, we must deal with these events as well.
            There are those who deal with the slaughter of the innocent children of Bethlehem by denying that it ever happened.  There is, after all, no account of this massacre other than Matthew's.  Perhaps he simply made up the story because it fit in well with what he was trying to say.  Surely if all the boys under two in Bethlehem had been killed, someone else would have noticed, too, and recorded it—wouldn't they?
            But the fact is that Herod was a very brutal ruler.  Many of his atrocities are well-documented.  He was such a tyrant, in fact, that he realized on his deathbed that no one in Judea would mourn his passing.  They would probably rejoice.  So he summoned dozens of important leaders from all over the country, people who were respected and beloved by the citizens, and he had them imprisoned.  He gave orders that when he died these leaders should all be executed.  All this just to make sure that there would be mourning throughout Israel when he died.
            Besides being extremely cruel, Herod was also quite paranoid.  He killed one of his wives and her mother when he thought they might be plotting against him.  And only a short time before Jesus' birth, he killed two of his own sons for fear that they might try to take over his throne before he died.  With all of this murder going on, it wouldn't be at all surprising that Herod might have had some sixty or so other boys killed, either.  And it's little wonder that when so many Jewish leaders were waiting

to be executed, the murder of a few children in a small village would have been overlooked by most people.
            Another way in which some try to rationalize the horrible events immediately after Jesus' birth is to say, "That was then, this is now."  What happened so long ago has no relevance to what goes on today.  Jesus may have lived under a government that killed its own children, but thank God we don't.  The world today is a much more civilized place than it was 2000 years ago.
            But anyone who makes such claims as these must not have been reading the headlines this past year.  We only have to remember the conditions of near anarchy that still reign in parts of Iraq and Afghanistan to get a feel for the paranoia and cruelty of Herod towards those he considered a threat.  In the land where Jesus was born, there were still many people dying in 2007, many of them only children.  Unfortunately, the murder of children in Bethlehem so long ago was not an isolated incident.  It was rather just one of a series of tragedies that have taken place throughout history and continue to occur today.
            Another way, then, that some try to explain the slaughter of the innocents is to say simply that it was all part of God's plan.  They would cite our text for today as an example of how God acted to save the child in whom God dwelt in a special way.  It shows the power of God to protect his followers from harm.
            Again, however, I have problem with this explanation.  For me, it raises more questions than it answers.  When God warned Joseph about what was going to happen, why didn't the rest of the parents in Bethlehem get the same warning?  Better yet, why didn't God simply take Herod's life before he could kill more people?  Didn't God care about the other boys?  Jesus, after all, was sent to die for us, wasn't he?  Couldn't the Messiah have died as an infant rather than waiting another 30 years?
            There are still many people today who, when they survive a close call with death proclaim, "God was with me.  That's how I survived."  But I always have to question such a simple answer.

What about all the people who do die?  Was God simply not with them?  Did God abandon the thirty-two individuals killed in last spring's massacre at Virginia Tech?  Was God not with the six people who died in the Crandall Canyon mine collapse this summer—or the three others killed while trying to rescue them?  If so, then I'm not sure I want to worship that God, a God who arbitrarily decides to be with some people who therefore live and to simply abandon others who then die.
            So far, we have not found a satisfying explanation to why God allowed the baby boys of Bethlehem to be slaughtered, and why so many terrible things continue to happen today.  We cannot

simply deny that people suffer and die for no apparent reason; the evidence is just too great.  We cannot distance ourselves from this suffering; it's too close by and eventually it will touch us as well.  And we cannot blindly accept what happens as "God's will"; for in so doing we turn God into simply another

fickle tyrant no better than Herod.
            So what are we to do with this story?  How can we make sense out of it?  And as we prepare to begin a new year, how can we have hope that this year will be any better than previous ones as the assault on our children continues?  There are some affirmations in this story that I do think give us some cause for hope.  There are some things we can learn about how God acted then that give us

reassurance of how God acts today as well.
            The first affirmation is that God does indeed act in history.  The Jewish Christians in the early church who read Matthew's Gospel for the first time would no doubt have recalled the birth of another child more than 1000 years earlier whose life was also threatened, but who survived to become a savior for his people.  That child was, of course, Moses.
            Moses was born at a time when another king, the pharaoh of Egypt, had issued a decree that all Hebrew boys were to be put to death.  Moses, of course, was saved from death by the faith and ingenuity of his parents who hid him and by the daughter of pharaoh who eventually found and adopted him.  In time, Moses became a great leader who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.
            So as the Jewish Christians of Matthew's time read about this Jesus who was saved from a death decree issued by a tyrant they would certainly have recalled the story of Moses who was saved as a child under similar circumstances.  As they read about Joseph taking his family to Egypt for safety, they would have recalled the Joseph of the Old Testament who likewise took his family to Egypt to save them from famine.  And as they read about those who went to Egypt as refugees before returning home to Palestine, they would have recalled their own ancestors who lived as refugees when they left Egypt bound for the Promised Land.
            This story was thus a reminder for Matthew's community of the ways in which God acted through Moses to save their people in the past, and how God was still acting through Jesus to save the

whole world in their own time.  For us, then, it is once again a reminder of God's continuing work throughout history to bring salvation to all creation.  It is a reminder that, even in the midst of terrible suffering, God still acts today.  It may be difficult for us to see God at work, and even more difficult for us to understand some of the ways in which that work is done.  But we can be assured that God still cares and that God still acts.
            In fact, the other important lesson in this story is that God understands all the difficulties and hardships we face.  For as we read about the events in Matthew 2, we must remind ourselves that God was present in Jesus.  So as Jesus survived a narrow brush with death, so did God, the giver of life.  As Jesus experienced homelessness as a refugee in Egypt, so did God, the maker of all.  God thus knows what it means to be human and to suffer all the difficulties that we humans must face.
            Christianity teaches that Christ suffered for us.  Most of the time, this message is identified with his death on the cross which was the ultimate experience of suffering.  But our story today reminds us that suffering was a part of Jesus' life from the very beginning.  He always faced hardships and difficulty.  So the events of the crucifixion, as unique and important as they are, cannot be divorced from the life Jesus led prior to that time.
            Furthermore, the events recorded by Matthew in his second chapter remind us that not only did Jesus suffer for us, he also suffers with us.  When we face a very difficult situation ourselves, we understand the words of the psalmist in Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  It seems when things are going wrong that God is far away, unconcerned about what is happening to us.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with feeling this way.  Even Jesus asked the same thing as he was dying.  He quoted the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm that spends 18 verses lamenting the terrible situation in which the psalmist found himself.  We need to allow ourselves to feel this pain and to

lament our condition.
            But there is also more to this psalm than simply wondering where God has gone.  Verse 24 reads, "He did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him."  Our text for today is an affirmation of that.  For even as we weep as Rachel did for her children and as the parents of Bethlehem did for theirs, God weeps with us.  For God's son also suffered.  And as we face sufferings today, God does not abandon us.  God suffers with us.
            So even though Christmas may be over, the message of Christmas must not be forgotten.  In the new year of 2008, there will be many terrible things that happen in the world and probably in the lives of many of us here, just as there were terrible things that happened in 2007 and 2006 and every year in

human history.  But we can rest assured that in the midst of seemingly meaningless events God is at work; and in the midst of apparent hopelessness God provides hope.  This coming year, may we be more in tune to God at work so that we can share a bit more in the hope that God has to offer.