A man with a boil on his finger sits reading a newspaper that tells him two million people are starving in south Sudan as a result of the ongoing civil war. He throws the paper down and says, “They’ll work it out somehow” as he goes to soak his thumb. The boil is serious and painful. It can spread and cause blood poisoning and, therefore, must be dealt with. Understandably, it causes a certain self-absorption.
Herod had a problem. He was racially Arab, religiously Jewish, culturally Greek and politically Roman. This incredible mix of contrasting and opposing forces created a fear for his throne that bordered on madness. That madness turned easily to violence. His brother-in-law became a bit too popular and “drowned” in the swimming pool at a palace party — such a shame. His favorite wife had to be murdered along with three of his sons. Caesar commented that it was safer to be Herod’s pig (hun) than to be Herod’s son (huion). The pig at least had a chance.
Every Christmas we note the account of the slaughter of the innocents — but have we ever lived in a society where such things really happen? In the first century, what kind of terror spread across the villages of the land when word of this official atrocity reached them? They were accustomed to Herod’s violent acts — but to butcher babies? What did the parents of Judea, Samaria and Galilee say to their children about safety and security?
Leopold, King of the Belgians, killed an estimated 10 out of 20 million people in the Congo while he managed it as his personal colony. The Armenians lost a similar percentage of their total community during the Armenian genocide. My Latvian friends in Riga told me earlier this year that the Russian Communists were responsible for the deaths of 70 million citizens of the empire. The southern Sudanese have lost some 50 percent of their people in the last 40 years. For them, the slaughter continues with an estimated death toll of 2,000 a week for the last 20 years, and this out of a total population base of approximately 6 million people. Lebanon lost 17,500 civilians to Sharon’s army in about six weeks the summer of 1982, while we were living in Beirut. Lebanon is a small country. A proportionate death toll for us would be about 2 million people.
Bishop Kenneth Cragg, the renowned Anglican Islamic scholar has just written: “Who can forget the sight of those descending towers or fail to visualize the dread wake of their demise or cease to ponder how many have no earthly trace but an urnful of anonymous dust sifted for their grieving family circle? These are one with those across the world whom disease, poverty and wrong consign to a mourning left with emptiness. Where words fail how make silence tell?” (emphasis mine)
Are they not also one with the infants of Bethlehem?
Time does not allow to tell of the Cambodians, the Jews, the Rwandans, the East Timorese and the Malaccans — the list goes on and on. But now, on a very small but very real scale, it has happened to us. The slaughter of the innocents. Now a new dimension of the Christmas story lies before us to ponder; not as something that only happens “over there” but as a story in which we also participate. And why did Matthew think it important to record this unspeakably brutal act? Was it because love had an inexpressible incarnation at the same time and in the same place? The incarnation of hate was not the last, nor was it the most powerful, word. Within that world of hate there was an incarnation of love in the birth of a vulnerable child who quickly became a refugee like . . . .
Lord, make us an instrument of your peace . . . .
Emmanuel — God with us! Maranatha — Come Lord Jesus!
Posted Dec. 22, 2001
Kenneth E. Bailey, an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament studies, lives in New Wilmington, Pa.
