By Bill Leonard
“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 2 years old and under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more’” (Matt.2: 16-18).
Herod’s ghastly legacy continues. In the Dec. 28 New York Times Magazine, Anne Barnard writes that 2014 “was a terrible year for children in conflict zones. In Afghanistan, more children were killed than at any time since the United Nations began monitoring in the late 2000s.” She suggests that at least “2,500 children were killed this year in conflict zones,” but concludes that “aid agencies say the exact number of child deaths is unknowable,” particularly in places like Pakistan and Syria.
The week before Christmas, Taliban shooters attacked a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 145 people, some 132 of whom were children. Many were taking an exam in the school auditorium when militants entered, CNN reported, “gunning down many of them in minutes.” A 14-year-old who escaped recounted hearing one gunman shout: “A lot of students are under benches. Kill them.”
A few days later, my longtime friend Michael Usey, one of the finest “in the trenches” ministers I know, concluded an email with this poignant, somber insight: “Been a hard Advent for me spiritually, between the police misconduct & deaths, the massacre in Peshawar, and the details about our torturing people. I think we should require that every nativity scene should have a Herod in it, don’t you?”
Usey’s words were an epiphany, what literary critic Lyman A. Baker calls “a sudden ‘seeing into the heart’ of a situation,” that often comes at “a moment of special intensity.” Baker says that an epiphanic moment (don’t you just love that phrase?) may burst from “a story (whether narrative or drama) in which something suddenly becomes clear,” and “which in turn causes past events to appear in a significantly new light ….” An epiphanic moment can change the way we see the world.
In Matthew’s Gospel, an epiphany is what the Zoroastrian astrologers experienced when they plotted a horoscope that guided them to Jesus on Twelfth Night. But their astro-spiritual revelation came at a devastating cost; the result was a voice of “wailing and loud lamentation” that lingers yet.
And then there’s Herod. Inserting him into “every nativity scene” might restrain our sentimentalized, “the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes” rendering of the Christmas story, and compel an annual reflection on the “slaughter of the innocents,” then and now, in ancient Scripture and on contemporary social networks. Indeed, the Times’ “Year in Pictures” for Dec. 28 included a photo of sobbing Pakistani women “refusing consolation” at the coffin of Mohammed Ali Khan, a 15-year-old Peshawar victim.
Sometimes the Herod’s of this world are unmistakably obvious, lurking somewhere on the edge of the crèche, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Mean as a snake, the first-century Herod murdered his wife, Marianne, and sons Aristobulus and Alexander when they provoked his power and paranoia. To destroy a potential “King of the Jews,” Herod ordered a toddler-genocide that turned the Holy Family into refugees, in a region still teeming with them two millennia later. Herod’s current successors perpetuate “wailing and loud lamentations” to protect their own dominions and ideologies, sometimes using “psychological tactics such as terrorizing populations, religious and sectarian narratives, [and] economic controls.” (That’s how Gen. Michael Nagata describes strategies utilized by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.)
However, Usey’s New Revised Standard Version of the Nativity might be more realistic if we stuck Herod right up against the manger, since the Magi and the rest of us often ignore Herodian danger until it’s too late. Jesus’ Herod was a smooth operator who cozied up to the astrologers dripping with fake compassion. Remember? “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” And the stupid “wise men” bought it, that load of camel cookies, at least for a while. Some Christmases we’d best put Herod up close to the manger to remind us how blind we can be to evil, and how gullible we are to principalities and powers that surround us.
So let’s take Michael Usey’s epiphany seriously and consider slipping Herod into the manger scene, disguised perhaps as a seedy shepherd or an overdressed astrologer, reminding us that evil lurks in even our most sacred spaces; that hope is a terrible gamble; and that humans, especially children, are perpetually vulnerable. Epiphanic moments, amid lamentation. Intimations of God’s grace.