One of the Least

I was sitting in an interfaith dialogue class during ordination training, when the words of a Reformed Rabbi stopped me in my tracks.

“The Messiah hasn’t come,” she said. “If the Messiah had returned, the world would be different.”  I was profoundly challenged by this supposition. Should the world be more different, now that Jesus is born?

In Matthew’s gospel, we see that although Christ has come the world seems unchanged in its corruption and brutality. Herod the Great, who rose to power through his father’s relationship with the emperor and dictator Julius Caesar, who executed several members of his own family, is described by Matthew as orchestrating the murder of all infant children in the Bethlehem area. 

The emotional whiplash from the serenity and transcendent beauty, the perfect peace of the nativity tableau to this scene of terror and chaos, is stark. So too is the contrast between where these two narrative episodes sit in our collective, cultural consciousness.  The proliferation of nativity scenes in popular culture is so ubiquitous, at times the signifiers slipping from the signified almost to the point of vapidity that it can be difficult to gaze upon the unfettered reality of the Christ event and to absorb the profundity of its theological and anthropological implications. It is so densely mediated through cultural white noise.

Not so with the massacre of the innocents. There is no Godly Play set, no playmobile or lego version of this. Instead, we are forced to gaze at the stark reality of the scene as Matthew presents it to us. What does the gospel writer want us to see, when he shows us this scene of abject terror? And what do you actually see?

For the gospel writer, there is a clear, significant contrast between two king figures, their identity and behaviour. Herod is illegitimate, insecure, defensive, and violent. He attacks the vulnerable in order to protect himself and his power. 

Christ, in contrast to this, is the authentic king, the one attested to in the scriptures with a demonstrable Davidic lineage. He is the new Moses, reversing the flight from Egypt described in Exodus and typifying the whole people of Israel as he returns to the promised land. A vulnerable infant himself, born in humble circumstances, he has no need for self-aggrandization or demanding privileges, no need to prove himself, since his identity and authority are indisputable. Herod, the fake king, brings chaos and terror but Jesus the true king brings good news and hope. Herod’s kingdom will ultimately not prevail, since by miraculous divine intervention, the Holy family flee to safety. God’s kingdom is the one that will triumph. 

Matthew is not primarily interested in the historicity of this event, nor of the identity or consequences for the many unnamed families and children who feel like narrative collateral in this story. They are really just blurry background figures subsumed into his literary purposes, like extras in a movie or non playable characters in a video game.

But I find myself asking, who were they? What happened to them? I empathise with them, imagining myself as one of the anonymous mothers in the scene. I picture snippets of news headlines and photojournalism featuring contemporary mothers and babies unwittingly caught in moments of horror. I picture the faces of the soldiers, following orders or looking away.

In centring the victims of this tragedy, I am reading against the biblical text and imposing my own perspective onto the narrative. I find myself asking, Does the fact that Jesus is spared make everything ok here? Are we to celebrate the triumph of God’s divine purposes at all costs, at any cost?  What about the other families and children in this story? 

The twentieth century Swiss theologian Ulrich Luz observed, "Modern readers notice that Matthew does not raise the theodicy question in connection with the suffering of the innocent children. It does not bother Matthew that God saves his Son at the expense of innocent people." It does not bother him. Is that right? Can that be right?

For the Korean-American presbytarian minister and New Testament professor Eugene Eung -Chun Park, the answer to why and how God allows these innocents to suffer can be found when we situate this story within the wider context of Matthew’s gospel. He notes Jesus’s words in Chapter 25, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ The least, the elachistone, the smallest. Eung-Chun Park argues that Matthew is identifying the massacred infants here as among the least. God will, ultimately, judge Herod according to what he has done. The motif of little children is also picked up in chapter 18, when Jesus states, “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.” In verse five he declares, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Whilst Christ escapes the fate of the children who come to harm, he also is each of those children, and each of those children bears the face of Christ. When we read intra-textually, the children move from blurred shadows in the background to share the identity of the protagonist.

Jesus continues,  “it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost”. Thus, it seems that contrary to our initial impression from this passage, the Matthean gospel writer actually takes pains to foreground God’s concern for the innocent, the vulnerable, and to insist that ultimately, they are factored in, they are included. Not one of them will be lost. 

Evil, does not prevail. God’s purposes for the world God loves will come to fruition. 

But where does that leave us? The Messiah is here, but the world seems unchanged. We move from the miraculous stable scene, straight to chaos and trauma. But God is here and God keeps God’s promises. This is not a platitude; it is a theological reality.

Here and now, we celebrate that Christ has come to be with us, to be among us, to be one of us. And we also do not look away from the reality of suffering in the world. The exploitation of the most vulnerable by the most powerful was not an isolated first century phenomenon. It remains. It is omnipresent. Even where it is unreported, or indeed redacted. 

Jesus is here, in us and with us, but God’s world is still in the process of being transformed. There remain pockets of deep darkness. We cannot look at all of them all of the time, although God does. But there will be times when we are called to gaze on, to participate in shedding light on the darkness. To affirm the God-given identity of those who are treated as nameless and faceless collateral in political systems. Even when it is costly to us.

The work of the kingdom is ongoing and we are called to join it.

There is a place for all of us in this story. But Matthew is clear: we need to pick a side. 

There is a place for each of us in this story, not purely as a victim, or as a blurry extra in the background, but as active participants working and praying for God’s kingdom to come.  We are to be on the side of the true king, defending the vulnerable and shining light where there is darkness. Even if, like the magi, we haven’t always got it right in the past.

We do not despair. We do not shy away from reality, we do not look away but we do not despair. We trust in the ultimate prevailing of God’s salvation plan for God’s world, which God loves, through the destiny-changing, fulcrum on which all history turns, the incarnation. We stand in that tension between the coming kingdom and the reality of present lived experience. We look to Christ, and we play our part. We are involved.

Christ is here. The truth and the hope of the Christ event and all that it means is the ultimate reality even here, even now. Herod will not prevail. Christ is with us. 

Perhaps, we need to gaze on the stable scene a little longer, a stable bigger than the whole world. But when we have finished gazing, the work begins. 

Happy Christmas.