January 2, 2011
The Other Christmas Story - Matthew 2:13-23
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadWhy is the movie, The Passion, rated “R”? Ya’ll know that movie. It was very popular about six years ago. It came out around Easter and it was all the rage for awhile. Except your children could not see it because it was rated R. Why was it rated R? The answer to that is very simple. It was the violence. The movie was basically over two hours of a guy getting bludgeoned to death, which would definitely earn it an R rating. I don’t blame the people who rate movies for rating it R, nor do I blame the producers for making it so violent. They got it directly from the Bible, for goodness sake. So I guess my main question is why did it have to be rated R? Why the violence and bloodshed? Was there not an easier, less astounding way to save the world than that? Why can’t we just have Easter?
And maybe even more than that, why is there so much violence in the Bible at all? It’s all over the place. It is very true that if you made the Bible into a movie, it would have to be rated R. Violence is the main thing, but even more than that, there’s sex, and conniving, and lots of unpleasantness (to put it nicely). As much as we don’t like to think about it, there’s even violence in the Christmas story. When I got home from our Christmas Eve service, I tuned in online to another Christmas Eve service from a Church that I knew growing up. I was surprised at that service that the preacher didn’t read the Christmas story out of Luke 2. Everybody knows that the Christmas story comes from Luke 2:1-20. Well, this particular preacher read from Matthew’s Christmas story. The Christmas story is all of Luke 2, and also Matthew 1&2 and John 1. Mark skips it altogether. So even though my dearly beloved and now departed aunt rolled over in her casket a time or two when that preacher read Matthew’s version and not Luke’s, it was perfectly appropriate for him to do that. And whether we like it or not, this dreadful story of Herod’s massacre of all the babies in Bethlehem is as much a part of the Christmas story as is “silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.”
So I ask you again, why the violence? Who wants to hear about a massacre, about a holocaust really, at Christmas? And who wants to raise the very difficult questions that this story raises, at Christmas? What about all the other children? That’s the big question. Why didn’t God appear to their parents in a dream? Just imagine if it was your child. He’s a beautiful baby boy. He’s eighteen months old. He’s learning how to walk, and he’s into everything. He’s putting words together. He’s the cutest baby ever to walk the face of the earth. Next thing you know, some Roman soldier comes barreling in your house and says that he has to take your baby. And then he takes your sweet baby, the sweetest on the planet, and kills him. All of which is bad enough. But then you learn that God gave some parents a warning, but not you. Why did God let Herod do that? Why does Herod even have to be a part of this? It’s Christmas.
Now you can say that all of that is beside the point in this story, that this story is really about how Jesus survives against all odds. Scholars are quick to point that that this is a connection with Israel’s Exodus, which is probably true. But even if it is, even if it didn’t really literally happen, as some have argued, why was Israel’s exodus so violent? Why the cross? Do you know how odd it is for a cross to be a sign of a religion? Have you ever really thought about that? Why does God choose such a hard, astounding, violent way to save us? Why can’t God just snap his fingers and make everything right? Why can’t there be just one story that’s devoid of violence?
That’s the big elephant in the room. I can live with the sex and drugs and conniving and manipulation, but it’s the violence that’s just brutal. Violence is everywhere, and it always has been everywhere. I don’t care what anybody says. Charlotte is one of the most violent cities in America, and yet Charlotte from the past was actually much more violent that what Charlotte is now. And it’s certainly not just Charlotte. Violence is the asterisk at the bottom of everything. Take the 4th of July, for example, in which we celebrate our independence, and our constitution, and our way of life. We should celebrate all that, and we should give thanks for those who have sacrificed so much for that. But little do we hear then that in order to procure our way of life, we completely eliminated another one, one that had been here for thousands of years. When was the last time you saw a Catawba Indian floating around here? We killed them all. And those whom we didn’t kill, we shipped out west. They’re gone. That’s our holocaust. How can you talk about the American story without mentioning sheer unadulterated violence? How can you talk about the human story without mentioning sheer, unadulterated violence? It’s everywhere.
Even in the Christmas story. But the miracle is that instead of just wiping it off the map, God becomes a victim of it. The thing that we might forget in this particular story of Herod’s massacre of the children is that the only child who was saved in it would grow up to meet a violent death of his own. And yet, Jesus overcame that death. It’s Christmas that we celebrate, not Herodmas. Jesus beat the violence, on our behalf. And even though the violence is still here, we have assurance that it won’t be here forever, that it’s on its way out, that only Jesus lives. Not even Herod, not even the Roman Empire, not all the evil in the world can stop God.
Fortunately for me, I have never been a victim of violence. I can read this story in the abstract. In fact, I can read pretty much about all stories in violence in the abstract. Unfortunately, many others (and possibly some of you) have been a victim of violence. So one of my challenges as a Christian is to explain to people what our faith has to say to them. If you were to meet the parents of these children killed during the first Christmas, what would you tell them? How does our faith advocate for them? If you have a completely defenseless, two year old child, how does our faith advocate for that child against an adult who is abusing that child? And it’s not just children, either, obviously. What about the elderly who are being abused? That’s fairly rampant today. What about the woman being abused by her husband? It’s a vicious cycle. She gets beat up and then she blames herself for it, and then she goes back to him and he beats her up again, over and over and over. What does our faith have to say to her?
A faith that says that God just zaps it altogether obviously is not real. Herod died, fortunately, but unfortunately he has been replaced many times over. Violence is real, and it’s still the big elephant in the room. We’ve come a long way in the last one hundred years. We’re so much more advanced medically and technologically and violently. We can commit violence more effectively now than ever. And yet the Christmas story says that God became the least among us, and even despite humanity’s violence, God, in that little helpless child, defeated it. God, in that man hanging and bleeding on that violent cross, defeated it.
The greatest mystery in the world to me is why Jesus has not returned. I cannot answer that on e. The early Christians thought that Jesus would return “soon and very soon.” Well, it has been a while, has it not? I cannot understand that. But what I can say with confidence is that God is dead-set against violence, so much so that God became a victim of violence himself. If you’re a victim of violence, you’re not alone. You’re not alone in your bleeding. Protestants for the most part do not have crucifixes. Crucifixes are crosses that depict Jesus still hanging on them and they are normally associated with the Roman Catholics. We depict the cross without Jesus for good reason, and that is because Jesus did not stay on that cross. And yet, that Jesus, that God was nailed to it in the first place is significant. Many people, especially victims of violence, have seen a crucifix, have seen a God hanging on a cross, and for the first time really “got it,” they really saw a God who was with and for them, not just one who was up there somewhere supposedly snapping his fingers and making everything rosy.
So, why the violence? Why this other Christmas story? Well, for one thing, it’s real. Like it or not, violence is real and happens all the time. Secondly, don’t ask God that question. It’s not God’s idea. Ask humanity. Ask us. Thirdly, whatever God does with the violence, God does not ignore it. Rather, God becomes a victim of it. If the Lord’s Supper tells us nothing else, it’s that. God becomes a victim of violence. “This is the body of Christ, broken for you, and the blood of Christ, shed for you. Yet, God defeats violence. Jesus somehow or other survived that massacre, and he grew up and got killed on a cross, but he came down from that Cross and gave us Easter. Easter gives those babies some hope and even victory that they did not have before. And it gives us hope and victory, too. We cannot ignore or condone violence. Unfortunately Christians do that all that time. We do ignore it, and condone it, and sadly commit it. We are guilty as charged and have causes a scandal to our faith. We cannot ignore violence. Neither can we defeat it. But God can, and God has, so what we can do is to stand with current victims of it, speak up for them, and remain confident that they and we will one day stand victorious. The light will always shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
