Tricked
Matthew 2:13-23

December 30, 2007


That famous TV series, M*A*S*H, portrayed a parable of our time. On Christmas Day, a mortally wounded soldier is brought into the MASH unit and Hawkeye Pierce and the others work feverishly to keep him alive, knowing that he has a young family back home. The task is tragically hopeless, so Pierce attempts to keep him alive past midnight, but his efforts are in vain for the soldier dies minutes before midnight. Hawkeye rushes up to the clock and pushes it ahead 20 minutes into December 26 and then falsifies the time of death on the certificate because “no child should have to grow up associating Christmas with death.” He had tricked death of its significance.

The rant against the commercialization of Christmas is becoming so pervasive that it is in danger of becoming trite. Perhaps you saw the photo in Time about the mock evangelist Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping who rails against the marketing of Christmas, “shopocalypse,” accompanied by a full gospel choir singing mock Christmas carols. His cause is featured in a new movie, “What Would Jesus Buy?” The trouble is that Reverend Billy, aka Bill Talen, is so trite that his message hits kind of hard. It’s hard to understand Christmas when you’re shopping.

It’s harder to teach Christmas now when every Advent the protests against Nativity scenes become louder, more persistent and more successful. Public schools cannot talk about the Nativity, but they can talk about the Christmas spirit. Everybody talks about the Christmas spirit, a scaled down version of nice values and polite consideration for other people during the truce of this holiday season. Have I ranted enough yet?

It is a confusing time and the confusion even reigns within the list of Lectionary readings. Today we hear the story of the consequences of the visit of the Magi, but it is not until next Sunday that we will hear the story of the visit of the Magi. January 6 for a number of Christian traditions is the date of Christmas. I guess the Magi were pretty slow getting around to things on the first Christmas. But we will proceed backwards today, the sixth day of Christmas. Six geese a-laying; so where are the geese?

Actually, we begin in the middle of the story, just after the Wise Guys had left. An angelic dream invades silent Joseph’s soul telling him to flee at once to Egypt because Herod, King of the Jews, is about to search for their baby in order to kill him.

Who would be threatened by a baby? Tom Wright, Anglican bishop of Durham and Biblical scholar, recalled the Christmas Eve service he once conducted where an eminent and religiously skeptical, if not hostile, historian had been dragged to the service by his family. At the conclusion, the historian came up to Wright with a huge smile on his face, “I finally figured it out why people like Christmas!” “Really,” Wright replied curious, “please do tell me.” “A baby threatens no one, so the whole thing is a happy event that means nothing at all.” I am glad the history of our times is being written by such a wise man.

No one is threatened by a baby? Herod, by the way, had killed his own wife and three sons because he was paranoid they were going to usurp him from his throne. Caesar Augustus once quipped that it was safer to be one of Herod’s pigs than his son. Killing babies didn’t bother Herod at all, especially after he found out that he had been tricked by the Magi. He is allowed to manipulate millions of people as pawns in his personal game, but look at his furious rage if he thinks he has been tricked. Their trick, of course, is that went home a different way and did not report to him a thing about the baby in Bethlehem - a grave error of omission.

Jesus is in Egypt, reversing the reputation of that most ancient of lands; instead of being the fleshpot of death and slavery, Egypt has become the land of freedom and life. Matthew cites Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” from a passage that refers to Israel’s experience in the Exodus. It doesn’t really fit, but close enough.

The infants are massacred back in Judea, 20 or 30 according to some scholars, but just imagine the pathos of one of those families hearing Jesus preach or watching him heal, knowing that their two year old was randomly murdered in place of Jesus. Matthew calls to memory the passage from Jeremiah 31:15, “A sound was heard in Ramah, weeping and much lament. Rachel weeping for her children, Rachel refusing all solace, Her children gone, dead and buried.” Again, a square peg into a round whole, yet it works sadly. Jeremiah was referring to Rachel as the matriarch of Israel which had been conquered by Babylon and its children were being sent off in exile to Babylon. Rachel wept too as the Jews in Poland and elsewhere watched their children stuffed into cattle cars for the long train ride to Auschwitz. The times, they aren’t a-changing.

Finally, there was one change: Herod died, reputedly of an intestinal infection, rotten to the core to the last. The dictator is dead! Long live the dictator! Archelaus, a pig of a son of Herod according to accounts, took over the throne, so dreams starting flooding into Joseph’s head again. Just as he was entering the Promised Land, a dream detoured him north to a city named Nazareth, which the Bible had not heard of before. They were refugees, strangers in a strange land. “He shall be called a Nazarene,” cites Matthew according to the prophets, but no one has ever found that verse in the Bible. Nothing good comes out of Nazareth anyway.

Is this still Christmas? Hey, this chapter has always been here, and yes, it is the Gospel. We’ve heard the spins: a baby threatens no one and so happily means nothing at all. What good would a baby do for us in the middle of our violent world? What do you think that historian wanted, a white knight to appear fully armoured to lead Israel in righteous warfare to drive out the Evil Empire of Rome? That’s the kind of effective historical action that changes the course of the world, eh? Yet, Jesus did not enter the world to dissolve its evil by his cuteness. It was not some idyllic era of valiant people and beneficent governments, but a brutally violent and cruel world of which we can only imagine, and there are people in many countries today whose people don’t have to imagine.

You and I are not here because our Messiah defeated the right armies and overthrew the right governments. The Gospel we proclaim is that Jesus disarmed the power of evil everywhere not by brute power, but by a weakness and gentleness and courage that every person may possess. Moreover, as deeply felt as was Hawkeye Pierce’s attempt to trick the time and save Christmas from death, Jesus was not afraid of death and he defeated its power. During these 12 days of Christmas in which Benazir Bhutto’s fight for democracy was ended in a ruthless murder, let us not forget that the birth of a baby was the incarnation of God, God becoming one of us, and as Paul later said, “neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan