The Holy Innocents (The Eve of)
Does Evil come from God, or from Us?
Preached at Saint John the Evangelist, Cold Lake
Octave of Epiphany, Evening Prayer, 10 January 2002
Matthew 2:13-18, Revelation 21:1-7
Collect:
Almighty God, our heavenly Father, whose children suffered at the hands of Herod, receive, we pray, all innocent victims into the arms of mercy. By your great might frustrate all evil designs and establish your reign of justice, love and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Sermon:
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in thy sight, O Jehovah, my rock, and my redeemer. Amen.
As I started to put thoughts together for this commemoration and celebration of The Holy Innocents I tried to find an upbeat aspect of the readings. There has been a lot of discussion about evil and horror these past few months, and I wanted to put a positive light in this homily. Well, after much reflection, I accepted that there are few ways you can paint the slaughter of young children in a positive light. But what we hear in the readings tonight, horrific and depressing, does have some important messages for us as a community of believers.
The story of the nativity leads us to the mystery revealed through the eyes of the Magi on the Feast of Epiphany. We come through this wonderful season and are drawn up short tonight, on this Holy Day – The Feast of Holy Innocents. The birth of our Saviour and His flight into Egypt are underscored in blood by Herod’s slaughter of all boys under the age of two.
Up until this point, the Christmas history reads much like a child’s bedtime story. Our eyes are filled with love and wonder at the message of the angels proclaimed before the shepherds. In the gospel reading Saint Matthew takes us from the journey of hope with the Magi, a journey that ends with us kneeling in the manger, offering ourselves our souls and bodies – all we are – before the Christ child, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to escape the hate, fear and unrestrained evil of Herod. And as the Holy family escapes, as they run away from this horrible act to save our Lord, those baby boys left behind are killed by Herod’s troops.
This event carries with it some interesting lessons for us. We are a hopeful people, we Christians. In our worship and our lives we often kneel before Christ to offer our praise and gifts to the glory of God. We are consecrated as a people in service of the Lord; this is the reason we are here. There is no greater mission for a believer than to do his Father’s will. The problem is that we can become separated from that holiness, can feel that warm enveloping embrace departing from us – much as we sometimes leave our families and travel far away for extended periods. The way we become separated from God is through sin, or (as my Grandfather would say) our ‘pigheaded stubbornness’ and unwillingness to do what is right. That closeness is lost through our unrepentant sin. As Christ fled before the evil of Herod, we can all too easily separate ourselves from God.
In that Holy city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, there would soon be an act of unspeakable evil. Herod’s soldiers, following his orders, would methodically proceed house-to-house, seeking all of the young boys and murdering them. We pale upon hearing the story, and wonder at the why and how of the event. The question that springs into my mind, is how could such evil come into such a Holy place? How could God, born of woman, flee the city and permit this act to proceed? The easy answer, although not so easy to understand, is that God had very little to do with it. Herod did not act as an agent of God, and we know that there is no ‘Saint Herod’ in the register of saints. Herod was a man, sinful and given through the gift of free will to do evil, horrible, unspeakable evil. There is part of the lesson in this reading – we are all part of the same race as Herod, and have in all of us in some way that same streak that urges us to do wrong.
We also see in this drama another play on the salvation story. Christ comes into the world in joy and wonder, announced by the angels to the shepherds and worshiped by the Magi. A short time later, Christ leaves – this time to Egypt until Herod dies - and later to leave again on the cross on Golgotha. Can you see the parallel here? Jesus, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt as a result of the evil enacted by Herod. Their presence is lost as a result of this evil. Soon after the Holy family returns to Judah, and Christ begins His world-altering ministry. As Jesus was taken from us to Egypt as a result of evil, so he will be sacrificed on a cross and taken from us again a second time as a result of evil, and return to us in the resurrection. In both the escape into Egypt and the crucifixion Christ is lost to us as a result of evil – an evil physically acted out by we humans.
This is the story of our Christian walk with Christ, is it not? We revel in the closeness of our Lord, and His overwhelming forgiveness and love, and then despair as we, through sin, feel that presence depart. In many ways we are those martyred children in Bethlehem, in the presence of our Lord and the salvation He brings, only to have Him lost to us through our death to sin.
The Holy Innocents answer many things about our world and the horror and evil we see every day. In fact, this slaughter was not the last death of innocents and likely was not the first. Our history as a race is littered with the bones of innocents that have been martyred, many in our lifetime. The names and events are those we still hear almost nightly on the news…Idi Amin, Sudanese warlords, ethnic cleansing, Hutus and Zulus, epidemic abortion, the state-sponsored killing of baby girls in China…and the list goes on. But what one thing do all these horrors have in common? They are all evil, immoral acts conceived, created, implemented and perpetuated by human beings – people a part of the same creation as us. For what God gifted us with in that creation was the choice of free will. As Norman Geisher states: God made evil possible, humans made evil practical.
We are called to act as believers in Christ – we are called to change the world for the better, to write letters, preach sermons, phone and email, donate money to try to change things for the better. But we know that this will not be the end of evil – the second paradise on earth will not come from our actions. What is even more important than these actions, the real gift I believe we can offer the world today, is an understanding and an interpretation of why there is evil.
In the past months there have been talk shows upon talk shows discussing that very question – how could Sept 11 happen to us? Anne Graham, the daughter of Billy Graham, was asked how could God permit such an event to happen. Her answer, “but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman that He is, I believe that He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand that He leave us alone?" Her answer does not tell the whole story. I do not believe that God’s action will be limited by our attempts to remove Him from our society. Anne Graham’s answer smacks a little too much of ‘I told you so’ for me, but this is a comfortable position for us as believers. It is not the answer, and even detracts from that answer as it places us above the non-believer in a superior role.
Our world has lost their Christian perspective, and as a result cannot deal with the question of evil. The world seeks for answers, for there must be a rational explanation for what happens in the world – people are mentally disturbed, or had poor upbringing, or it was just bad luck. Never the simple truth – that evil’s only goal is to destroy, to take the beauty and order of God’s creation into chaos, and those filled with His Holy Spirit into despair. Evil seeks to destroy…take another tack onto the Sept 11 events. What about the terrorists who went willingly to their death thinking they were serving their God? Could the only reason that horrific attack happened be to have a few souls willingly kill themselves? We will not know, but we can offer this to the world. Why do bad things happen? We live in a world that is broken; the human part of creation is like a cracked pot that awaits the return of the maker to put it back together. Bad things happen because people make decisions that permit, tolerate or act our evil wishes.
So where do we go from here? Our hope, as always, is in the Lord. Martin Luther King said ‘Evil can not permanently organize itself, for it contains the seeds of its own destruction.’ Something, which seeks only to destroy, cannot last for long before it destroys itself. Our hope is in the images painted for us by John in revelation “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had vanished…I saw the holy city coming down out of heaven from God…He will wipe every tear from their eyes; there shall be an end to death. And to mourning and crying and pain; for the old order has passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4, NEB)
The worst thing that ever happened on earth – deicide, the murder of Christ on the cross – became in God’s hands the greatest story ever told: A real story that has and continues to transform the lives of millions. Through that horror, we have been bought into immortal life. As Father Francis Nemeck writes, within “God’s providence everything is capable of becoming a catalyst for good.”
So as we ponder the deaths of those young children so long ago, and the death that is so much a part of this world today, we find comfort. We find comfort because we understand why there is evil in creation, and we can pass this message onto the world of non-believers. As we hear John’s vision of the new world in Christ, and think of our salvation through the cross, we find comfort. We know that even as Christ fled to Egypt for a time, as He died on the cross for a time, He came back to us from Egypt, and from the grave. We know that when he left for His Father’s house, he left with us the Holy Comforter. We know that Christ’s promise is that he will come again with a new city adorned like a bride for her husband and will dwell with us forever. In that promise we find comfort that lasts regardless of what happens in the world.
I speak to you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.
