When the Bible Speaks Directly to Our Time
The scriptures sometimes jump off the page into the headlines, as if they were written yesterday. Sunday’s gospel reading was a case in point. For churches that follow the liturgical year Sunday was the second Sunday after Christmas. The gospel reading was the last half of the Matthew Christmas story, Matthew 2:13-23. The magi have departed “by another way,” and the king, Herod, is hot. He wants and gets blood—the blood of children. You know the story.
This Herod, Herod pere to the later Herod who meets Jesus after he is arrested, was a notoriously insecure and vindictive ruler. After Herod murdered his wife and two of her children, Augustus, the Roman Caesar, joked that it was better to be Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios). His father was an Idumean—an Edomite—and he struggled under the apprehension of the Jews that he had come to the throne illegitimately. He was always looking to prove himself.
He was a developer, hence the “great” that often follows his name: Herod the Great. He built fortresses and temples and palaces across the kingdom, including the famous mountaintop fortress, Masada. His best known construction project, then as well as now, was the expansion of the Jerusalem temple complex. The Western Wall, now the holiest site in Judaism, was his construction, part of an enormous retaining wall he built in order to expand the temple courts. But it was never enough.
Like despots always and everywhere, he was given to grandiosity and pettiness in equal measure. When he died a painful death, no one much mourned him. Before he died, he gave instructions to his survivors to gather a group of prominent men from the kingdom and execute them so that the people would be in mourning, even if not for him. Once dead, no one followed his orders. A sad man, in the end.
But it’s not just Herod who jumps from the page into our time. There’s the family at the center of the story huddled still in Bethlehem, living who knows where. Matthew mentions a “dwelling place” (oikos). It can be a house or a room in a house or some other structure. Taking this as history, which it’s not, this may be some time after the birth. It’s often suggested that it was as much as two years later, given the order from Herod to kill all the male children two and under. Already displaced from Nazareth, the couple flees the impending violence to Egypt, living there as refugees.
We know them still. In our time families like this are spread across the globe: refugees fleeing the violence of their homelands, looking for a place where they can make a life, seeking, as do Joseph and Mary, to return when they can. A difficult life.
And last, the magi. Tradition has tried hard to clean them up. It’s made of them “wise men” and “kings.” It’s numbered them (three, although the biblical account does not give a number) and named them (no names either). But the story is having none of this. They are simply magi: astologers, conjurers, dealers in the occult. We get our word “magic” from “magi.”
Magi were everywhere at the time. They were often considered a bare grade above charlatans. In Acts 13, we have the story of a certain Barjesus, also known as Elymas, a magus who worked for Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Cypress. Luke can hardly contain his disdain for this man, a Jew claiming arcane powers. Paul calls him a “son of the devil, enemy of righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy” (Acts 13:10).
Magi were originally Zoroastrian priests, but as the story of Barjesus shows, the name had lost its connection with Zoroastrianism and become a name for dubious dabblers in the occult. It was a few of these dabblers from outside any proper religion who arrived in Bethlehem with their gifts.
So, we have Christmas. The story, according to Matthew, includes a petty and murderous would-be king, a refugee family, and a scruffy group of astrologers. Hardly the stuff from which you would construct the account of the coming of the Son of God. But the deep truth remains: God is most at home among the dispossessed. And those who see best often are those who are outside the religious establishment. And those who would use the power of violence to control history rarely, if ever, succeed. And in the midst of all this is the child who is the Christ, the messiah.
As the gospel was being read Sunday, one could sense in the gathered congregation that we needed no sermon. Any of us could have walked to the pulpit and said simply, “The Word of the Lord,” and it would have been enough.
Clay