The Reality of Evil (Matthew 2:13-23)

Originally delivered 01/01/17 at Church of the Shepherd and edited for clarity in the online medium.

Matthew 2:13-23

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,  “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: 

“A voice was heard in Ramah,    weeping and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children;    she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” 

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Sermon

Good morning, Church of the Shepherd, and Happy New Year! I hope that you were able to enjoy some rest and maybe even some time with loved ones over the Christmas break. I know that Hannah, Teddy, and I enjoyed our rest.

Given that we have now entered into a new year, I thought it might be good for us to reflect a little on the year that has just passed. Based on the memes swirling around the internet, one could say that 2016 has been widely considered one of those “terrible years,” whatever that means. Often this is some sort of reference to the loss of Harambe the gorilla, or it is a reference to the various celebrities who have died this year, as some sort of kitschy-unserious that people are “mourning” the deaths of people we honestly don’t really know and honestly don’t really really care about, at least in the way one would need to care in order to really mourn.

For others who say that 2016 was a “terrible year,” some people are deeply concerned about the various political situations happening in the West, which includes a wide variety and complexity of political and cultural events that constitute, for some, a deep “terrible-ness.” What it seems that these folks are doing by labeling the year this way is something kind of like our doctrine of substitutionary atonement, in that they are imputing all of the evils of 2016 onto a number so they can be redeemed of it. That doesn’t seem to me particularly successful; after all, those political changes are still going to happen come 2017.

In the midst of these more negative versions of “that terrible year 2016,” though, Hannah and I have a really different set of experiences. For one, we (together) finished that MA program at the University. For another, we had a baby. For a third, we’ve finally begun putting the pieces of the puzzle of calling that God has handed us together into something coherent. For us, at least, 2016 was not a terrible year. In certain ways, it’s been a joyous and refreshing one.

All these experiences of 2016 aside, however, I do think that if we were look at the world as a whole and look at the various events from January of last year through yesterday, we will surely find more than enough reasons to rightly call 2016 a “terrible year.” If nothing else – if we ignore human rights abuses in North Korea, or sex slavery across the globe, and etc. – I think that the devastation that is Aleppo and the rest of Syria should give us reason to describe 2016 as “terrible.” If there has been anything that has moved our souls toward despair, challenged our faith and filled us with doubt, made us weep and cry, this year, it has surely been the videos, the photos, and the tweets emerging from those who have been and are trapped in the city of Aleppo. In the midst of this horror, our souls might have difficulty coming in prayer to the Lord of Heaven; after all, if He has not intervened through prayer already, why should He do so toward us? The cry of the human heart when confronted with such suffering and such evil is often “Where is God?”

We are in a new situation when confronted with the problem of evil in these days, just like those who lived in the 1960’s experienced evil in a new manner with the broadcasting of the fighting in the Vietnam War. For us, we have the ability to see the direct impact of evil upon the everyday Syrian person, as they upload videos and images directly from their phones to the internet, and we, on our phones, see and experience immediately their fear, their terror, their sorrows. We experience, vicariously, direct and unveiled evil perpetrated by human beings on each other.

When confronted with the reality of evil, as Christians we have the temptation to waive it, to say, “Ah, but all this shall be made well” in order to avoid the discomfort of it. We all do this in many ways – on the conservative end of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of black brothers and sisters will waive it by saying “All lives matter.” On the liberal end of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of the unborn will waive it by saying “Abortion is a civil right.” On both ends of the Church, believers faced with the real suffering of Aleppo recently waived it and said “Thank God Christmas is coming soon, so I can think about better and more positive things.” And while it is true – and a very central truth – that all the evils of this world shall be triumphed over and that all the wrongs shall be made right – Christ won all this on the Cross –still, in our time, now, before His return, there is real evil affecting real people right now.

We cannot afford to waive evil, to make light of its impact, to ignore its presence in our world. We cannot afford to turn our eyes away from it because it is too much for us to bear. It is for this reason that we will turn to the passage we heard earlier. This story is one that directly follows the Christmas story, and it is one in which the reality of evil makes a real impact in the little town of Bethlehem. In this passage we will wrestle with the presence of real evil in the middle of the escape-to-Egypt narrative and what it means that in the midst of God’s plan to save His people, something absolutely horrible happens. With that said, let us pray.

            Oh Lord. God of Heaven and of Earth. Come.

            Oh Lord. Spirit of the Most High. Come.

            Oh Lord. Jesus the Suffering Servant. Come.

            Have mercy on us.

In our passage this morning, we have two different stories that coincide. One story, focusing on the Holy Family, follows Joseph as he receives a message from God to leave Bethlehem and go to Egypt and then to return following the death of Herod the Great. In the other story, we see Herod’s response to the Wise Men’s disobedience. In the section immediately before this one, we learn that the Wise Men had gone to Herod originally to inform him about the star and the child who would be king, not realizing that Herod would find this unwelcome news. Afterwards, they are directed by God, after leaving their gifts for the child, to leave in another direction and not return to see Herod. Herod, of course, eventually figures out that these Wise Men avoided him on their way back east, and in rage he kills the children of Bethlehem in order to rid himself of this new ‘king of the Jews.’

I want to draw our attention to the structure of this story, because I think that it is significant for how we are to read it. Matthew uses a Greek rhetorical structure called a “chiasm” in which the central point of a story is the one in-between two or more parallel structures. The chiasm in this passage is a simple A-B-A structure, where the “A” parts are the story of the Holy Family going to and leaving Egypt – highlighted by the repeated words of the angel “Rise, take the child and his mother…” – and the “B” part is Herod responding to the message of the Wise Men in the middle. What Matthew’s audience would have known upon hearing this story, then, is that the most importance piece of information here is the part in which Herod slaughters the children of Bethlehem. That is what Matthew, in using this rhetorical structure, is drawing our attention to.

Yet I do not think that this is how we often think regarding this passage. It is surprisingly easy to overlook it or to read this story in some unengaged fashion: “Ah, Joseph flees to Egypt, Joseph returns from Egypt, and during that time Herod kills some children.” Let us remind ourselves what is happening here: a man who has been given the title “king” by the Roman government, whose concern should be for the welfare of his people, hears that the prophesied king – the Messiah – has been born in Bethlehem. This ought to be good news. But he is so concerned for his continued lineage and power, his title given him by Rome, that he murders every child under the age of two in that village and the surrounding area. In our day and age, this would be like if a Democratic state representative who was afraid about not being elected in the next cycle decided to murder all the Republican voters in Woodlawn. To us, this is clearly ridiculous: how could a Republican in Woodlawn pose a threat to a Democrat running for office in Chicago? Why does he feel the need to murder these people?

Here is a man who loves his power and his position of power so much that he is willing to kill an entire village’s worth of babies and children in order to know that he has killed the one who is prophesied to take his place. Not only that, but get this! this is a man who believes prophecy enough to think that the Wise Men’s words are true and that this child-king truly is a threat to his power, and yet who also believes that he can intercept and prevent God’s plan through senseless violence. This is a man whose greatest achievement of his day was the expansion of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and yet this is a man who in the land of Judah repeats the very same evil of the ancient Pharaoh from the Book of Exodus, an act that the Jews identified as one of the chief representations of the work of Satan. In an ironic turn of events, Joseph and his family must flee to the land of Pharaoh to escape the Pharaonic evil that exists in the land of God’s people. All is not well, here.

What are our expectations when we hear a story like this one? Or when a preacher begins to exposit this sort of story? Like I mentioned in the intro, I think that our usual response to this sort of evil is to waive it, to placate, to turn our eyes away from thinking about the pure evil that this story brings to our attention. Even biblical commentators tend to go about this way, leading to some focusing on the typological aspects – this happened so that Jesus could be called a “prophet like Moses,” this happened so that Jesus could be sent to Egypt, etc. etc. Our tendency, when faced with this sort of evil, is to attempt to reason with it, to make sense of it, to rationalize it.

Yet Matthew’s commentary on this event does not give us hope for this sort of interpretation, like we would desire. There is no “but it was all-right because you know that babies go to heaven,” or “it all turned for the good.” No, this story records an absolutely unnecessary evil. Herod the Great will die in his own due time with no repayment for these crimes, no rebuke from the Roman authorities, no justice. Matthew doesn’t even help us out with what possible justice might look like for Herod. Wouldn’t it have been nice, if he had added those verses from Isaiah and Ezekiel describing the devil in hell? You might not even believe in hell, and yet the thought of Herod the Great, the murderer of babies, being tormented in hell – if we’re honest with ourselves – is a satisfying thought, to say the least.

What Matthew does add to the narrative, however, is a little quote from the book of Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Mt. 2:18)

There is no “starry-eyed” optimism in this word of prophecy. Rachel, the archetype and representative of the mothers of Israel, is weeping and weeping and weeping, and she refuses to be comforted. Matthew does not tell us whether she should be comforted or whether she will be comforted. Strangely enough, Matthew doesn’t even tell us anything more regarding the massacre of the innocents. He narrates it in the midst of the Christ-going-to-Egypt story, tags it with this prophecy, and then he leaves it, never mentioning it again.

What is the significance, then, of the deaths of a village worth of children at the hands of a greedy, power-hungry political figure in light of the overarching Gospel narrative? Why does Matthew take the time to share with us this bit of story, link it to OT prophecy, and tie it in with the broader narrative of Christ’s journey to and back from Egypt? Why include it at all? What is the Holy Spirit communicating to us here?

I wonder if the best way to deal with this passage is for us to consider another Gospel passage, this time from the Gospel of John, the one in which Jesus Himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. In John 11 we have already seen that Jesus knows that Lazarus is going to die, and He knows also that He bring Lazarus back from the dead. Jesus makes this explicit in 11:4. Yet still, when Jesus arrives on the scene, and He sees the weeping Mary and all the gathered mourners, the Scripture reads “He was deeply moved in His Spirit and greatly troubled.” Jesus asks, “Where have you laid him?” The mourners point the way, and we hear that incredible and well-known verse in John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”

In the verses that follow, we hear the attempts of the Jews around him to make theological sense of this weeping. Some say “See how He loved him!” but others say “Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” Famously, of course, Jesus then raises Lazarus from the dead.

But what should we make of Jesus weeping? And in a similar vein, what should we make of this Jeremiah prophecy “Rachel weeping for her children,” refusing to be comforted? In the middle of Jesus’ exile from the land of Judah, the personified “Rachel” weeps and refuses to be comforted; at the very beginning of Jesus’ triumphal procession to Jerusalem, Jesus Himself weeps. Jesus who holds the power over death, Jesus who will raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus who gives value and dignity to human death by promising us entrance into His Kingdom, this Jesus is the God who weeps over the death of man.

This tells us that the reality of evil is not insignificant in the eyes of the Lord. We suffer in our culture of avoiding judgment and being nice from a lack of seeing how seriously God takes the work of evil in our midst. And then for those who do take it seriously, all-too-often they take it seriously in a manner that is inconsistent with God’s nature – you know, that typical hellfire-and-brimstone sort of person. In our culture, we either think that God is permissive and okay-with-everything and He’s just chill, or that God is wrathful, indignant, and angry. But Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus tells us something different about God.

And Matthew’s Spirit-inspired inclusion of the massacre of the innocents tells us something too. God sees the reality of evil. He sees it every day. He does not need Twitter or Facebook or The New York Times to see the evil done both in the plain light of day and in secret, on the streets of Aleppo or in darker alleys of Chicago. He does not need National Geographic reporters or CNN to see the ways that people do wicked things for the sake of their own greed and power. He does not need a stethoscope to hear the condition of our hearts, wherein we do the same things – to be sure, on a smaller scale – when we advance our own greed and power at the expense of others in our own contexts.

There’s this beautiful but horrifying song by Sufjan Stevens on the Illinois album about the mass-murderer John Wayne Gacy, Jr., who resided somewhere on the North Side of the city. After recounting in song the narrative of this man, who murdered 33 people, wrestling with the question that Sufjan found repeated over and over again in his research “What was it that made this man this way?”, Sufjan sings – and this is a chilling line – “And on my best behavior I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.”

What is the significance, then, of the massacre of the innocents? What does it mean for us? Why should we hear this story? Why does Matthew present it to us? I am going to posit that this story has two things to tell us:

The First, is that the presence of real evil here in the early parts of Matthew sets the stage for the work that Jesus is going to do. Herod has done something truly, incredibly terrible, and we should be disgusted. But we should not be surprised. This is the “normal” mode of life here on planet Earth, the reality of evil is our reality. You and I do not kill babies, but we hold within us the same greed and power-hungry-ness that results, in the long run, in the real deaths of real people. This “normal” life, one in which death and destruction dominate our newsfeeds and televisions, is the one that Jesus came to declare war upon. Matthew shares with us through this narrative an image of who the real enemy is, and, in so doing, he tells us what is at stake for Jesus to come incarnate to the earth. Jesus’ mission is to eliminate death itself.

But the Second point, and I think this is just as important if not more, is that the reality of evil is to be lamented. The personification of Rachel is not wrong in weeping and refusing to be comforted. What is actually wrong is how hardened we have allowed ourselves to become toward real suffering and real pain. After all, Jesus, again, knowing well His power and His triumph, weeps over real suffering and real pain. He weeps over the way that Death has entered into Lazarus and his family’s lives. So I think that Matthew has described the narrative in this way so that we might pay attention to something that is worth lamenting. It is worthwhile to weep over children who are being slaughtered for the sake of a man’s power.

In fact, I would add, it would have been wrong if nobody had lamented these children, right? The weeping of Rachel, of the mothers of Bethlehem, does not make the real evil right – it doesn’t correct the wrong done – but it identifies the dead children as having value and purpose, and says, of their sudden deaths, “This is not right.” Lament does not make wrong things right, but it does grant dignity to those who have been wronged. To weep and weep for the children of Bethlehem is to say to the world “This is not right, this is not as it should be. There must be a better world than this.” Or, to put it the way Dr. Soong-Chan Rah does: “Lament is important truth telling.”

It is not enough for us to confess, in a blasé manner, that there is something wrong with the world and that the reality of evil is our reality, we must also participate in God’s lament for that reality. Matthew tells us of the death of children not just to set up the stakes of Christ’s work on earth, but also so we, alongside Rachel, can lament those who would have otherwise been unheard, unremembered, buried in the sea of atrocities that have occurred in our reality of evil since. When we lament, we join God in His emotional plea for our world to be reconciled to Him. We join with saying with God “This is not right.”

Lament, as I’ve said in the past, is not something that we do very well in the American church, so my challenge for us this morning is a very specific, small challenge. That challenge is something like this: When you hear / listen / watch / experience the reality of evil, as we so often do in our day and time, do not turn away from it or waive it off. Instead, respond with lamentation in prayer.

In some of these situations we can be the people who bring life to a world of death – such as when you pass a person in need of cash to catch a bus – but that is not always true. A lot of the time, you’ll be experiencing the reality of evil at a large distance, through the T.V., through your phone, through the internet, and maybe there isn’t anything you can do. But resist the temptation of fatalism that says “I cannot do anything, why should I pay attention?” My challenge to you is to mourn the evils that you see, cry and weep for them – or if you find crying and weeping hard like I do, pray for them – instead of passing on them. Be willing to open your heart to the pain of others, to feel their fears and concerns and pains.

This is not an easy thing to do, especially given the busyness of a community of people in Chicago. I recommend a practice like breath prayer for learning how to lament well in the midst of your busyness (and if you don’t know what breath prayer is, please ask me after service). But it is my sense that the practice of lament is only going to be increasingly important for us as a people as we move further into the age of social media.

You might ask: What are the benefits of lament? There’s another sermon hiding in that question. For today, all I will say is this: Jesus, the Living One, the Firstborn from the Dead, lamented a man whom He knew He would raise to life. He cries over human death and suffering, and I believe He welcomes us into joining Him in that lament.