Mostly our Christmas readings tend to sanitise the historical event with a focus on miracles, angels, light, gifts, bucolic shepherds and exotic wise men. Cue the orchestral music, the peaceful candles and cozy cows. Which is not entirely unreasonable, given the fact that the events of that night instigated a cosmic shift in the trajectory of the human story from tragedy to glory. All memory is impacted by the outcomes of events, and a hard labor that ends in a joyful healthy baby is recalled differently than one that results in a stillbirth. I love putting out my wreath and hanging stockings and ornaments just as much as anyone. Beauty and community and joy are central to this story.
But the second half of Matthew 2, after the kings and gifts, is as horrific as any story ever told. And as horrific as the nightly news from the area in 2023. Herod can't find the individual infant that his constituents are beginning to suspect could be the answer to prophecies, the awaited king, the potential disruption to a political and social order where he and his court are quite comfortable? Well then, just send in overwhelming force to indiscriminately kill all infant boys. To be safe, given the imprecise timing of stars and camel-paced approaches, all boys two years old and under.
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, refusing to be comforted because they are no more . . . not the phrases we put on our Christmas cards. But certainly the lived experience of most of the world. Including the same area today, where the powers with weapons have justified killing 8,663 children among the 21 thousand (mostly) civilians killed so far.
This story is one of the many I'd prefer to edit out of the narrative. But as a mom who once scooped kids and ran from evil men with guns shooting at us and our neighbours, as a doctor who has been present at the moment of too many child deaths to count, as an aging senior who prays for and supports so many families facing danger . . . I think this horrific chapter needs to be included. The incarnation does not magically make life immediately perfect, not even safe. And the need for the infiltration of God's ways into our world is seen in the blood of the babies. It's a serious story with real consequences. Evil really is evil. Jesus doesn't shy away from the worst our world can conjure. He entered real weeping, and because of that the end of the story will be no more tears.
I call my preferred movie genre "dark and redemptive", because that's the truth of the world. Walking into darkness and not sugar coating the losses. BUT . . walking through that to light.
Merry Christmas from the Bundibugyo Team
(since it's the 29th of December, probably incumbent upon us to remind any readers with end-of-year impulse to plot-twist some stories on our side of the globe towards the beatific . . .
Christ School Bundibugyo, BundiNutrition, and the Myhres, all plod on by your kindness.)
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