I wonder how many Christmas sermons you have heard in your life? I wonder how many tonnes of glitter we have collectively sprinkled on folded cards? How many donkeys have been coloured in during all-age gatherings?
I love Christmas, but there is a dark side to the Nativity story that rarely gets a mention in festive services. I have yet to see this part of the story feature on a Christmas card or tree ornament. But right at the core of the Christmas story is an episode of despair and tragedy: the slaughter of the innocents.
Matthew’s is the only Gospel that describes the events:
‘When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son’ (Matthew 2:13–15).
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity, who were two years old and under, in accordance with the timescale he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’
This difficult Christmas passage includes five important reminders for our work with children and families.
CHRISTMAS IS NOT A FAIRY STORY
Perhaps it is understandable that the mass killing of small children does not feature heavily in our yuletide celebrations. But we should think twice before we sanitise the Christmas message and edit out the awkward bits. Either all of scripture is God-breathed or none of it is. Either we accept God on his own terms or we don’t accept him at all.
So perhaps a closer look at this difficult part of the Bible will help us grasp afresh the power of the Christmas story in all its fullness, and help give us fresh vision for our ministry among children. We must help children gain a full and accurate picture of God. This means we help them from an early age to understand that there will be parts of God’s universe and Word that we don’t understand; that wrestling with these things is not wrong and that it is good to ask questions.
CHRISTMAS SHOWS US THAT PERSECUTION IS NORMAL
Oliver Cromwell famously told his portraitist to paint him as he saw him, ‘warts and all’. The Christmas story we are given in the Gospels has not had all the difficult parts airbrushed away. We are shown here that the world Jesus was born into was not an idyllic Christmas card tableau, but a hostile environment. Israel was an occupied territory. It was ruled over by the Romans and yet the Jewish King Herod was the one to order the killings.
King Herod was a vicious and vindictive person. It was not out of character for him to order the killing of small children; he ordered the execution of his own wife and three of his sons. According to historian Josephus, Herod ordered that a member of every family was to be killed at the time of his own death so that national mourning would be guaranteed.
God decided that his own son would be born during a brutal and cruel time in human history. Right from the start of his earthly life, Jesus is in danger from both the Roman Empire and a despotic Jewish king. However old we are, we all need to realise that following this Christmas child will also put our lives in danger. It is important that we help children grasp from the earliest age that there will be a cost to our discipleship.
CHRISTMAS DEMONSTRATES THE UNITY OF THE BIBLE
To escape the slaughter, Joseph takes Mary and Jesus away to Egypt. The story highlights the fragility of this tiny little Christmas family. Against the wealth of King Herod and the power of his soldiers, Joseph and Mary have few resources. They flee and become refugees in Egypt. After Herod dies, Joseph is warned in another dream that it’s time to come home. These twin dreams remind us of another Joseph who took God’s people to find refuge in Egypt. Joseph only appears once more in the New Testament, when Jesus is 12 years old. For the rest of Jesus’ life he has no earthly father. In a way, Jesus relies on his true and heavenly Father, thus demonstrating that God really is a father to the fatherless.
This is not the only time in the Bible that a cowardly king launched an attack on children. Back in Egypt, when a new Pharaoh had forgotten all about Joseph and what he had done to rescue the Egyptians from famine, this insecure Pharaoh orders the death of all baby boys, instructing the midwives to carry out a gender-selective extermination. Similarly, when the wise men alert the spineless King Herod about the birth of the Messiah he also tries to wipe out his enemy by a mass killing of small children. It is harder for things to get much darker than the wholescale slaughter of children, but in the middle of this despicable mass murder come signs of grace.
This time it is not an escape from Egypt, but an escape to Egypt. Matthew, the Gospel writer, draws attention to some of the similarities at play between Moses’ and Jesus’ story by quoting the prophecy of Hosea: ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.’
When Moses came of age, God told him to go to Pharaoh and demand that he let his people go. He described Israel as God’s firstborn son. So now Matthew takes this verse about the Exodus and applies it to Jesus. We realise that Israel was just a foreshadowing of Jesus’ coming into the world. Jesus is the Son of God that Israel failed to be. Jesus is not just the saviour of Israel, but the saviour of the world. We are being prepared to see Jesus as a greater saviour than Moses ever was. Jesus:
- Upgrades the law of Moses
- Delivers his new law from a mountain in his Sermon on the Mount
- Receives encouragement from Moses at the transfiguration
- Feeds God’s people in the desert
When I was a child it seemed that Christmas took for ever to arrive, but we see that in God’s story Christmas came after thousands of years of preparation. Can we help our children make the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament? Can we help them read at another level and come to enjoy scripture more fully?
Can we help them learn the patience of waiting for the promises of God to be fulfilled, even if they take millennia rather than minutes to fulfil?
CHRISTMAS REMINDS US THAT DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES ARE NORMAL
Ironically, Christians have sometimes idealised the family. The expected norm is a neat nuclear family with a mum, a dad, 2.4 children and perhaps a dog. It’s strange that there are so few examples of this kind of family in the Bible. The first human family includes a murderer and his victim. The foundational family of the nation of Israel includes a barren couple that resorts to surrogacy to find an heir, who is then estranged due to familial jealousy.
The 12 tribes of Israel owe their origins to a fertility feud between Rachel and Leah. This is not to mention Esther, the adopted daughter of Mordecai, or David’s care for Mephibosheth. We need to make sure that we affirm the range of family experiences children may have come from in our teaching.
Christmas is a time when families are under pressure. More domestic violence incidents take place at Christmas than at any other time of the year. More suicides take place around this time because many feel so lonely. The Christmas story speaks hope to those in fragmented family situations. God himself chooses to allow his own son to be born in turbulent times, into a fragile and unusual family.
CHRISTMAS REMINDS US OF THE NEED TO PROTECT THE VULNERABLE
Back in the Exodus, five brave women demonstrated the grace of God. Two brave midwives refused to kill Jewish male babies when they were born, despite the direct orders of Pharaoh. Meanwhile, brave Jochebed and her daughter Miriam did everything they could to protect young Moses from being discovered. When it was not possible to conceal his identity any longer, they managed to engineer the possibility that Jochebed could be his foster mum before Pharaoh’s daughter herself adopted him. Who could have known that the baby in the bulrushes would grow up to become the saviour of his people?
In our nativity story, another slaughter of innocent children is afoot. This time it is not a pagan ruler that seeks the extermination of the children of God’s people, it is a compromised king of Israel that seeks to murder young Jewish boys. For King Herod, just as for Pharaoh, these small children were seen as a threat to his power; a threat to his throne. This time a saviour greater than Moses is being born. This time his foster carer was not his mother, but his earthly father, Joseph.
This Christmas, in light of the horror of the slaughter of the innocents, could we become even more sensitised to the plight of the innocents around us today? Remembering that Moses was a fostered and adopted child, and remembering that Jesus himself was raised by a man who was not his biological father, could we consider how we, the Church, can show compassion to those in our towns and cities who have no families to look after them?
There are 4,000 children in the UK still waiting for adoption: children who are considered too old, too troubled or too damaged to be given the love they need. While we are listening to one more cosy Christmas sermon, sprinkling more glitter and distributing the crayons for more colouring sheets, let’s not forget those for whom the dark side of Christmas is a current reality.
