Christmas 9: The Horror of Christmas?

Jesus & Christmas part 9 -

The horror of Christmas?

‘...weeping and great mourning…weeping for children…[mothers] refusing to be comforted because they are no more.’

That could easily have been taken from any number of newspapers or media scripts over the last week describing the horrific realities of Newtown, USA.  Horrors that should have stirred our compassion and anger and tears and prayers.  But it is not.  It is taken straight from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth.  It’s from the Christmas story!  Not joyful songs of a birth but the bitter weeping of innocent deaths and bereaved mothers.

Evil in the Nativity

We are familiar with many of the nativity characters – angels and shepherds and Mary and Joseph and the donkey.  Our cute Christmas story books and children’s nativity sets and much-loved carols are full of these characters.  But one character is often forgotten, perhaps as we unconsciously swerve away from his repulsive actions?  He’s not in any toy nativity or pre-school drawing or popular carol.  Yet in God’s version of events in Matthew 2 he makes up a major portion of the story (10 of 33 verses, or 30% - more than Mary and Joseph put together).  He is sinister and evil and dark.  He is filled with hatred and fired by jealousy.  He is power hungry and ruthless.  Secular history knows him as brutal and heartless with no mercy or love.  His name is King Herod.  Insecure and threatened by the birth of a new king yet unable to identify precisely who Jesus is nor to hoodwink the wise men to reveal his location he sets about the systematic slaughter of all boys under the age of 2.

‘When Herod realized 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 time 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.”’  

(Matthew 2:16-18)

Humanity's Desperate Need

Recent events make it easier to imagine the horror of that moment 2000 years ago; a moment so similar to Newtown.  Human nature has not changed.  The world is still as it was – broken, filled with evil and wickedness.  And as desperately in need of a Saviour now as it was then.  Peter encourages us to be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that we have’ (1Peter 3:16).  Hope we can offer even in the midst of the most horrific of events.  The world needs a Saviour, and God loves us so much that in Jesus he has come as that Saviour.  

Making more of Christ at Christmas

Certainly and essentially fill your Christmas this year with joy and gladness and celebrating.  But perhaps also this year allow the full story; all its characters including Herod to inform your understanding of Christmas.  There is a reason God allowed Herod’s actions and a reason God had it recorded into the biblical account.  A brutally stark reminder that the world is broken and needs a Saviour.  And God came into the very heart of that evil and wickedness as Saviour.  Herod and his actions should repulse us, as should the realities of the tragedy in Newport.  Both should drive us with joy and desperation to Jesus, God with us, the Saviour the world and we so urgently need.