Herod, 2025 version

Sermon for Christmas I, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: Matthew 2:13-18

 
A Merry Christmas to you all. I think for most of us, we had a good Christmas. We celebrated with family and friends, or had a quiet day, or maybe had to work and celebrated in another way. I have to think of my friend who is having her first Christmas without her mother and is having a hard time this season. Hearing her talk about it brings the day or two of celebration to a halt and the reality of life returns, but it doesn’t bother me. It is a reminder to me that my experience of Christmas is not shared by everyone, and our gospel reading this morning reflects this as well. Sometime after Jesus is born, Joseph and his family are warned by God to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous search to kill Jesus. We’re reading this just three days after Christmas, and tomorrow is the feast of the Holy Innocents, a commemoration of the death of all the children in and around Bethlehem, killed at Herod’s command. This is not a happy way to wind up our holiday season and it clashes with the popular scene of the wise men from the East offering their gifts to Jesus in peace and wonder. But this is life, and if we are honest, we all have these moments where the reality of life intrudes as a killjoy on happy moments. That doesn’t mean that we can never find true happiness. It just means that true happiness is the not pure experience that we long for.

We cannot read this passage without the cultural images of the wise men, also known as the Magi, that we’ve seen in pictures and paintings and in a crêche. That makes the story of Jesus’ family fleeing Herod harder to contemplate and easier to wave away. Curiously, Herod, the king of Israel becomes afraid, not angry, when he learns that these men are searching for Jesus. They say that Jesus is the king of the Jews, and that fear of a leader of a people who Herod was not a part of speaks to Herod’s basis of rule. He is not a leader so much as he is someone chasing after power, and by making power his sole prize he is afraid of anyone who has the power of peace to lead people. This makes the wise men’s description of Jesus as king a threat to the shaky foundation of Herod’s power by exposing how Herod has gained power - through force, threats, and murder. What this illustrates to us is that the humility, love, and divine justice Jesus brings is a threat to anyone who wields influence and power against those without power - and their reaction belies what motivates them. It shows where their weaknesses lie.

The holy family remain as exiles, refugees in Egypt until Herod dies a year or two later and the threat of death is gone. But this waiting period came with a cost to the male infants in Bethlehem: they were killed out of fear, their life standing meaningless before Herod’s lust for power and control. Matthew brings in a short passage from Jeremiah to remind us of the loss, of Rachel inconsolably weeping for her children who are no longer alive. This would have been a truly traumatic event, similar to the first-born of the Egyptian people being killed as the angel of death passed over the Hebrew slaves. But, even with Jesus’ later return, there is still grief in the land among those looking for the Messiah. The effect that Herod’s rule and attitude had on Judea would last well beyond his death, to become a generational trauma. Jesus’ contemporaries were looking for someone to heal their trauma and lead them out of their fears, and Jesus was there when they needed that healing the most as adults. With such a rough start to his life, hope and healing still prevails with Jesus because God guided him, and then guided others to him because he brought that hope and healing in the wake of Herod’s rule.

This is a story of our time as well, where we grieve over the loss of cultural identity, civility, and predictability in the face of cruelty and indifference among our current national leaders. It has made some of us uneasy while others feel that something broken in our nation is being fixed. But there is no denying that there is collateral damage to us that leaves us angry, confused, and fearful, for different reasons. This is felt acutely because unlike Jesus, we do not have an Egypt that we can flee to and wait until things settle down. We are stuck here, riding it out. We can choose to react in fear as Herod did in the face of what we feel is threatening us, or we can choose to trust the different path God is calling us to. Because even in our fear and anger, God is with us, blessing us with a promise that we are not abandoned, not left to the worst of ourselves. We are dealing with our version of Herod, and are reminded that Jesus did not enter, nor do we live in a world of constant joy and contentment as our celebration of Christmas hints at. Christmas is a time of relief, a reminder that joy and happiness can be found in difficult times.

God will lead us to a land where we will be ready for Jesus to show us how to find peace and joy among the hard times we go through individually in our lives and together as a community. Herod died long before Jesus taught us what love looks like, and it was Jesus’ persistent, compassionate, unconditional love that prevailed over Herod. So we too will prevail over the Herods of our time. There are wise men among us, not always speaking truth to power, but who instead point us toward a source of awe and wonder. That source is also where we find refuge and comfort from our fears. That source is Jesus, who we see at Christmas as an infant, full of love and hope for us. We do not need to flee or hide so long as we have faith in his love for us, and accept that love for ourselves, and then finally be able to love our neighbors as we are loved.