In the short but terrifying time period of 361-363 of the common era, Christians who thought their safety had been assured by the Edict of Milan in 313, found themselves again under direct persecution by the Roman imperial government. Not all of them: the policy of the Emperor Julian was to single out Nicene Christians (those who believed in the existence of Christ from the beginning of time) and favour the Donatist splinter group in North Africa who thought they were the innocent persecuted victims. Julian tried to divide them against each other.
And it was in this period that Bishop Optatus of Milevis, in Numidia, North Africa, preached the first Christmas sermon we have on record. His Scripture text was the massacre of the Holy Innocents. Why? To try to encourage and strengthen his community in the face of the threat of death, to believe in the surpassing love of God, that death is not the end, and that their faith would see them through.
In our readings for this Sunday, the Revised Common Lectionary uses the complete text describing the slaughter of the male infants and children who came under the sword of the Roman army to be sure none of them would grow up to usurp the throne of Herod. The Roman Missal takes out the text specific to the feast of the Holy Innocents and presents just the beginning and the end, to put the focus on Joseph’s decision to take the family and emigrate to Egypt until Herod was no longer a threat, then return to Galilee.
The Bible, as we know, was not written by journalists who adhered strictly to factual accounts of events. Texts such as these were stories told to make a theological point, and the point here was quite simply that the massacre of infants in the time of the baby Jesus mirrored the murder of the Hebrew boy babies by Pharaoh. Except here, Egypt served as the place of refuge, not danger. The family’s return paralleled the Exodus of the enslaved Hebrew people to freedom.
So let’s pick it apart. I’m indebted to Scripture scholar Werner Weinreich for these eye-opening aspects of the story that set it in a rather different light.
First, the majority of scholars doubt that these events ever happened. They’re not attested in contemporary historical sources (although Herod’s cruelty was.) Weinreich writes,
“Though Herod was ruthless when he came to deal with his enemies, he was not so stupid politically as to slaughter the babes of Bethlehem.”
It’s possible that the account was parachuted into Matthew’s Gospel from another source. The infancy narrative here differs in both style and content from the rest of this Gospel, and also from the Christmas story in Luke. Mark and John don’t address the birth of Jesus.
Both Joseph of the Hebrew Bible, and Joseph of the New Testament, are shown to be obedient in following the messages they receive in dreams. Joseph set out with Mary and baby Jesus by night. The Hebrew slaves left Egypt by night. On their return, Joseph settles the family in Galilee, where the adult Jesus was to pursue his public ministry – and where Matthew’s community may have been located.
Matthew makes a telling distinction between the words “children” and “son” in Greek. The baby boys who were slaughtered were called teknah, children, even though the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible in Greek, uses huion. For Matthew only Jesus is a huios, a son, the Son of God.
In our Gospel where it says,
“This was to fulfill what had been spoken…through the prophet,”
this is not to make a shocking claim that the murder of infants was the will of God. The Greek means,
“to make [the saying] come true.”
It’s a set-up to give Scriptural warrant to the idea that Jesus was to return to his own land in exodus from Egypt.
Today our screens are filled with images of children killed, maimed, orphaned and traumatized in lands where attacks are mounted against civilians as a tool of terror. For some it may spoil Christmas, to see the results of deadly violence against children. Perhaps we can put the two together as motivation to take action to make the death of children no longer collateral damage in time of war, but an atrocity to be eliminated from the face of the earth.
© Susan K. Roll
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
