Story by
Richard W. Swanson
http://www.thelutheran.org/article/a...e_id=6830&id=1


Emmanuel fleeing
Matthew's Gospel reveals a God who comes into creation for us and, with us, runs for his life


The Christmas story in Matthew’s Gospel isn’t made of the sentimental stuff of Sunday school Christmas programs. It opens with a much starker scene. There are no shepherds. There is no host of angels praising God and singing. Instead, one lone angel dashes onto the scene with a desperate message: They are seeking to kill the child.

Herod, that puppet of Rome, that corrupt and debased pretender to the throne, has dispatched armed men to kill all the babies of Bethlehem, every child 2 years old or younger. He imagines that killing the children will protect his shaky claim to the title, King of the Jews.

As a result of the angel’s message, the baby is snatched from his bed, held tight in his mother’s arms as she runs for her life. The toddler’s eyes are big as he sees real fear in his mother’s eyes, in his father’s actions.

Imagine the child, growing up as a refugee, away from his family’s clan home. Imagine the day he asks why he has no cousins or aunts or uncles. Perhaps his mother can say nothing, but only looks down and away, silently trying to control her breathing. Perhaps his father simply leaves the room.

Perhaps, finally, they answer his question, weaving dread and terror into the story of the family’s purpose, the family’s hope, the family’s faith. Jesus must have asked. Jesus must have remembered the pained answers.

Although the slaughter Herod ordered happened in a Jewish community of peasants descended from David, artists typically have set the scene elsewhere—in Europe or, more recently, in Central America or Africa. It would appear that when Jesus was chased from his home, he joined refugees who walked out of Sudan in the middle of the night, children lost from their home, lost to their parents, traveling and preyed upon by lions and packs of soldiers alike.

When Jesus is grabbed from his bed as his family flees, he has company on every continent, in every century. Fleeing with him are Cherokee and Lakota, Dinka and Tutsi, Roman Catholic and Mennonite, Serbs and Bosnians and Croatians. Fleeing with him are Jews of every generation since the exile into Babylon.

In Matthew’s story, God comes into the creation to be with us—Emmanuel. And with us, Emmanuel, Jesus, runs for his life.

It’s not only genocide that hunts us. Disease and drunken drivers snatch little children from their mothers’ arms every day. My sister is living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, living and losing ground—muscle-by-muscle, nerve-by-nerve, day-by-day. Friends of mine are living with the twisted aftermath of sexual assault, holding together lives that insist on fraying and unraveling, day-by-day.

My students at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, S.D., work to build a durable education that will let them serve God’s creation. But as they build, the ground shifts under their feet: a grandmother dies, a father loses his job or the family loses the farm. Everybody’s family is hunted by disaster, and, in the face of disaster, everybody is family, including Jesus.

That is the point of the Incarnation: God is with us—Emmanuel. God is the least of these, our sisters and brothers who are hunted and haunted by disaster.

Listening for Rachel

Matthew does more than simply show Emmanuel fleeing with his sisters and brothers. Matthew brings in Rachel who wails for all her children, wails as she has for every generation since the exiles were paraded naked past her tomb on their way to Babylon. Jeremiah heard her voice in his generation. Matthew hears it also in his and gives her voice to our generation as well, gives it to every generation and teaches us to listen for Rachel forever and everywhere.

The cries of Rachel ring through all of Matthew’s story. At the end of it, Jesus is caught by Pilate and executed, the last of the babies of Bethlehem to be killed by an official who owes his position to Rome. But here again, it’s not simply Jesus who is tortured.

Read the story carefully at this point: We are shown scenes of Jesus being examined in front of the chief priest in Jerusalem. We are accustomed to interpretations that place the blame for Jesus’ death on the Jewish council that hands him over to the Roman governor. We are accustomed to naïve readings of the trial in front of Pilate—ones that imagine this Roman overlord could be intimidated by a crowd of subject people, that miss the bitter irony of this painful scene.

This is not a time for naïve interpretations. Study the actions of 20th-century Jewish councils. In a ghetto, the Jewish council was given responsibility by Nazis to maintain order and deliver families for deportation to the death camps. If victims weren’t delivered to the trains or if an uprising broke out among the Jews, Nazi soldiers rampaged through the streets, killing indiscriminately.

The stories from those days are full of scenes in which Nazis toy with leaders of the Jewish community, forcing them to act against their people, twisting them and tying their hands until they can act only as puppets in bizarre and brutal shows. In those shows, the Jewish councils are made to be the tools of Nazi ventriloquists, forced to say what those with real power want them to say, forced to take responsibility for brutality and murder so the Nazis can pretend to keep their own hands clean.

“Let their blood be on us,” say the Jewish council members because any other words would anger their Nazi masters and because of the threat of greater violence against the entire Jewish community.

Pilate’s bloody hands

This isn’t a time for naïve interpretations. Remember that just before Pilate vanished from history, he was removed from office because he had become too violent, too cruel even for the Roman Empire. Pilate was in control, and his puppet-master hands were bloody. The Jewish council was doing just what he created them to do: trying desperately to keep the peace, even if it meant handing over one of their own.

Jews living in the time of Jesus would have known this, whether or not they blamed the members of the Jewish councils. And they would have tasted the bitter irony.

In Matthew’s story, Pilate aims not only to crucify one more Jew. He aims to torture and kill the whole Jewish faith, to kill particularly its heart—the expectation that God may be counted upon to defend justice.

There is a resurrection coming at the end of Matthew’s story. Be sure of that. But notice that the resurrection does not remove Pilate from power or diminish Rome’s ability to invade Judea and destroy the temple 40 years later. There is a resurrection coming, to be sure, but notice that the witnesses who meet the resurrected Jesus are mixed in their reaction: some believe and some doubt.

Matthew’s story is fully aware that Rome still runs the world and babies still die and families are still uprooted. Matthew’s story knows that both belief and doubt are justified in this complicated creation. Maybe that is why Jesus sends the whole mixed crowd out, believers and doubters alike, sends them all to baptize and teach. There is a deep wisdom here, a mature hope and a poignant promise. In the matter of making disciples who can carry good news effectively in a dangerous world, those who have earned their doubts may be as essential as those who are overwhelmed by belief.

We will come to Easter soon enough. For now, we are wound up in Matthew’s wise and complicated story of Christmas, of fear and joy, of Incarnation and execution. Easter will come. Until it does, we will wait with God’s people, with God’s whole creation—eagerly longing for justice and life.

And we will listen to Matthew’s story, hoping to learn its deep and impatient wisdom. Matthew’s story links Jesus with all the children who do, and do not, escape disaster—in Bethlehem, in Auschwitz, in Rwanda, in Darfur and throughout history in every human family. Matthew’s story also links us with all of those children because when God is with us, God is with all of us.

Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas to us all.

http://www.thelutheran.org/article/a...e_id=6830&id=1