Tag: 9/11

Where is the Hope in the Slaughter of the Innocents? (Matthew 2:13-23, Christmas 1 Year A)

Matthew 2:13-23

Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents; Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0

Sometimes, Christians tell stories of miraculous answers to prayer where they are saved from a disaster. Around the time of 9/11, I heard one about a Christian who should have been on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers, but whose circumstances changed unexpectedly and they missed the flight.

Here is one I read recently, from a respected pastor:

I remember once almost booking a trip to Prague. I’d planned it perfectly—a romantic getaway for Vicky and me. My finger hovered over the “Book Now” button, but something in my spirit said no. It didn’t feel right. I hesitated and didn’t book it. Weeks later, there was a massive explosion in the very square where we would have been staying.

Admittedly, that pastor is making a different point, about how God sometimes says ‘no’ because he is preparing something better for us. But I still read the account and wondered about who might have been present at the site of the explosion.

And something like this is one of the concerns we bring to the disturbing account of Herod the Great’s order to kill babies and toddlers in Bethlehem, whereas Jesus, Mary, and Joseph miraculously escape.

How are we going to tackle this troubling story? It naturally falls into three acts: the escape, the slaughter, and the return. These will be our guide to the flow of the story and what Matthew is saying.

Firstly, the escape:

Just as he did when Mary fell pregnant by the Holy Spirit, Joseph hears an angel of the Lord in a dream, and they escape to Egypt. That would have been financially easy for well-off Jews of their day, but it was certainly not a preferred option[1]. And while it is debatable whether Jesus’ family was poor, they were certainly not wealthy, so this was not an easy decision.

And yes, that makes Jesus, Mary, and Joseph refugees, something we might remember in today’s fevered politics of immigration. The fact they returned later does not negate that, as some have tried to claim.

Right from the beginning, then, pain and suffering cast their shadow over the life of Jesus. It will also be so for his followers.

In doing so, Jesus is like Moses, who was also rescued from certain death as a baby at the hands of Pharaoh. It is one sign that Jesus will be the One greater than Moses, who was prophesied.

That gets further underlined when Matthew, as he does so often and especially in the birth stories, quotes Scripture as being fulfilled. In verse 15 he cites Hosea 11:1,

Out of Egypt I have called my son.

In other words, he makes a parallel to the Exodus, which again was led by Moses. And just as in Old Testament texts such as this one Israel was called God’s son, so now Jesus is supremely God’s Son – not only because of the virginal conception by the Holy Spirit, but also because Jesus will fulfil all that Israel was meant to be, but failed to be, due to sin.

Even – and perhaps especially because – suffering and injustice are at work, what we see here is that Jesus’ ministry of salvation is being foreshadowed, maybe even beginning, in his infancy. The One greater than Moses, the True Israel, will lead his people through and from suffering to salvation. In the midst of the darkness, the light of Christ is shining.

Is that not reason to praise God? Even in this darkest of stories, God is working his purpose out.

And if God has preserved us through trials, are we listening to know what our place in those purposes is?

Secondly, the massacre:

There is a lot to say here. There are those who think the story didn’t happen, and that Matthew made up this story to fit with the fulfilment of a Scripture. However, if that’s what he did, then that makes Matthew a pretty awful person, and I don’t think that’s sustainable on the tone of the rest of his Gospel.

The big objection is that there is no historical record of the ‘slaughter of the innocents.’ All sides agree that it is consistent with Herod’s vile character. We know he had family members whom he regarded as political rivals killed. We know he even arranged for a number of nobles to be executed on the day of his own death, so that there would be grieving in the land. He obviously knew that few would grieve his own death.

But the reality is, horrible as it sounds, that the killing of male babies and toddlers in Bethlehem was probably political small fry in comparison to all his other atrocities. The violent acts that get reported by ancient sources like Josephus tend to be ones of national importance. This would not have been so, especially given that working from our best estimates of Bethlehem’s population at the time, probably around twenty youngsters in an insignificant town were slain[2].

That is still twenty too many, and it is still unbearably wicked. And I am working from the assumption that Matthew has given us an entirely plausible account.

Building on that, this is not the only place in Scripture where we see a juxtaposition of deliverance for some but suffering for others. To give one other example, when persecution breaks out against the early church in the Acts of the Apostles, many are imprisoned, Simon Peter is freed from his cell by an angel, but others are executed.

Many years ago, I heard a story about a massacre of some missionaries, who lived together in a compound. Many were killed, but others escaped. The survivors returned to their homeland, where a memorial service was held. As you can imagine, people struggled there with the fact that some were murdered but others were not. A speaker at the memorial service said, “God delivered all the missionaries. He delivered some of them from suffering, but he delivered others through suffering.”

The slaughter of the innocents is the most graphic telling of why Jesus needed to come. This is the level of wickedness in our world. Human sin and depravity is such that we will even not spare the most vulnerable and the most innocent for the sake of our own comfort, status, or financial gain. It is just as true today. While some abortions do happen because of serious medical complications and other distressing reasons, there are others that happen because of couples who are unwilling to make the financial sacrifices necessary to raise a child. If the Assisted Dying Bill gets successfully through Parliament, there will be elderly people in this country put under emotional pressure to end their lives so that greedy relatives can get their hands on their inheritance sooner.

Make no mistake, the slaughter of the innocents is not just something terrifying that happened two thousand years ago. Parallels are still happening today. And they will continue until people bow the knee to Jesus.

For Jesus is God’s remedy for all the violence and hatred in the world. Jesus, who escaped suffering here, would one day go to the Cross where he would absorb the sin of the world for all of us.

God had planned this from the beginning. God had created this world out of love, but love is something that takes risks, including the risk of rejection. God knew from the outset that it could and would go wrong, and that a rescue plan was needed. That is why Revelation speaks of Jesus as ‘the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.’

Even here, there is hope. For when Matthew looks for an appropriate Old Testament text, he finds one in Jeremiah 31 that imagines the matriarch Rachel weeping in her grave as the exiles are marched off to Babylon. That sounds relentlessly bad, doesn’t it? But in that chapter, the disaster of the Exile leads to God’s rescue plan. For it climaxes in the promise of the New Covenant. And for Christians, that means Jesus.

Even in the darkness, God’s light in Christ is still shining. May we remember that.

Thirdly, the return:

Once again, Joseph has an angelic visitation during a dream. What a man Joseph was, for being open to God speaking to him. We laud Mary for her example of discipleship in agreeing to carry the Messiah in her womb, but Joseph deserves praise, too. He is an example of true faith to us as well.

When the family returns, Joseph also shows he is astute. Not Bethlehem, because although Herod is now dead, his son Archelaus is in charge of that area. He was every bit as bad, if not worse, than his father[3].

Joseph opts for Nazareth, where according to Luke he and Mary came from. It was politically insignificant, a small settlement of about five hundred people[4]. There is no way the sophisticated urban elites from Jerusalem would have ever had Nazareth on their shortlist for the upbringing of the Messiah.

But if the town was inconsequential to them, it certainly wasn’t to God. In his eyes, Nazareth was spiritually significant – something Matthew makes clear with a quotation that is a wordplay[5]. That quotation, ‘He will be called a Nazarene’, in verse 23, does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament. However, it was a common practice to make Hebrew puns by what was called ‘revocalising’ a word, which basically meant putting in a different selection of vowels. The best theory is that Matthew has revocalised the Hebrew word ‘nezer’ to make ‘Nazarene.’

If he has done that – and I think he has – then ‘nezer’ is the word for ‘branch’ in the prophecies that the Messiah will come from the ‘nezer’ or ‘branch’ of David’s line. The Messiah growing up in obscure Nazareth? Oh yes. What is insignificant in the world’s eyes is significant to God.

Now if that is true, what about those of us who do not live in our great metropolis or indeed in another major city today? Who cares about these places? God does. Let others write off the places we live in. God doesn’t. He cares about them and has plans for them.

For our part, let us be open to God’s leading in the places where he has called us to serve him. Let us be modern-day Josephs, attentive to the voice of God in our lives, especially in the Scriptures.

People who know their Methodist history should get this. We make a lot of the fact that John and Charles Wesley grew up in Epworth in Lincolnshire. For many years, we even had a publishing house named after Epworth. But who would have heard of Epworth were it not for the Wesleys? God had other ideas, just as he did for Nazareth.

What does God want to do here, and who does he want to raise up as his servants in this place, who might even go on to have a wider influence for Christ?

Let us be on the lookout.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p109.

[2] Keener, p111.

[3] Keener, p113.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Keener, pp113f for this and what follows.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 7: And Finally (Philippians 4:1-9)

Philippians 4:1-9

For many years now, ITN’s News At Ten bulletin has had the tradition of the ‘And Finally’ item: a lighter item of news with which to close the broadcast after half an hour of unremitting doom.

The tradition continues to this day, and even has its own website. Going there, I discovered that recent stories included a girl from Sunderland whose message in a bottle reached Sweden; a man who has made a calendar from pictures of the M60 motorway; and another man who hopes to be the first disabled skier to reach the South Pole.

When we get to Philippians chapter 4, we’re getting into ‘And Finally’ territory in the letter. It’s the final chapter. We might have thought Paul was about to sign off at the beginning of chapter 3 which begins with the word ‘Finally’, but like the enthusiastic preacher that just means, ‘Here come another two chapters.’

But now, and in next week’s reading, Paul is wrapping up his thoughts. This is almost like the ‘Any Other Business’ section of a committee meeting. There are a last few items he wants to cover that he hasn’t been able to fit under any of the themes earlier in the letter.

The ‘AOB’ we shall cover this week are mainly matters of pastoral wisdom; next week we’ll look at some personal remarks Paul makes.

Firstly, stand firm:

Verse 1:

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

Stand firm in what sense? Note that Paul begins with the word ‘Therefore.’ He’s referring back to what he’s just said, which I preached about last week. He urged his readers to stay focussed on Christ and the end of all things rather than leaving God out of the picture and only concentrating on earthly desires and making an idol of sensual yearnings.

This is a ‘stand firm’ in the sense of our lifestyle. To choose this way of life is not always easy. We will be subjected to pressure from our society. We are bombarded with messages, not only in advertising, that tell us we should buy things we don’t need. You could even argue that our economy depends on us doing so. If you want to see this in action, go back to 9/11 and remember that the first thing President George W Bush told the American people to do afterwards was ‘go shopping.’

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Christians cannot enjoy good things. Of course we can, when we can in all conscience do so with thankfulness to God. But we have a higher calling than just satisfying materialistic desires.

Pray too for younger Christians living among the pressure to turn all romantic relationships into sexual ones at an early stage, rather than waiting for marriage.

And the church has got sucked into this, oscillating from its prude-like past to validating this, that, and all sorts of sexual experiences, to the point where many single Christians have felt alienated. But their witness – often costly – to the truth that ultimate meaning is not found in a romantic relationship but in Christ is one we need to hear, but which has been devalued.

So firstly, let’s stand firm in seeking our meaning and our value in Christ and in eternity.

Secondly, be united:

 2 I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

What has happened here? Two women who had been co-workers with Paul in spreading the Gospel have now so fallen out with each other that he needs to ask someone else to mediate in order to restore the relationship. Of course, we don’t know anything about people falling out with each other in the church today, do we?

Except that every time I say something like that in a sermon I get reactions that include nervous laughter and awkward facial expressions.

Because, tragically, today we know only too well. I expect you can tell tales of arguments and verbal fisticuffs in church circles.

My problem comes when people try to laugh it off or minimise it. “Oh, that’s just Mrs Jones, she’s always like that.”

I’m sorry, that just won’t do. People get hurt. Christian witness gets damaged.

Now maybe as a minister I end up in the firing line more than other Christians, especially when I don’t do what some people want me to, but I can tell you stories of when church members have made up false stories about me, and – with no exaggeration – libelled both my wife and me.

We talk about the Internet being a Wild West where keyboard warriors think they can say anything they like, however hurtful, behind the protection of a screen, and – they hope – anonymity. But similar things have been happening in churches for years.

And it’s serious, because the Gospel is a message of reconciliation. It’s not just personal, private reconciliation with God through the forgiveness of our sins – although it is that. It’s also about being reconciled to one another, and the building of a new community that is a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom.

So our commitment to good and healthy relationships in the church matters. Let’s never forget that Jesus died for our unity.

Thirdly, be positive:

4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Now I’ll be honest with you and say this is the section of today’s sermon that I most have to preach to myself. For those of you who don’t know, I live with depression. It runs in my family. I am blessed in that mine does not require medication.

So I can read this list of positive qualities to which Paul calls us – rejoicing, gentleness, turning anxiety to prayer and finding the peace of God – and know that too often I can be miserable, grumpy, and despairing. Maybe a negative incident will have triggered me. But sometimes, the dark cloud just seems to blow in over my life.

And maybe some of you also struggle to rejoice and be positive, too. The Good News for us is that these qualities of rejoicing, gentleness, and peace are not simply things that can be flicked on like a switch – if only they could – but are an outworking of the Gospel. They come to us as Jesus invites us to get our eyes back on him and away from ourselves.

Yes, every one of these flow from Jesus and the Gospel. His love for us despite our sin is a source of wonder and hence of rejoicing. His grace, mercy, and forgiveness engender gentleness in us, because we want to be like him in response. His trustworthiness and his reign at the Father’s right hand give us confidence to pray and reason to be peaceful rather than anxious.

Some of us will express this by jumping for joy. Others of us, especially more introverted types like me, will do it in a quieter way. And yes, my kids have asked me, “Dad, is there anything that gets you excited?” Actually, there is a good number of things that do, it’s just that excitability is not my default state of mind.

Even if circumstances are discouraging, let’s get our minds on Jesus and the Gospel. Because, as the title of a recent Christian worship music project says, we may have downcast souls but we can still have expectant hearts.

Fourthly and finally, be focussed:

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

Too often in the church we are what one author called ‘cultural Christians.’ It’s been happening since the earliest centuries of the church. We profess faith in Christ, but we imbibe so much of the surrounding culture that it dictates our thoughts and affections more than Christ does. Think of what we watch on TV, the books or magazines that we read, the music or other entertainment that we enjoy. All these things have their own moral values behind them, which may or may not be compatible with Christian faith.

I believe this is one strong reason why a lot of our moral and ethical decision-making as Christians is often indistinguishable from the world, when Jesus expects us to be distinct.

I’m not saying that we should only listen to Christian music and only read Christian books – although frankly a lot more reading of good Christian literature would make an improvement to the spiritual temperature in many churches. But we must be careful what captures our hearts and minds. That is why Paul says we need to take care to fill our minds with what is good, pure, and beautiful.

And if we need to fill our minds with that which is good and godly, the other side of the coin is that we are not to empty our minds. One of the dangers with some forms of meditation that can accompany yoga classes and other practices is that it is based on emptying the mind. But if we empty our minds, then we leave them vacant for all sorts of unhelpful and unsavoury things. It is far better to take a Christian approach to meditation based on the sort of things Paul advocates here, where we fill our minds with what is good and virtuous.

So it’s worth seeking out recommendations of Christ-honouring and beautiful art and culture. And if we find ourselves in a situation where someone wants us to empty our minds in order to meditate, then we either need to withdraw or we need to disregard their instruction and meditate on a verse or passage of Scripture. These are practices that will help us focus on the truth and beauty of our God.

Conclusion

So these four items of Any Other Business are not immediately related to each other – standing firm, being united, positive, and focussed – but together they do form good practices for formation in Christ and hence for Christian discipleship. I commend them to you, and next week I’ll finish my series on Philippians with another virtuous discipline – thankfulness.

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What I Wrote After 9/11

So today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ll leave learned reflections on the interim to better commentators. In particular, I’ll point you to Will Willimon’s challenging reflection.

But I remembered something I wrote at the time. 9/11 (or 11/9 in British English) was a Tuesday. At that time, I wrote a regular Christian column in the local newspaper where I lived, the Medway Messenger.  The Messenger was published on a Friday, and I had to have my copy in a couple of days ahead. That week I had written something, but the magnitude of the terrorist attacks meant I needed to write something fresh and email it in.
I’m going to reproduce below what I actually wrote. All copy for newspapers risks being edited, and mine was. Savagely. It was cut only to leave the parts about the terrorists deserving the judgement of God. I think it ended with the paragraph that concludes, ‘there is no forgiveness for the terrorists’.

Why? There are two possible explanations. One is that my piece was published in a week when the paper was celebrating a relaunch, and they were keen to devote many trees to praising their own success. Some of that appeared on the same page as my article.

The other possibility is that they didn’t like the tenor of my piece. As you will see, it concludes that every single one of us needs mercy, and that God’s mercy can scandalously extend to the most evil of human beings. They may have been offended by the Gospel.

Would I change anything now? Certainly not the emphasis on mercy! We have a scandalous gospel, and it needs celebrating. In the following fortnight, I preached two sermons to help my congregations come to terms with what had happened. In the second one, I preached from Isaiah 30, with its message of woe to those who trusted in horses and went down to Egypt. Might there be a word of judgement from God on the West in what happened? I preached that sermon twice, and in one of them a worshipper publicly argued with me in the middle of the sermon about that. She then refused to share The Peace with me.

I might say different things about President Bush, and pick up on his offensive remark at the time that the way for Americans to respond to terrorists was to go shopping.

But see what you think. My full, unedited script follows below the asterisks.

************

Where were you when you heard that JFK had been shot? That was the question of my parents’ generation. I don’t know: I was only three years old at the time, and my family would not own a television set for another two years.

Where were you when you learned that Princess Diana had died? That’s easier: I had just moved into Medway, was living in temporary accommodation in Lordswood, and was due to start work here the next day.

Now the new question for our generation is, where were you when you heard of the plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? I was sitting here at my desk, when my wife came in from work. I had not long emailed my regular column to the paper. “Isn’t it terrible, these terrorist attacks in America?” she called out.

“What attacks?” I asked. We turned on the TV and found ourselves affixed with a morbid glue to ITN. If only it were a Bruce Willis movie.

That original column seems less important now. Maybe it will be printed one day – who knows? I just had to write something different. My thoughts are all over the shop; perhaps yours are, too. But here goes.

Before anything else, let me plead with you not to assume that your Muslim neighbours are all secret terrorists. Whatever my own (quite fundamental) disagreements with the Muslim faith, I know enough to realise that many Muslims share the same abhorrence of terrorism. Do not stereotype them, do not stigmatise them, and do not take out your anger on them.

But then let me move on to the questions I am often asked as a Christian about justice, punishment, and forgiveness. In the Church we are often caricatured as being weak and namby-pamby when we speak up for forgiveness. The Bible speaks of justice as well as forgiveness. Criminals must be brought to book. But it is for justice, not revenge.

President Bush was right to say in one of his early addresses to the American people that there should be no distinction between the actual terrorists and those who harboured them. To the Christian, motive and attitude of heart are just as crucial as outward action. Jesus said that those who harbour anger are as liable to judgement as murderers, and those who lust in their hearts are as much sinners as adulterers.

But one distinction can be drawn between the terrorists and others involved in the planning of these unspeakably evil acts. Let me put it in a provocative way for a Christian: there is no forgiveness for the terrorists.

Why do I say that? We presume that the terrorists all perished on the hijacked planes. Unless there was a last-minute repentance, they will face the judgement of God. The Bible teaches that ‘it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement’.

But their co-conspirators are still alive, we assume. They still have opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. Whether they do so is another matter, but there have been some remarkable precedents in history.

Take the end of World War Two. Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, and as far as we know there was not an ounce of repentance from the evil man himself. I may be wrong, but I do not expect to see him in Heaven.

But at the Nuremberg war trials, something remarkable happened. An American Army padre named Henry Gerrick was appointed to be a chaplain to those accused of war crimes. The Nazis had killed his only two sons: imagine how he felt in having to minister to them.

Of the twenty-one prisoners, sixteen requested his services. He gathered them together and told them of a God of mercy, whose Son Jesus Christ had died for their sins. Some, like Goering, sneered, despite the pleas of his own daughter. But others, including von Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frick, went to the gallows, accepting their earthly punishment but saying their confidence was placed in the mercy of God and the death of Christ.

It is in that mercy that we all find our only hope in eternity.

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London

I am a Londoner. Although neither I nor any of my relatives live there any more, today’s vile news has hit me hard. My father used to take the train each morning to Liverpool Street and then a tube to Aldgate East. My sister used to commute to Edgware Road. Friends used to go through King’s Cross to work. I once went for a job interview at Tavistock Square. When I came in at lunch-time and saw the TV news, I just said, “Evil.” I wanted to say something far worse. It was certainly in my heart. Only the presence of my small children stopped me.

I wanted to wish evil things on Osama bin Laden. Like a British judge sentencing him to life, but the prison warders allowing other prisoners to inflict a tortuous, slow death upon him. I had to fight to tell myself that I believe in a better way as a Christian. What that inner fight would have been like had I lost any loved ones in the atrocities, I don’t know.

I’ve offered up the odd prayer about what I shall preach on Sunday. What words, what hope can I give? Must there also be a challenge, with the risk of causing deep offence?

Then I stopped thinking about myself. I thought about Mr Kahn, who runs our little neighbourhood sub-post office. And I prayed that no-one would take it out on him. I prayed, too, for the Sikhs who now own the former Methodist church building nearby. After 9/11 British Sikhs were attacked. I pray for their protection now.

I pray, too, for those trained to help at times of disaster. Last night I was at a District Council meeting where we lamented a lack of volunteers among ministers to be undertake Critical Incident Volunteer training in Kent. London already has people trained – thank God.

And naturally I pray for the injured and the bereaved.

But I must pray, too, for the perpetrators. Yet it’s too easy to parrot the words of Jesus, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” because to some extent these people do know what they’re doing.

Lord have mercy on us all.

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