Advent Day5: I. Am. The. King.

Man!  You!  I feel an itch!  Nay – not my back – deep inside – like something growing – something bad – for me – something that changes everything – something that changes me!  It’s growing in my bowels – I can feel it – it’s a cancer upon my land!  And.  I.  Will.  Not.  Have.  It.  
I.  Will.  Not

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

My body will not be the master of me!  It will not.

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

Bring me a doctor!  No.  Bring me a soothsayer.  No prophets – who can stomach their righteous smirks?  Make it a soothsayer.  Quick now.  There’s no time to waste.

Grab those visitors.  I don’t care what time it is!  Bring them to me now!  

I will have what they know.  They cannot deny me!

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

What’s this you say?  My itch . . . my cancer . . . my roiling bowels . . . that thing growing inside me is fear?  Get away from me!  I have no fear!  What would I fear?

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

I fear I go mad.  No one is in the room, yet I hear the laughter of children.  They are laughing at me!  They cannot!  They must not!  Who are they to laugh at me?  I will kill them all to stop their laughter.  I will not have it.  I.  Will.  Not.

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

The Visitors say there is a child and he will be king.  I have no son.  Who is this of whom they speak?  What fool would dare to put forth their own child against me?  Who is this pretender?  There can be – there is – no other king.

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

And I will kill him.  That will end this madness growing inside me.  But I do not know who he is.  What good are soothsayers if they cannot tell me who he is?!?  Where is this child?  This son of infamy?  This child who plots against me even from the womb?  Bring him to me and I will eat him for supper!  No.  I must not be seen doing this thing.  Yet how can I not be?  I must kill him.  I will say the parents plotted against me and this is their punishment.  I won’t just kill him.  I will kill them all.  It is my right.

I am the king!  I.  Am.  The.  King.

All was silence as the king’s cancer spread itself upon the land.  And the silence was rent by the keening of Rachel, her children no more.

Matthew 2.1-18

Lully, Lullay, Innocents of Holiness

It’s the 5th day of Christmas, the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents on the Orthodox calendar, the day observed of Matthew’s account of Herod’s murder of children in his efforts to seek and destroy the Messiah.

It is, as you might imagine, in these United States, a day most observed in the breach.  It just doesn’t fit in with Santa and happy wishes and family dinners, this normative reality of killing fields.

And so do the scholars argue, as if the killing of children has not been the blood sport of kings for a very long time now.

Isn’t that the funny part?

That it, this killing, should seem so incredible that it would be doubted.

I understand the doubting of Jesus as Messiah, as The Risen One, as The Christ.  That doubt makes sense.

But doubt the slaughter?  That’s like doubting the air we breathe.

It’s even funnier – in a macabre sort of way – when considered that it is not any slaughter they doubt, but merely this one.

[sigh]

Really?

‘They’ say Matthew (of gospel-writing fame) was out to prove Jesus by linking him to the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures.

They then say that Matthew’s proof-texting meant he made up stories to fit prophecies.

Where’s the logic in that?

Isn’t it equally logical that Matthew did what we all do – look at the events actually happening and seek to ascribe meaning to them?

It’s not the events that are suspect . . . it’s the meaning.

So isn’t the more important question not whether there was a slaughter of children . . . but how do we equate the Prince of Peace and the God who sent him with such a slaughter?

***

There’s a horror in the land 

in Jesus’ time and in ours too

the slaughter of our own young

(never, never, never forget 

Herod slaughtered his own)

The Slaughter of the Innocents

is the murder of our own innocence

who can walk away from that?

Of course Rachel weeps!

How could she not?

But fear not her tears . . . 

fear the day her grief moves

from tears to anger

that will be a dangerous day

for the killing ones

the day Rachel’s lack of comfort

comes for us

***

It Just Won’t Do: Rewriting Jesus’ Story to Make It Nice

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is a favorite of mine.  So it is with some joy that I listen to Cloverton’s Hallelujah (Christmas Version), its words telling the story, in brief, of the coming and leaving of Jesus, whom my kind call The Christ.

I say ‘some joy’ because, while Cohen’s music and Christ’s story never fail to move and their combination is powerful, there’s something missing.

I noticed right from my first listening – there’s no edge.  Even with the brief lyrical account at the end of the crucifixion, there’s no edge.  And in Leonard Cohen’s original – in the playing of the music, in the lyrics, in Cohen’s voice itself, there is definitely edge.

So too in the Christmas story.

The need we seem to have in our time and place for everything to be nice (or the extreme opposite coming

from the same impulse – that all be nasty beyond belief) leads to a perpetual erasing from the story as it appears in biblical texts of such things as the slaughter of the boy children and Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s time living as refugees in Egypt . . . or the oppressive policies inherent in forcing an occupied people into displacement merely to be counted for taxation purposes . . . or the scandal of having a child in questionable circumstances (let alone bearing the child of God) . . . or the giving of symbolic gifts which predict the coming demise of one who is now but a babe . . .

The story is not only beautiful and wondrous . . . it is also portentous and frightening.

The point of Jesus’ life and hence his story is that he enters the human condition unconditionally, with all its fraughts and frailties, risks and redemptions.

It is a story with edge.

There is no baby in a manger to lullaby without also allowing our mortal flesh to fall silent in the face of such a literal earth-shattering entry.

No coming of the faithful, no telling on the mountain, without the bleak midwinter.

The sacrifice of the cross only comes after the sacrifice of The Holy Innocents for The Holy Innocent.

Singing the beauty without also singing the horror and cruel ironies is to rewrite the story into meaninglessness.

It just won’t do.

____________________
*It must be remembered that I write from my own context as a Protestant living and working in the United States.  The Catholic and Orthodox traditions are much better at remembering and observing the harrowing realities of the story of Jesus' birth, including their observance of The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents.