Unsafe Space
Today, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It commemorates the young children and infants killed by King Herod in his search for baby Jesus. Just because the magi return to their homes in the East by another route doesn’t mean that Herod forgot about the new king who they came to see and honor. Not long after the magi leave, Joseph has a dream in which an angel tells him to take his family and flee to Egypt because King Herod is about to begin a massive baby-hunt to search for baby Jesus and kill him. So, at a tender age, baby Jesus and his parents become refugees and immigrants. They leave their home country because of political persecution. They flee for their lives, because it is too dangerous to stay.
(Stained glass window at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Kingsville, MD; the only one I’ve ever seen of this scene in Jesus’s life.)
We Christians talk about Jesus being fully human and living through every human experience and so understanding what we go through. This is one of those ways Jesus became like us that we don’t talk about very much: Jesus was a refugee. Jesus was an immigrant. The Holy Family leaves, during the cover of night, to go to a foreign country, where you can be sure they didn’t have all the proper papers for entry and they certainly didn’t have the years it often takes to legally enter and stay in our country.
Let’s add a little context as to just why baby Jesus was such a threat that Herod was willing to commit mass infanticide. There’s one other place in the bible where we read about a King killing baby boys and that’s at the beginning of the book of Exodus. This is when the Israelites became enslaved in Egypt and the Egyptians wanted to subdue and oppress them so much that the Pharaoh decreed that all Hebrew baby boys should be killed at birth. There were two midwives who worked their way around this and managed to save some, and there was a mother who managed to save her baby boy, by putting him in a basket in the Nile River. That baby boy was Moses, and he was indeed a threat to the Pharaoh, as he was the one God used to free God’s people from slavery and oppression.
Now, we have another baby boy who is a threat to the King, because he’s also called a King. When the magi go to King Herod, they ask for the baby who was born King of the Jews. Except, King Herod is King of Palestine, where the Jews live, and he worked hard to become King! Herod the Great ruled Judea from the year 37 BC to the year 4 BC. He was appointed by the Roman Empire, by Caesar Augustus, yet he had to fight for four years to firmly take control of his kingdom and so he never felt his power was fully secure. Herod’s kingdom was only 1,350 square miles, slightly larger than two counties, and he built at least seven major fortresses so that he was never far from a defensible stronghold. He was known for rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem on its grandest scale ever, and this is the temple that Jesus and his disciples knew. Some of those are the reasons he is known as Herod the Great. Yet, King Herod was also known for ruling with an iron fist, violently suppressing all opposition and not above killing his own family members, such as his first wife, his brother-in-law, and three of his own sons, when he suspected them of wanting his throne. You can see that King Herod wasn’t be above killing a baby, either.
King Herod was furious that the magi didn’t come back to report to him what they found, as he had told them to, and he gave orders to his soldiers to kill all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and younger. This is what we call the massacre of the innocents, or the holy innocents. Little children who had done nothing wrong other than to happen to be born around the same time and the same place as baby Jesus. The story is often used to highlight children who suffer and die as a result of abuse, neglect, poverty, war, slavery, or any other reason that is completely no fault of their own. These are stories that need sharing and suffering that needs alleviating.
There are other children who suffer and sometimes die as a result of being refugees and immigrants, and I think we often miss that Jesus and his family had to leave their homeland for a foreign country because of the very real threat of death. A refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster, and who cannot safely return home. Church World Service estimates that “every two seconds someone in the world is forced to leave their home and everything they know” (https://cwsglobal.org/learn/migration-asylum-and-refuge/ ). There are so many refugee groups, I don’t even know where to start naming them. Chances are that you know someone who left their home country and came to the U.S. because it wasn’t safe for them to stay where they were. One person I knew well was a colleague of mine in Maryland named Pastor Jorge. The church he pastored in Cuba was growing so large so quickly that it was seen as a threat by the Cuban government. So, the Cuban government threatened Pastor Jorge. That’s why he came to America, for four years without his family before they finally received clearance to come, too. He’s here as an immigrant; he’s not claiming asylum, and so he’s not included in any refugee statistic. Yet he left his home country because of the very real threat of political persecution. There are many stories like his, including Jesus’.
As we end our season of reflecting on holy spaces, let us also be mindful of spaces that are hazardous to our health, when the space we’re in makes us physically sick or literally threatens our life, our livelihood, or our loved ones. If that is you, I pray you are able to move to a space of refuge and safety. If that is not you, may we be that place of refuge for others.