“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE”
Matthew 2:13-23
(12-30-07)

Sometimes I wish our text this week from Matthew
wasn’t the prescribed reading from the lectionary on the Sunday right after Christmas. After all, less than a week after we have celebrated the birth of God with us,
the birth of the one who will save his people from their sins, the birth of Jesus,
and with nary a moment to catch our breath,
we are confronted with our text this morning from the Gospel according to Matthew.
It’s a text of terror, filled with hatred, fear and death.

But it is a vivid reminder that Christmas,
God’s ultimate interaction and intervention into human existence
isn’t just some sort of fantastic, detached fairy tale,
but that the birth of Christ, God with us,
takes place in the very midst of genuine human existence,
with all the ugliness and pain and hurt which all too often marks our reality.
Christmas doesn’t shy away from what is far too common in our world,
and our God doesn’t pretend that our lives aren’t the way they truly are.
God doesn’t pretend that there aren’t 840 million people in the world
who are malnourished and 153 million of those people are children under 5 years of age. God doesn’t pretend that there aren’t every year
6 million children under 5 who die as a result of hunger.
God is very aware that 48% of all refugees are children
and that as of 2004 there were an estimated 143 million orphans living in the world.
God knows that 246 million children
between 5 and 17 are engaged in child labour.
Of these, nearly 70 per cent are working in hazardous conditions,
in mines, with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or with dangerous machinery. Some 73 million of them are less than 10 years old.
God knows that in Calgary last year, IFTC provided 17, 759 beds for guests,
and over 8000 of those beds were for children.
God knows that 87,212 Calgarians used the services of the Interfaith Food Bank in 2007 and 43% of those were children.
This is the reality of the world in which we live.

Senitmentality goes out the window
with our text this morning from Matthew’s gospel account.
Matthew gets right down to the business of life,
as harsh and as brutal as it can be at times.
We need to set up the passage which we read this morning
so that we can understand its context.
Unlike Luke’s gospel account,
which moves directly from Jesus’ birth,
to his dedication at the temple when he was 8 days old
and to his return to Nazereth with his family,
Matthew’s account tells us that it was not as easy or as straightforward as Luke tells us.
God’s presence in the world is always met with resistance.
This resistance for Matthew is personified in the figure of Herod, ruler of Judea.
Earlier, wise men from the east had come to inquire of Herod,
where the child who was born king of the Jews was.
Herod, convinced that he alone was king of the Jews,
set about a ruse to discover where this child was to have been born.
When the wise men were warned about Herod in a dream,
they did not return to tell him where Jesus was
but returned to their own country by a different road.

Herod, upon learning of the wise men’s departure,
flew into a rage and ordered that all the children who were born around Bethlehem
who were two years of age or younger, be put to death.
As horrible as this was, it was very much in line with the kind of person Herod was.
He was known for his brutality.
According to the Jewish historian, Josephus,
Herod was an extremely cruel man,
who seems to have had no problems ruling by evil means.
Herod ordered the execution of three of his sons
(even Augustus Caesar in Rome is reported to have said
it was safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son);
and at his burial, one member of every noble family in Judea was to be slain
so that the nation might really mourn.
Matthew recalls the prophecy of Jeremiah,
that a voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children,
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

This prophecy was originally written in the context of the exile,
when the people of Judah, were enslaved and taken captive by the Babylonians.
Rachel, who symbolizes the nation of Israel, as wife of Jacob,
who is called Israel, who is the father of the tribes of Israel,
weeps for the lost children of Israel.
However that weeping is set in the context of God’s promise of restoration and return. And so also Matthew may have positioned Jeremiah’s prophecy here
to acknowledge the suffering of those who were affected by Herod’s cruelty,
but also that just as the people of Israel in Babylonian exile were to be restored,
so also the hope of God born in Jesus would also be restored from exile in Egypt.

Before Herod can get to Jesus,
an angel appeared to Joseph and warned him to flee into Egypt.
There they remained until Herod had died
and then they returned back to Nazareth because Archelaus,
Herod’s son and successor, nearly as brutal as his father, was ruling in Judea.
I don’t know how many of us
have ever given much thought to these few verses in the bible.
How many of us have paid attention to this part of the Jesus story?
We are familiar with the birth narratives and even the visit of the wise men,
but Jesus as a refugee,
Jesus fleeing for his life from Herod while other children of his age are slaughtered?
The truth is that wherever God is present in our world, there is resistance.
There is resistance to what God’s presence and God’s love stand for.
And often it’s the innocents in our world,
the young and the elderly, the powerless and the oppressed,
who pay the greatest price.

Within our congregation are a group of young people
called the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan.
Many of you know about them and about their ordeal.
These are young children,
some who were barely older than Jesus when he had to flee to Egypt,
whose parents were brutally killed,
who were forced to become refugees,
wandering across Africa because of war, because of terror,
because of acts of unthinkable horror and hatred.
Ten thousand of these Lost Boys and Girls lost their lives
while wandering from place to place as refugees.
Why?
Because people’s desire for power and their greed for control of resources
trumps their regard for human life.
Because there is always resistance in this world to the things God stands for.
In many places in Africa, including Malawi,
children suffer because they are the weakest,
they are the most vulnerable,
because those who are supposed to care for them
are dying due to sickness, due to genocide.
Those who stand for peace,
those who fight against oppression and evil,
they are most often the ones who are martyred for their courage.
We think of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi,
and we think of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who were murdered because they refused to back down from their belief
that violence and hatred are not God’s way.
The rulers of this world always resist the presence of God and God’s rule.
Sometimes it seems that our resistance can be futile.

And its not only external, but internal as well.
Before we scoff at Herod, we might ask ourselves the question,
are we willing to cede lordship of our lives
to anyone other than ourselves or to the gods of our own making?
If Jesus isn’t going to be Lord of our lives,
then what will we do with him?
If we won’t make room for him in our lives,
where will we relegate him?
We cannot serve two masters,
there can only be one Lord.

Where is the good news in this story?
Where is the gospel?
It is very present in how God through the angels, through the dreams Joseph has,
leads Jesus and his family to safety,
to Egypt and then back to Israel, to Nazareth.
Herod dies, all herods do.
The good news is that it is not our resistance to evil that is futile,
it is the resistance of evil to the presence of God in this world
that will prove to be futile.
God will have his way.
That is the really good news.
God will have his way, resistance is futile.
Herod found out when he died his miserable death.
Josephus, the historian, notes that Herod’s death was a profoundly painful one,
suffering from, in his words, a fire that glowed in him slowly,
which did not so much appear to the touch outwardly,
as it augmented his pains inwardly…
His entrails were ravaged by ulcers and his rotting body produced worms.
And when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing,
which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath,
and the quickness of its returns;
he had also convulsions in all parts of his body,
which increased his pain to an insufferable degree.
It was said by those who endued with wisdom to foretell such things,
that God inflicted this punishment on the king on account of his great impiety.

Will God punish all who resist his presence in such ways?
Not always in this life.
But we acknowledge that the Herods of this world do not prevail.
Neither they nor their successors will prevail,
sooner or later they lose their power.
Sooner or later they die.
Whether it be the Herods or the Hitlers, they don’t last.
Their resistance is futile.
God in Jesus Christ has come to be God with us.
And even when the world thought they had gotten rid of him on the cross,
they were wrong again.
God will have his way and God’s way is our salvation, our reconciliation, our restoration. God’s way is for children to be free from persecution and suffering,
for all to be free and loved and cared for.
God’s way is for compassion and mercy and grace to be overflowing.
God’s way is for humility and righteousness to rule over haughtiness and wickedness. Later on in Matthew’s gospel account, in the Sermon on the Mount,
Jesus goes on to say that those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake
will be blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you, says Jesus, when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.
God will have his way.
Resistance is futile.
The last will be first and the first will be last.

The good news is that this way, God’s way,
again isn’t limited to some fantasy world,
some detached world where there is no human reality,
but Jesus came to be born among us, in our world,
amid our violence and our pain,
amid our world’s evil and wickedness.
The good news is that our text is our reading for the first Sunday after Christmas.
God knows exactly what kind of world into which he sent his son,
God knows that exactly because we live in such a world that we needed his son.
The good news is that the bible, the word of God,
acknowledges that and brings us hope in the promise of God.
Resistance is futile.
God will have his way.
There will come a time when no one, no child, will die of hunger or war or abuse.
There will come a time when no violence or anger will harm,
when the preciousness of life, all life, will be respected and valued by all.
There will be a time when the desire of God will be our desire,
and the Kingdom of God will reign over all.
God will have his way. That is the promise of Christmas.
That is good news indeed.