AMONG THE SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

There are times when I want to ask God what on earth is going on. Actually, I don’t want to ask, that’s too polite, I want to scream at God, what do you think you were doing, just sitting around watching while an atrocity takes place. Holy Innocents is one of those events I get stressed by, the Holocaust is another, as is what’s going on in Darfur at the moment is a third.

The massacre of the Holy Innocents is particularly horrific because it was a direct consequence of God’s breaking into this world as the Christ-child. So why did God have to send that star to guide the wise-men. Didn’t God realise that Bethlehem was so close to Jerusalem that they were almost bound to get confused and go there first? And once they’d spoken to Herod, the cat really would be among the pigeons.

The whole story makes me intensely angry, those babies, those innocent lives cut short. And the grief of their parents, the horror as their children were seized, how many of them were murdered also, for trying to protect their children?

My anger is directed at God who is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful but who just stands by and watches. Was God sorry, did God grieve for the parents? But is that enough, God still didn’t stop the massacre.

But once my initial anger has passed, I begin to realise that I’m not looking at this quite right. There is no excuse for what Herod did. This remains an atrocity. What changes is my interpretation of the culpability of God. Because one of the consequences of being made in the image of God is that we have free will. We can chose how we act; it’s one of the defining features of our humanity, one of the greatest gifts of God and the one that we misuse most often. Herod had a choice, the soldiers who killed had a choice. In allowing them that choice, God allowed them to kill, because to stop them would be a denial of their humanity.

It’s a sobering thought that tyrants and murderers, the Herods and the Hitlers and the Sadam Hussains are just as much made in the image of God as we are, just as human as the saints are. Made from the same material, the same clay as the rest of us. We all have to make decisions between good and evil, day in day out, year in year out. It’s part of living out our humanity, experiencing that great gift of free will from God.

And it costs, it cost God as man his life on the cross. It cost millions of Jews their lives in the concentration camps, it costs thousands of women in Darfur their dignity and self-respect, it cost the lives of the Holy Innocents.

Once again we are reminded that the Christmas story is not one of sweetness and light, all angelic choirs, cute animals and a pretty mother and child. Life and death are inextricably bound up at Christmas. The myrrh given by that wise man from the east is the sign and symbol of this. Simeon says ‘and a sword will pierce your heart’. Death, is at the heart of Christmas, the cross looms over the stable and the Holy Innocents are massacred as a foretaste.

God’s breaking into our world is a costly gift, God’s honouring of our humanity is a costly gift. But God believes that it is worth that sacrifice to make us in God’s image. We also have to trust that God knows what God is doing.

Rev. Penny Sayer

Curate, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea