Angels, Shepherds, Wise Men... and a Mass Murderer?

Preached at The Church-in-the-Gardens, December 28, 2025.

What figures do you usually find in a nativity scene? 

In other places, including some Eastern European countries, you might also find a mysterious figure dressed in a robe, with his arms folded and a great big frown on his face. Not the Grinch or Ebenezer Scrooge, but someone who goes back to the very first Christmas. There with the angels and the shepherds and the wise men stands a mass murderer named Herod. How weird is that? Does he belong there? Is Herod really a part of the Christmas story?

During Advent, we began the year of Matthew for our gospel readings. Only in Matthew do we get the story of the magi from the east, following the star to find Jesus and bring him gifts. And only in Matthew do those same magi stop along the way to ask Herod for directions. And only in Matthew do we get… “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.”

It’s an abrupt ending to what had been a merry little Christmas. Merry, right up until the point where the evil king starts killing innocent baby boys. 

You may have never heard a sermon on this text because most preachers avoid it. I mean, really, who wants to hear this right after Christmas? But in Matthew’s gospel, there is no Christmas without King Herod.

Now, Matthew also makes a point of inserting stuff throughout his narrative to prove that Jesus was a fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures. The parallel he draws here, of course, is with what story from the Hebrew Scriptures where all the babies are killed and one child is saved? And remember where that story of Moses took place? Yes, it happened to be the same place where Mary and Joseph fled with their baby boy. (A part of the story we also only hear in Matthew.) So, perhaps Matthew just threw in this story about killing all the little boys as a literary device, and we don’t need to fret over it. 

But I’m afraid that might be letting us off the hook too easily. For Herod is a key part of the story Matthew wants us to see. 

When the Magi ask him about the king of the Jews, Herod is miffed because, after all, HE is the king of the Jews. Seeing a threat, he has the power to eliminate it, and he goes for it.

Matthew wants us to know, from the get-go, that Jesus was born into a world mired in violence. In fact, the reason Jesus was born into this world was because it is mired in violence.

Now, if you’ve ever read the Old Testament, you know that its pages are dripping with blood. Often, the violence is attributed to God. God is angry. And when God is angry, somebody’s gotta pay. 

Those who told the stories we have in our Old Testament were trying to make sense of the world and their relationship with God, and they were speaking from their own limited experience. The early writers held a primitive worldview that’s reflected in a primitive understanding of God. God rewards the good and punishes the wicked, and you’d better do everything you can to appease God’s anger because when God gets angry, somebody’s gotta pay. That’s a primitive understanding of God.

And then, along comes Jesus. “Do you really think that’s what God’s like?” he asks. That God smites entire cities just because they don’t do what he wants them to do? Nothing could be further from the truth. God isn’t about violence. God is about love.

That means that when someone strikes you on your cheek, you don’t strike them back, you turn the other cheek. That means you don’t fight your enemies, you pray for them. That means you don’t retaliate when someone does you wrong, you forgive. The secret to being happy in this life is in giving yourself in love.

That’s what Jesus taught, again and again, in as many ways as possible right up to the very end. As he was leaving them, he taught his disciples one last time about the most important commandment of all. “Love one another.” He said this after he demonstrated what that love looks like by kneeling before them and washing their feet.

Love isn’t just a mushy feeling inside. It’s something we do. We show it in our actions. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s violence. And, by violence, I don’t just mean when we physically harm another. I mean whenever we assert our power over another in a way that causes them harm…physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual… whenever we assert our power over another in a way that causes them harm, that’s violence. 

We seem to have a blind spot when it comes to violence. Maybe because we’re so accustomed to it in our culture that we have little awareness of what it’s done to us. It’s like the proverbial fish unaware that they’re swimming in water. It takes something really big for us to notice, something so shocking that we can hardly bear the thought of it. Like the slaughter of innocent babies in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago, or the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren in our time. 

We’ll look at these events as if they’re anomalies, strange occurrences that appeared out of the blue, for no apparent reason, and we wonder, how could such things happen? When, in fact, they are the inevitable result of what happens when you eat, sleep and breathe violence. 

We have an addiction to violence in our culture. And what is the first step in dealing with an addiction? The first step is admitting that you have a problem.

Have you ever looked at the shows that are on T.V., movies, video games, the sports we follow, and considered how much of our entertainment is based on violence? At the top, or near the top, of nearly every list of favorite Christmas movies in America is Die Hard. Can you believe that? Perhaps that’s appropriate for a nation whose Christmas morning surprise this year was the bombing of a small African nation.

Isn’t it incredible how even a grave tragedy like the murder of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 20 of them children 6 and 7 years old, couldn’t get our nation to budge an inch by passing a single law that would make gun regulation more reasonable?

We obviously have a violence problem. But it runs deeper than that in ways that may not be so obvious to us.

When the people we encounter in our everyday lives become objects to manipulate or control so we can get what we want from them. Or when we think nothing of belittling other people to make ourselves feel bigger?

We have a violence problem.

Imagine how our relationships with those closest to us would be transformed if we could stop posturing and protecting ourselves from one another, and instead, give ourselves in love by forgiving, and showing mercy, and daring to reveal our vulnerability to one another? What would happen if a person really lived without violence in our violent world? Well, actually we know what would happen. And perhaps that’s what we’re trying to avoid. 

Jesus lived a life of non-violence, a life given in love. And he ended up nailed to a cross. But even then, he met that act of supreme violence with love. He could have cursed those who unjustly crucified him, or worse. Instead, he forgave them. And, to my way of thinking, that was the most significant moment of his life. Not when he was executed on a cross. Lots of people were executed on crosses. But only one forgave the ones who put him there.

Ironically, many Christians completely miss this point and have used the cross to project their own violence onto God, assuming God is as violent as we are, and God is angry with us and somebody’s gotta pay.

Doesn’t that primitive explanation of the cross completely miss the whole point of Jesus’ life? He died as he lived. As a God who confronted the violence of this world with love.

So, where does that leave us, as people who want to follow Jesus and yet may be, in fact, a lot more like Herod than we are like Jesus? As people who are addicted to violence, how do we love as Jesus loved? Could we turn our church into something like a twelve-step group that meets regularly to support one another as we struggle with our addiction to violence?

I don’t know what it would look like if we dared to be that honest and vulnerable with one another. But I do know that in a church like that, when we read about Jesus’ birth, we would always include Herod in the story.