God’s Revolution, A Radical Reading of Scripture for Refugees from Religion

Then Herod set out in his wrath and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and its region who were two years old and younger, relying on the knowledge of the wise men … And from every hilltop came the call to mourn and weep inconsolably, for the mothers of the dead cannot be comforted. - Matthew 2: 16, 18

After the Mounties stole our children, we sat on the beach for days and all we did was cry. We knew we’d never see them again. We knew we had no future. – Hazel Joseph, Alert Bay, 1996

First came the rumor, and then the slaughter. Three wise guys heard that a rival to the king had been born. Fearing civil war and anarchy, the learned trio dutifully reported the news to Herod. And then the child killing began.

Being a state sanctioned slaughter, that particular genocide wasn’t considered a crime. On the contrary, the massacre of every male infant in Judea was an official, lawful act ordered by King Herod. All the babies had to die, and morality took a backseat to the needs of power.

Some things never change.

There’s nothing unusual about this blood-soaked scenario. It’s how society stays safe and stable and rulers remain on their thrones, from kings to popes to prime ministers and CEO’s. Political expediency comes first, and humanity comes second, or last. Then, after the slaughter, the killers babble about healing and reconciliation. Kill, Rinse, Repeat.

Ultimately, none of us have enough of a problem with this arrangement to stop it, since we routinely fund it and let it happen. Like genocide, child killing by Church and State is habitual and as old as humanity itself. For who is more expendable than children? Consider the little charred bones in the sacrificial ovens of Moloch or of any Christian Indian residential school for the answer.

Take Maisie Shaw, for example. She was a young girl who was also murdered at Christmas, in the year 1946 at the United Church’s Alberni internment camp, inaccurately called an Indian residential school. Like the slaughtered children of Judea, Maisie was killed by an official order and by someone who got away with it because he was protected by the State: Principal Alfred Caldwell. 

Multiply Maisie by 60,000 times and you’ll see how officially sanctioned child killing is as normal and legal in Canada as it was two millennia ago.  

And yet, we are told by today’s Bible reading that this particular case of child murder in Judea so long ago was unusual and of more significance than your standard imperial atrocity. Why? Because the target in the State’s cross hairs was Jesus, who after all was more important than your average peasant or indigenous child. He was the son of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe!

And so there you have it, the implicit message of Christianity: most babies, like most people, are expendable, but some of them aren’t. Who? The ones with connections, like Jesus.

The truth, of course, is very different. Jesus Yeshua was no different than any other child born under the gun to a single mother in poverty. He was just one of those who survived, and so he seems special. But as he so often pointed out in most of the Gospels, he wasn’t the issue. Something called the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was.

“Why do you call me perfect?” he asked his buddies. “No one is perfect but God.”

So much for religion.

I remember the first time I held the bone of an ‘Indian residential school’ child in my hand. It was October 6, 2011, at the former Mohawk Anglican camp in Brantford, Ontario. Standing next to me was Geronimo Henry, who when he was younger had buried other children at that spot. He said to me,

“They liked raping and torturing us in the basement on Sunday mornings. Upstairs they were praying and singing their hymns, and downstairs they were killing kids.”

I doubt if any of the Christian pew sitters who hear the Slaughter of the Innocents story one of these Sundays will make a connection between it and the children’s blood on their own hands. The once-a-week Happy Hour in church is designed to smother that association and muffle the terrible noises coming from the basement.

Fortunately, something more than religious expediency is at work: the power of lamentation, which is an uncontrollable blast from the heart of God’s pain. The blood of the innocents cries out through locked church doors and closed hearts through the outraged cries of the survivors. 

As the Gospel says, “The mothers of the dead cannot be comforted”. They cannot be comforted by all the crocodile-tear apologies by the Church and State killers or the reconciliation babble or the blood money payoffs or the fake government ‘inquiries’. Because there is no moral or legal statute of limitation on murder, and no way to politely manage the cries of shattered hearts, which are like trumpet blasts crumbling the walls of officialdom.

We are told in scripture that the killers of children stand guilty and convicted by the fact of their crime, and will face judgement, even if they are kings and popes. But that’s not what happens in the real world. When the killers of children are the ones in power, they are never guilty of anything and they don’t even have to absolve themselves of child murder because it’s not a crime, but completely legal. Justice is a fiction in the face of institutionalized slaughter. Just look around.

That said, today’s Gospel reading is a remarkably accurate depiction of how things operate in the realpolitik world of power, then and now, especially when it comes to child killing. I’ve experienced that bloody fact in my own life and that of my fallen friends. And today’s reading about the events around Jesus’ alleged Bethlehem birth is like a mirror that reflects our lives. It is a sort of instruction manual on how targeted people survive State terror, and how the witnesses to a crime endure by keeping its memory alive.

In that regard, it’s amazing and instructive that even at his birth, Jesus caused hysteria among rulers and posed a threat to established authority, which made even his closest friends love him from a distance. The same is true for any of us who speak the truth about our homegrown Group Crime. 

Like any truth teller, Jesus became a refugee from state terror from the start and a wanderer in poverty and exile. And he stayed that way to the day of his judicial murder by the Romans. So it’s no accident that Jesus has always been a symbol and an inspiration to just souls everywhere, for his life and death as the permanent outsider mirrors our own experience as targeted people.

Despite its lofty religious tone, the Bible is filled with a common sense and ironic understanding of the foibles of rulers and their clumsy plans. We read that when King Herod learns about the newborn child who might overthrow his kingdom, he cons three not-so-wise men into being his agents to hunt down the little usurper by saying, “I want to worship this new-born Messiah too!”. Like obtuse academics on a Royal Commission, the trio of stooges believe Herod and go to work for him, perhaps unaware that they are helping the State conduct mass murder. Eventually, they discover the little threat called Jesus and dutifully inform their boss.

Are these wise guys naïve or merely stupid? Regardless, their news frightens Herod and makes him even more paranoid than normal, like anyone with a lot to lose. He sees conspiracies everywhere, distrusts his wise guys for what they know, and tries to have them arrested. Failing that, he then goes after baby Jesus, using the information so conveniently provided by the “wise men”.  But Jesus and his family have been tipped off and skedaddle to a safe house.

Frustrated twice, Herod must save face. And so, like any ruler feeling his power slipping, he launches a war: the murder of every child in the area who is under two years old. But this inept, scattergun approach fails to hit Jesus.

Despite the tragedy of the moment, one can almost hear the Gospel writer chuckling up his sleeve. For Herod’s intended target has slipped from his grasp, making the King look ridiculous. The vaunted power of the State is not as absolute as we might think.

Those of us in the Canadian Herod’s cross hairs have had that revelation routinely, especially whenever we’ve confronted the churches that murdered Maisie Shaw and so many like her.

Like the hero in a Greek tragedy, survivors to a slaughter are a subversive, random element that bloody rulers didn’t figure on. Because survivors remember the fallen and keep alive the truth of what killed them by calling it out loudly and publicly. That is the power of mourning, of letting the voice of the dead shout unceasingly through us. And that is why the disruptive cries of a handful of us forced Canadian Church and State killers to admit some of their crime when they wanted nothing other than to bury it forever, as they are doing now with more banal national coverups and rewritings of the history of their extermination of children.

This first Christmas story ends with the same ambiguity experienced by our campaign to confront our homegrown Holocaust. A blood-soaked Herod remains officially though more unsteadily in the saddle, while a few unsilenced mourners and survivors endure, awaiting their moment. But as with Jesus, the killing has been not an ending but the start of something unexpected by everyone: a new presence in the world that threatens to overturn the entire sick arrangement of rulers and ruled. Something Jesus Yeshua called “the Kingdom of Heaven”.

A few years after his attempted murder by Herod, Jesus stood up in the Nazareth synagogue and announced that he was launching a revolution that would bring sight to the blind and ‘good news’ to the poor. He proclaimed that all debts were cancelled, all land returned to their original owners, and all prisoners set free. Jesus was enacting the Jubilee Laws, which brought down rulers and the rich and raised up the poor, making all people equal. 

The prosperous Nazareth parishioners responded to his words in outrage and tried to throw Jesus off a cliff. But having learned how to maneuver around his adversaries, once again he eluded his killers.

Whenever I shared this revolutionary Gospel message from my pulpit, it tended to alarm or confuse my wealthy parishioners, but it brought a smile of relief and amusement to the street people or aboriginals in our pews. Middle-class Christians generally can’t relate to the man Jesus, except as an abstract cult figure. They tend to be left cold by the human Jesus and by any equating of him with rebellion or the underclass, even though scripture is full of such references. 

Contrarily, poor and outcast people quickly identify with Jesus as one like them, who by their existence challenge and upset all the cozy arrangements. We had no better example of that than in our movement of mostly homeless native people that occupied churches and exposed the lie of a blood-soaked Christianity.

The affluent pew sitters and those that run the abattoir churches have a reason to be worried by Jesus’ message when it is shorn of its festive, feel-good Christmas fluff. For that incendiary purpose is contained in the very words of today’s Bethlehem story from Matthew.

When Jesus’ family is given a warning to flee from Herod’s killers, the Greek word for “warning” is craymatzo, which means to be admonished by God and given a new purpose and name. In other words, you’re not only yanked to your feet suddenly but garbed in a new identity to allow you to escape. Call it divine camouflage, but it isn’t there simply to allow you to survive, but to have a new reason for your life.

Similarly, the Greek word for “flee” is feugo: in Greek and Latin, it means to fly away and to reject, as in shunning evil by departing from it. So, fleeing is not an act of fear but a separating of ourselves from what is wrong. Going into exile from everything we know is our first spiritual act that changes us according to a higher aim. 

Throughout our many myths and legends, the Hero leaves his people to go into foreign lands and discover his true strength and return to overturn. And because of that, the boot always comes down. The Empire strikes back; state terror slays the innocent. But the seed of a revolution has been sown.

Nevertheless, the question remains, hovering like an accusing finger over the neighborhoods of slaughtered babies : from where does the evil of child killing come, and why do Christians commit it so habitually?

In this Gospel passage, when the babies are slain, the Greek word used to describe the murder is anaheereho, which means to steal and then exterminate, the way animals are bound up and ritually slaughtered. The same word is used to describe sacrificing an animal or children: a blood ritual going back millennia, where people believed they were purified by killing the pure and innocent. The Hebrew word kadush means two things at the same time: to sanctify and to sacrifice. We make something holy by murdering it.

And there you have it: the source of the crime. For wired into the language and thought of Judeo-Christianity is the ancient tribal belief that one cannot worship God and be made pure without ritually murdering the best, the purest, and the most innocent among us. 

Why else were the first-born children of the Canaanites thrown into the fire pit of their insatiable god Moloch? Why was God’s own first-born son Jesus sacrificed on a cross? And why today are the Catholic, Anglican, and United churches that killed generations of children still allowed to legally operate and face no consequences for their mass murder? Because consciously or not, innocent blood is still believed to be our key to worldly power and salvation.

In the face of this habitual and institutionalized crime, Jesus’ words are not meant to be politely listened to for an hour on Sundays. They are meant to cause an eruption in the listener: an inner turmoil that starts snapping the chains of complicity with official wrongdoing that are forged on us since birth. Without that inner, disruptive explosion, our hearts will remain unmoved by the mass murder of children, and we will continue to be willing accomplices of the butchers garbed in robes of Church and State.

Of course, these are mere words. And all the correct words spoken over the years about child killings and baby trafficking and Christian genocide have not stopped the killer’s knife. The crime continues unabated because it is who we are. And yet, being hunted by assassins and forced to flee into exile can help us unlearn who we are and become someone else. And then maybe we will start placing our bodies between the innocents and the killers who come for them. Maybe then we will become fit to be part of that revolution called the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and help overthrow the blood-soaked rulers and their commanding prince of darkness, so that a new creation can dawn.

Perhaps it took Jesus years to discover that purpose. But he was set on his course at the moment of his birth, as were any of us who are chosen to carry this burden. The only certainty is that we have no home except the one that lies ahead in the new world, on the other side of the great, cleansing fire.

Next reflection: Nowhere to run - Judgement is closer than you think

(based on Luke 3:2-17)