How Christmas really began

And when the wise men had left, Look! A heavenly messenger came to Joseph and cried, “Wake up! Take the baby and mother and flee to sanctuary and live there until I bring word, for King Herod will seek to destroy the baby.” … Then Herod set out in his wrath and murdered 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.

According to the Bible, Christmas began with the mass murder of children. But it’s a state sanctioned slaughter, so it’s not considered a crime. On the contrary, the massacre of every male infant in Judea was an official, lawful act ordered by King Herod, so everyone was expected to comply. Which they did, naturally.

After all, the scary rumor that prompted the child killing orgy was that a rival to King Herod had just been born. Lawful authority was being challenged. So, to keep society safe and stable, all the male babies had to die, and morality took a backseat to the needs of power. After all, we don’t want civil war and anarchy, do we?

Of course, there’s nothing unusual about this blood-soaked scenario. It’s how anyone stays in power, from kings to popes to prime ministers and CEO’s. Political expediency comes first, and humanity comes second, or last. It’s one of the reasons that child killing by church and state is as old as humanity itself. For who is more expendable than children? Just look at 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 a 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 much the norm 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 atrocity. Why? Because the target in the cross hairs of the State was Jesus, who after all was much more important than your average peasant or indigenous child. After all, he was the son of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe!

And so there you have it, right at the start of the New Testament - 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. 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 a 'residential school' child in my hand. It was October 6, 2011, at the former Mohawk Anglican internment camp in Brantford, Ontario. Standing next to me was Geronimo Henry, who as a child had buried other kids next to the building. He said to me,

“They especially liked raping and beating 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 Biblical story this Sunday 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 correlation and muffle the awful noise coming from the basement.

Fortunately, something more than political or religious expediency is at work. As even the most powerful child killer discovers, the blood of the innocents cries out through every locked cathedral door and closed heart, and it does so through the cries of the living. For as the Gospel states “The mothers of the dead cannot be comforted”. Most people can easily look the other way, but Eternity and the survivors cannot.

The survivors cannot be comforted by all the official 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 statute of limitation on murder any more than there is a legal one. The killers of children stand convicted and guilty and sentenced by the fact of their crime, even if they are kings and popes and prime ministers.

That’s in theory, of course. The idealistic message of the Bible is that justice will come because everyone stands under judgement. But that’s not what happens in the real world. In practice, when the killers of children remain in power, they are never guilty of anything and they don’t even have to absolve themselves of child murder because it’s not considered a crime. Justice is a fiction in the face of the requirements of power. Just look around.

Despite the utopian tone of much of the Bible, today’s Gospel reading in fact closely reflects how things operate in the realpolitik world of government, then and now, especially when it comes to the ritual killing of children which is a practice of Church and State as common as war and genocide.

What’s amazing and instructive about this story is that even at his birth, Jesus caused hysteria among rulers and posed a threat to established authority. Just souls always evoke that reaction in the guilty and cause them to come down on us. Like any truth teller, Jesus became a refugee from state terror from day one and a wanderer in poverty and exile. And he stayed that way to the day he was judicially murdered by Rome. So it’s no accident that Jesus has always been a symbol and inspiration to the poor and the targeted people everywhere, for his life and death as the permanent outsider mirrors our own experience of the world.

More to come ...