L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s
Church,
The Second Sunday after Christmas—January
2, 2005
The Herod in Us
“But when Herod was dead,
behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, Saying,
Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel:
for they are dead which sought the young child's life” (Matthew 2:19-20).
King Herod was an especially nasty character. He is
called “Herod the Great” by historians, not because of his moral achievements,
but because he was quite willing to use any means at his disposal to secure his
kingship of
The slaughter of the Holy Innocents, which we observed
in particular last Tuesday in the Church’s calendar, was only one of the many
massacres that Herod commanded during his reign. His very last action on earth was
a massacre. He called his nobles to his deathbed, and once they were gathered
together, he ordered his soldiers to kill every one of them. Thus, he declared,
there would be universal mourning to accompany his own death.
It is, however, Herod’s slaughter of the Innocents
that most concerns us, since it was his attempt to overrule the prophecies of
God that a King and Messiah should be born in
There are, of course, certain ironies in a mere man’s
attempt to kill God. If such a thing were truly possible, it would be an utter
act of suicide, since the existence of all creatures depends on the existence
of God. If one kills God, he necessarily kills himself. Less immediately
apparent is the irony that Herod was already dying of a horrible “wasting”
disease, and knew it, when he gave the order to kill all the boys of
Herod was such a wretched person that it is easy for
ordinary people to think that he has nothing to do with them, the same way that
they could never imagine themselves taking the part of a Hitler or of a Stalin
in the history of the world. In fact, during the Middle Ages, Herod became a
figure of fun, a blustering sort of bogeyman and hapless tyrant in the miracle
plays that entertained the people on their holidays.
But Herod needs to have a serious place in our moral
thinking, for if none of us is a “Herod the Great,” we often behave as if we
were “little Herods.” Whenever we serve ourselves at the expense of other
people, whenever we make those around us pay the price for our delusions of
grandeur or fantasies of self-importance, there is little to distinguish us
from that awful man. Whenever we sin, we kill Christ by adding to the burden of
sin that he bore to the cross, where he died for the sins of all men, in all
times and in all places, including our own.
Herod is the perfect picture of mankind unredeemed,
and his excesses are simply the working out of the fallen human nature against
which we all must contend. He is also a reminder that every one of us would
lose the battle against the fallenness of our nature, were it not for the gift
of God’s grace. We all have the potential, apart from God’s grace to be the
worst human being who ever lived. The good news is that we do not fight alone.
God overcomes our fallen nature for us, through the birth, death, and
resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, who became man to show us what a human
being is meant to be, and who died so that we might become the sort of human
being that he is forever.
Herod’s war against his own children is also a great
warning to the men and women of this and every generation. The care of all
children, whether of our own children or of the children of strangers, is the
most important practical duty that God gives us, after the duty to worship him
and him alone. In fact, we cannot really care for children and raise them
properly to love and serve God, and to live moral lives in that service, if the
children do not see us worshipping God.
Moreover, if we do not worship God alone, making that
worship the highest duty and purpose of our existence, we will not be able to
care for our children as we should. Our idols will get in the way, and all
idols are gods of death. Our selfishness will get in the way, and we will
become the puppets of sin and death, claiming to be the kings and queens of our
own destiny when we are nothing of the sort.
It should come as no surprise, then, that our Lord
says in one of the lessons appointed for Holy Innocents Day:
Verily I say unto you, Except ye
be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the
kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little
child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive
one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of
these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone
were hanged about his neck, and that he
were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:3-6).
To raise children, we must first become the children
of God by adoption and grace, through the sort of faith that trusts in God as
our perfect, all-powerful, and all-knowing Father. However old we get, we are
not really grown-ups until we have this sort of faith, and we are not really
doing the work of parents until this is the sort of faith that we attempt to
pass on to our children, and to our children’s children. Without this faith,
our families are like bodies without hearts. They may be perfect in every other
way, but they will not be alive and capable of giving life.
The bad example of faithlessness, given by
disobedience to God’s clear commandments for good living, is the most dangerous
poison in the world. And we administer that poison to our children when they do
not see us either in obedience to God or in repentance for our failures to obey
him. God knows that we are fallen creatures, and so he always holds out to us
the means and the opportunity of forgiveness. But if we spurn that forgiveness,
everything else in our lives is futile and a sham. Our Lord, continues in the
passage just quoted:
Woe unto the world because of
offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom
the offence cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them
off, and cast them from thee: it is
better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands
or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee,
pluck it out, and cast it from thee:
it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two
eyes to be cast into hell fire (Matthew 18:7-9).
Our Lord uses the language of mutilation, not because he
wants us to mutilate ourselves, but because he wants us to understand that sin
is the mutilation that makes us monsters. If the only way to enter heaven and
to avoid hell were to dismember or blind ourselves, then that price would still
be less than the damage we do to ourselves and to others by sinning. But our
true choice isn’t between one sort of mutilation and another. It is a choice
between wholeness with God, who heals and saves the repentant, and the sin that
must destroy us unforgiven and unredeemed.
Our children, then, need to be
brought up in a home and in a society where God is loved and worshipped so that
they, too, can be made whole and holy by the love of God. And we know that this
is more than a “nice religious theory” by the evidence of the violence in our
schools and playgrounds. Children are killing other children because they are
living in an ever more godless world, with less and less of the protection that
faithful Christian homes provide as they face down the evils of this world
together, sharing a mutual faith in God and a mutual obedience to him.
Our society is teaching our
children to be Herods, and it teaches them that it is normal and acceptable to kill,
if it is convenient and the state approves. Our fellow countrymen, under the
protection of our God-defying abortion laws, have killed millions upon millions
of innocents since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. This
burden of death “out-Herods Herod,” as the old saying goes.
Where our Lord told us to
sacrifice anything of this world, any part of our life that did not serve God,
in order to live and to live abundantly, our laws say that it is proper to kill
children in the womb if having a child would be an economic burden, or
embarrass us, or ruin our plans for the future. Life, the greatest gift of God,
and our participation in giving of life, the greatest honor that God gives to
humanity, are treated as less than nothing.
This is the example that we are
giving our children, and now those people raised in an abortion culture are
looking to extend the rule of death. They are debating, as a serious option,
infanticide during the first six months or a year after birth. They are debating
doctor-assisted suicide as the beginning of a policy that will extend to an
involuntary death for the sick or elderly, if they are deemed “unworthy of
life.”
What we sow, we also reap. But
the place to reform these evils is not in politics, but in our hearts, our
homes, and our families. A Christian people will not tolerate these enormities,
and if we raise up a Christian people, these evils will pass away. We must
remain ever vigilant against the “Herod” that is in each one of us, and we can
overcome him by the grace of the Messiah born in