Rising like a behemoth from the midst of the Judean desert, just miles from the Dead Sea, is the ancient fortification of Masada. On this massive plateau flanked by sheer drops of hundreds of feet, Herod the Great built two palaces for himself. Masada, which itself means “fortress” in Hebrew, speaks for itself.
If one were traveling across the otherwise flat portion of the Judean desert surrounding this gargantuan fortress, Masada would obviously need to be circumnavigated. Its towering height is a direct contrast to the nearby Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. You can’t climb Masada without the aid of a cable car or a feat of mechanical engineering, and so you must go around it.
It’s only when one makes the journey to the top of Masada that its purpose stands out in relief. When standing on top of this geological eyrie, with stunning vistas of the surrounding landscape, it’s possible to begin to understand the paranoia of its originator.
Scripture doesn’t mince words when describing Herod the Great. He is consistently portrayed as ruthless, egomaniacal, and extremely fearful. His cruel actions and distorted use of power are tied back to the same motif of his insecurity. Only at Masada must Herod have felt even remotely secure, with a magnificent aerial view of any potential approaching threats.
Just as Masada rises from the floor of the Judean desert as a striking anomaly, so the specter of Herod the Great looms high off the pages of Scripture. And as anyone traveling the Judean desert must go around Masada, it seems that in Scripture, people must navigate around Herod’s ominous presence.
In today’s reading from Matthew, Herod is, in some sense, the elephant in the room. What we don’t hear are verses sixteen through eighteen in chapter two. These verses made their appearance on the Feast of the Holy Innocents this past week, but today, they are left unheard.
Herod is the elephant in the room not because he’s unacknowledged, but because everyone is perpetually rerouting their paths and plans to avoid him. And we might wonder why. Herod the Great was, in all actuality, a mere puppet of the Roman Empire. His claims to power were largely buttressed by his flashy building projects, of which Masada was a shining example. Herod’s claim to power rested solely on his ability to curry favor with the Roman Empire. And this he did with astounding skill.
But behind his mammoth building endeavors was a fragile ego that wielded violence to compensate for fear. Herod is why we find the magi adjusting their travel plans after visiting the Christ child. Herod is why Joseph redirects his family to Egypt in order to escape the massacre of the holy innocents. Herod is the elephant in the room around which everyone is dancing, or from which everyone is running.
No matter the year or century, some things never change. Herod was not the last ruler of his type in the course of human history. It seems that we can never part with the foreboding presence of tyrants among us, determined to build themselves up by wreaking havoc on humanity.
Oppressors of every stripe are, to our own day, the causes of people’s destroyed plans, at least, and their demise, at worst. Power-hungry despots are why many reroute their journeys into exile. They are why many people find themselves wandering in loneliness without homes and family and wondering where God is in such injustice and misery.
It is ironic that Mary and Joseph carry the Savior of the Nations back into Egypt, the land of exile, as they flee from Herod. It is as if the clock has been turned back. After God’s mighty deliverance of Israel from bondage so many years ago, after God’s presence in pillars of fire and cloud in the wild desert, after God’s journey with his chosen people from exile in Babylon back to Jerusalem, now the Holy Family itself is back in exile—and all because of one person around which everyone changes plans and cowers in fear.
Some things never change, we might also say. How did the clock get turned back in some ways, after so much progress and advancement? Why is everything spiraling out of control because of the actions of people in whose hands power is abused? How does a biological tyrant of great mystery cause so much death and destruction in spite of our numerous medical and technological advances? These are the lingering questions of our own day; they are not limited to the time of Herod.
The other elephant in the room is the question many are afraid to name: where is God in the face of looming violence and cruel oppression? How many times have you heard people speak this query? How many times, like the elephant in the room, is this question voiced silently and left unspoken and instead raging in human hearts?
It’s not a question that we can solve with absolute certainty. It’s not a question for which any mortal has all the answers. And it’s not a blasphemous question. It’s just naming the elephant in the room: where do we find God in all this?
When no angels appear to us in dreams to redirect our journeys, what do we do? When will many of our wandering, homeless neighbors finally find a place to rest? How is it possible to move on when what has been lost in exile cannot be recovered,?
These are the questions to which easy answers are dishonest, but they are the questions we need to ask. These are the questions before which we must hold a reverent silence.
And thank God for Matthew, who is trying to help us with our questions, amid the carefully crafted storytelling surrounding Jesus’ birth. He is an evangelist, after all, destined to speak some good news. Matthew does not dance around the elephant in the room. Matthew names it, takes it on, and leads us to God in the midst of it all.
In Matthew’s story, Herod’s murder of the holy innocents is the part left unheard in today’s Gospel passage. But it is there. Like Masada, it sits solidly amid a desert of questions, and it is the reason for two diversions that frame its literary position. Before this massacre, the wise men leave Bethlehem by an alternate route because of Herod’s threat. Because of the looming threat of the massacre, the Holy Family flees to Egypt. And even after Herod’s death, his cruel legacy embodied in his son leads the Holy Family to end up in Nazareth, by various peregrinations.
But what we find clear as a bell amid all the circuitous wandering of the various travelers in this story is God’s abiding presence. God’s presence finds its way into the travelers’ paths, indirectly and mysteriously. This is the way God so often works.
For Matthew’s characters, this presence arrives in dreams. For us, it may be different. This gracious hand of Providence might not be obvious while we’re wandering but only in hindsight. The merciful protection we seek might not seem merciful at all in the moment, but Scripture and tradition tell us that God is faithful and true.
It is the Christ child himself who shows us why God’s presence among us is sometimes hard to find. It is this tiny, lowly babe who reveals that the God we worship and adore does not hurl Herod from his mighty palace of Masada through the might of his own omnipotence. No, God journeys with us around the elephant in the room and gives us power to proclaim justice in all our wanderings. Sometimes, entertaining the elephant only feeds its hungry ego.
As God insinuated himself into the human condition in the flesh of a human baby, and in the face of the monolithic cruelty of tyranny and oppression, God comes to us, often as quietly as a baby moving, to take our hand and lead us around the elephants in the room, not to avoid them but to show us a subtler, more powerful way. God comes to show us what true righteousness is like. God comes to show us the path of life.
Masada still looms today over the Judean desert, a relic of a despot whose legacy is the path of terror he unleashed. But the Word of God still abides. It is living and ever moving among us, giving us grace and power to utter truth and peace in the face of Herod’s modern disciples. Unlike the transience of royal power rendered obsolete, God’s power and might do not depend on monuments and palaces but on the Word of truth. And this Word still changes the world, no matter the size of the elephants in the room.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 3, 2021