Why Don't We Talk About Herod
As Brenna pointed out yesterday, churches rarely talk about this part of the Christmas story. It’s not cute, it’s not hopeful, and it just doesn’t feel much like Christmas.
When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
Matthew 2:16-18
As Brenna pointed out, there may be some deeper issues for why churches don’t often mention it. This week we’ll look at three reasons.
The first is that White theology is about individuals and not about communities and systems. As Erna Kim Hackett has written, “Though there is a place for the individual in theology, white theology, in profound syncretism with American culture, has distorted the Bible to be solely about individual redemption.”
So what that means is that White theology focuses on individual sins, individual needs for redemption, and in passages like this it says the each individual is a false king of their own needing the sacrifice of Christ to redeem. But this passage is about the head of a governmental system with the finances and military force and bureaucratic machinery to implement a decree - it’s an entire system that is operating to do violence to the innocent.
Moreover, individual White theology tends to focus on souls vs. individual bodies, because when Evangelical theology was being formed in the 1700s and 1800s, it was largely done in the South. Because White Southerners wanted to maintain their innocence, the emphasis was on saving souls and not needing to worry about bodies… because that way they could enslave black and brown bodies and still ‘send their souls to heaven.’ It was a very important theological move to make if you want to be able to justify gross physical treatment, slavery and genocide, of Black and Brown bodies - ignore what’s happening physically, claim it’s good ultimately for their souls
This bible story is about a grossly oppressive system, headed by Herod - and these systems continue to exist all over our world today. What systems are like that in our day? And do you participate in those systems by what you believe in? Take some time to ask yourself what kind of theology do you have - does it limit sin to individuals, or could whole systems be corrupt and in need of change? Does it limit the ‘spiritual life’ to the soul alone, or does it matter what we do with our minds, hearts, and bodies - and what we do with others’s as well?