Jer 31:7-14; Psalm 84; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23
Genocide. The deaths of the Holy Innocents at the hands of Herod definitely fall under the definition of genocide. The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides the only formal definition of genocide agreed upon by nation states today. Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
When I hear the word genocide I usually think of the murder of over six million Jews at the hands of Nazi powers before and during World War II. Two thirds of the Jewish population living in Europe at that time perished.
But that 6 million doesn’t include other groups that were targeted for annihilation. If you include persons with disabilities and physical defects, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet and Polish civilians, Romani (referred to generally by the term Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and many others who were political or religious opponents of the Nazi regime, you can add another 5 to 8 million souls, giving us a grand total of 11 to 14 million in Europe alone.
That doesn’t include the millions of Chinese and other Asian nationalities killed during the occupation by Japanese forces in WWII. The early to middle twentieth century was a blood bath for innocent souls. Thank goodness that all ended with the allied victory at the end of the “second Great War”.
Of course then there’s the estimated 12 million Soviets murdered at the hands of Joseph Stalin between the end of WWII and Stalin’s own death. Perceived political threats, homosexuals, those refusing to abandon their religion; basically anyone who Stalin disliked or perceived as even a minute threat. Entire families and bloodlines disappeared together.
Then there was that Khmer Rouge thing in the late 1970’s.
When the former Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1980’s, tens of thousands of Muslims were murdered, mostly men and boys, with killing fields still being found now and then.
And then of course there’s that little “incident” in Rwanda in 1994. Ethnic cleansing resulted in the deaths of around 1 million ethnic Rwandans.
Since 2000 more than half a million souls have been taken in Darfur, Sudan.
Ok, so there’s still a lot of genocide-type killing going on in the world even today. But at least our hands have always been clean. Well, as long as we don’t count those pesky Native Americans we almost completely obliterated in the 1800’s. Or the Chinese immigrants, the ones who helped build America’s railroad network and were treated like sub-humans in the 19th century American West. And then of course there’s that slavery thing, but that wasn’t really genocide it was just usury, just business, so long as you don’t count what the slave trade did to the African nations the slaves were taken from. And some folks get very upset about the 130,000 Japanese civilians killed when we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that’s really nothing compared to the 1.2 million Japanese civilians that died when we fire-bombed Tokyo and other major cities before the end of WWII. And then there’s also that German city called Dresden, the one the allies completely bombed off the map, including the entire civilian population that lived there during WWII. In more recent memory there are the 2 million Cambodian, 1 million Laotian, 3 million Vietnamese civilians killed in the quagmire we call the “conflict in Vietnam”. Most recently there was our invasion and conquering of Iraq, which claimed between 500,000 and one million Iraqi citizens. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan haven’t been full counted yet.
Ok, so no one’s hands are clean. In fact, during the 400 years of imperial expansion by Christian European nations and their colonies from 1492 through 1892, it’s estimated that between 80 and 100 million native peoples died at the hands of overzealous “Christian” explorers worldwide. If you add the disease the colonists brought with them that native populations had no natural resistance to, multiply that number by five. That adds up to about 1 million native peoples perishing every year for 400 years.
Even the bible itself is filled with constant bouts of genocide. Moses is saved from the Hebrew genocide at the hands of pharaoh. The Hebrew slaves are saved from genocide at the hands of another pharaoh. The Northern Kingdom of Israel is obliterated by the invading armies of Assyria. The Southern Kingdom of Judah is almost obliterated by the invading Babylonian armies. The Maccabees are saved from genocide at the hands of Seleucid Empire. And on and on and on.
Thank goodness God in scripture was never involved in genocide. Of course there was that one night in Egypt when every first born of Egypt was killed in God’s attempt to force Pharaoh to release the Hebrews from slavery.
Well, and then there’s the Israelite’s, crossing the Jordan river with Joshua as they take the “land flowing with milk and honey” promised them by God through Moses. There were other people living in those lands… were.
Sodom and Gomorra. Noah and the Ark. If we are to see history the way the Old Testament writers did, with God responsible for everything, Scripture has God doing some serious smiting as well.
In the history of this world there is no one who has truly clean hands. History is filled to the brim with genocide and murder, and heaven is filled to the brim with the victims of genocide and murder. And if we have the courage to look back at our own history as Christians we will see that radical Islam is not the only religious tradition that has killed millions in the name of God.
And today’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew brings an image of one more genocide. King Herod, Herod the Great as he was called, is not about to allow one more uprising to threaten his grip on power in the Roman-occupied Jewish lands. The verses left out of our passage from today have Herod angrily ordering the murder of every male child under the age of 2 in Bethlehem and the surrounding country. As Christians we celebrated the feast of the Holy Innocents this last Monday, our way of remembering all those innocent children murdered by a despot king in a failed attempt to kill our savior. We remember those children and we pray for their souls… yes we Episcopalians pray for the souls of the dead, an important piece of our Anglo-Catholic and Roman-Catholic heritage.
Jesus prepare to flee. When I imagine Joseph and Mary receiving the terrifying news about Herod’s plans, and think about their “flight” away to safety in Egypt, I also think about other families throughout history who have had to flee in the night, usually with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Noah and his family scrambling into the Ark to escape the flood; Lot and his family fleeing the fire and brimstone that consumes Sodom and Gomorrah; the Hebrew slave families frantically marking their doorposts as Egyptian firstborn die around them; Hebrew families fleeing Samaria and Jerusalem as armies move in to annihilate them in the years 520 BC and 70 AD respectively; an African family running into the brush as slave traders encircle their village in the 17 and 18 hundreds; Native American families leaving their land behind as white cavalry push them further and further west; Aboriginal families being systematically destroyed as Australian authorities seized their children and forced them to live with “white” families; Jewish families hiding like rats in attics and cellars as Nazi soldiers drag their neighbors off to concentration camps and gas chambers in the nineteen thirties and forties; black South African families trying to escape the hopelessness of Apartheid; Rwandan families fleeing out their back doors as their neighbors are hacked to death in the streets behind them in the nineteen nineties; Palestinian and Lebanese families trying in vain to escape destruction as Israel and its enemies battle each other in the midst of large urban populations; Immigrant families from many nations like El Salvador and Venezuela and Ecuador and Haiti and Columbia and Cuba who flee persecution at the expense of leaving their homeland and their relatives and their former lives behind forever.
Our human history is clear: genocide has been a part of life since the dawn of time. Families have been fleeing death and destruction for just as long. And no one’s hands are clean.
The Good News today is that’s not the way things are meant to be, and that’s certainly not the way God calls on us to live or to act. The death of the Holy Innocents must stop. Joseph and Mary flee to safety and return when the danger of Herod is gone. Those who Joseph and Mary fled to in Egypt were safe harbor for them, even though they were aliens in that land. If not as Americans then especially as Christians, we too are called upon to be safe harbor for those who are being persecuted in this world of suffering and of death and of destruction. We are called to be safe harbor for those whose families are being threatened and killed. We are called to be safe harbor for those whose lives are being destroyed at the hands of injustice in all its many and evil forms.
The Good News today is that we can be instruments of God’s justice in a corrupt and unjust world. Maybe we can’t completely eradicate genocide in the world, but we are called on to try. Like those who opened their hearts and their homes to Joseph and Mary and our Lord, God has given us the blessing of being able to do the same for others. If we can’t do that as Americans, then we must do so as Christians. God expects nothing less of us, and God will bless us for our faithfulness.