SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

With her permission I reproduce here the column my daughter the Rev. Tess Kuin Lawton, an Anglican priest and chaplain of Magdalen College School in Oxford, put on Facebook yesterday. I found it the most moving and pertinent comment I have seen.

It is rare to have an item of news so appalling that the instinctive human reaction is not to listen, watch or read about it at all; but in the story of the murder of 140 school children by the Taliban in Pakistan on Tuesday, that is what has been thrust into the heart of the pre-Christmas glitter and sparkle and the juxtaposition is impossible to bear.

Yet, the religiously minded among us cannot help hearing the echo of both Pharaoh and Herod and we find ourselves once more taking off our shoes as we wait for the Theophany. The religious narrative of our souls has shown that when God has come into the world, it has been a world of violence and horror. These things are not new. They are part of the human condition every bit as much as hope and anticipation and joy.

The Fall is not simply a colourful myth we can weave into carol services and set to beautiful music. It is reality of human nature which allows each one of us to sink to untold depths of depravity and paint a picture which can nevertheless justify our actions. There is a rationale behind every act of moral evil; a way to explain it, make sense of it. We seem to need to be able to do that somehow, in order to comprehend the darkness. So we have heard about revenge for the West honouring a teenage girl who champions education, we have heard of children bearing the punishment for the sins of their fathers in the army, we have even heard some try to suggest that education is un-Islamic.

Pharaoh feared the growing numbers of Israelite slaves and gave orders that the midwives kill all new-born boys. When the midwives could not do this, Pharaoh ordered that new-born boys be drowned in the Nile instead. The words used in Exodus for Pharaoh’s dealings with the Israelites are ‘shrewd’ and ‘ruthless’. Today, in a society where we are protected from reality by a screen, we are used to hearing these words used in a response to a budget report, not as a way of dealing with people. In the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Herod works ‘in secret’ to ‘search for the child and destroy him.’ When his plan is thwarted and the holy family flee into the same Egypt of their ancestors, Herod’s fury leads him to ‘kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.’

We read it out, we remember it in the Church’s calendar, but until this week, we have had no idea of the absolute horror of such an act. Turn off the radio, turn your faces away from the front page of the newspaper, change channels on the television. This blood is too much, these teenage faces caught in a moment of terrifying death is too awful for us.

How do we respond to the depths of sin in this world? What words can explain? None, of course. This is the season of watching and waiting. And sometimes what we watch is too much for us. ‘Maranatha’, come Lord. We have taken off our shoes, we have covered our heads, we have rent our clothes. Come into the heart of this evil. Gather into one, in your kingdom, the pain of all these broken lives. Lift up the souls of each child and never let them go.

This is what Christmas is about. The true light, which enlightens everyone is coming into the world. What we may have forgotten is how extreme the task of the Word really is. We know, because we hear it every year, that he is in the world but the world does not know him. This week, we have been reminded how far away from the light we have strayed. The reading which begins our carol services is not a nostalgic nicety, it is the painful and gritty truth. There is no health in us.

Advent is about facing this. In ourselves and in the world around us. We dress the Church is purple because it is a season of penitence. Have mercy on us, miserable sinners. At times, we forget it in the glittery rush for Christmas and in our desire to lift our spirits in a season of grey skies and long nights. At school, we were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in joyful parts as King and page, as soon as December 1st arrived. But for another school, the slaughter of the innocents was just around the corner.

One commentator on the radio shed some light on the subject when she pointed out that this act of murder by the Taliban was a sign of their weakness rather than strength. Like Pharaoh and Herod before them, they are fearful of the power which (in this case) one young girl might have. Luke’s Gospel begins each of his first three chapters with a ruler: King Herod, Emperor Augustus, Emperor Tiberius. Yet we know that in not one of these cases does the power really lie here and we urge the reader to tell us about John the Baptist, Mary, the shepherds.

The horror of the murdered schoolchildren must make us reflect deeply on our own sin, our own culpability in this world, in a way which perhaps the familiarity of the readings and carols have inured us to. It must take us back to the raw power of God as we await the greatest theophany of history and, in humility and awe, we must pray.