Epiphany
Matthew 2.16-18
Rev Margarita Lais Tourn
Minister in the Waldensian Evangelical Church of the River Plate, Argentina, and until recently pastor of the Reformed Evangelical Church in Buenos Aires.
At Christmas and Epiphany, we celebrate the joy that can be ours in accepting that Jesus wanted to be Emmanuel, God with us and with all people. Let us make that joy complete by allowing him to help us examine ourselves and the social systems in which we are inserted and in which the God who embodies himself in our history wants to be present.
Today as yesterday, when Christ reveals himself, when he bursts into our history, he provokes a reaction of acceptance or rejection.
Epiphany is the feast in which the church commemorates the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. We remember this just a few days after Christmas, when we have yet to remove the decorations of the festive season in which we celebrated so much joy, love, peace, the gathering of family and friends. The visit of the kings can be read almost as a magical story, the perfect complement of a romanticized Christmas.
But in the Bible, Christmas and Epiphany both come with texts that chill our blood. Is the massacre of the innocents very different from the birth in a stable? We know that there are people whose fate it is to be born excluded from society. We know too that orders are given openly for children to be killed. Are these not, perhaps, more or less the same thing? Both facts are generated by the same system that has no room for Jesus and in which, nevertheless, he wants to reveal himself for our liberation.
Most of those who are born with no room are condemned to die before they are two years old from malnutrition or preventable diseases. In our country, Argentina, there are campaigns for sterilization, but our women and men have access to sterilization only with money and in secret. Many children are born, but not to live. Our nation's Herods refuse to promote responsible parenthood, supposedly because they are in favour of life, but tacitly and at the same time they have already signed the death warrant of many of the children yet to be born.
Herod's attitude in Matthew's text is repellent, but his instruction to his soldiers is just a crude example of what is done routinely to maintain order in a system of power. Hence we cannot avoid speaking of this theme and feeling it as our own. It is frightening that even today, as individuals and as church, we often justify the order that is socially imposed and the terrible methods with which it is maintained.
Without being aware of the analogy with this moving story, we are on Herod's side when we say or think that excluding, victimizing or subjecting part of society and even whole peoples may be terrible but necessary for the common good. A few years ago our then president encouraged people to believe that in our economic system there was no place for 30% of the population, but that it would benefit the others. Would that disposable 30% be the children whom today we see dying of hunger? Did we need to realize that excluding that 30% did not benefit anyone, but corrupted the whole nation, in order to attend to Rachel's wailing and loud lamentation? Even now, do we still prefer not to hear this story?
This wailing helps us to recognize our own reality, so that we may seek to transform it in the light of the values proclaimed by Christ. As Christians, we are called to stand alongside the children and to question the reality that condemns the innocent.
In Herod's day and in our own, some see the victims as a danger, a public threat. It is clear that in the biblical text this is the reaction of those who are opposed to what Jesus reveals, but today things are very confused. We do not always recognize the cruel strategy of the powerful, who blame their victims or try to hide them from sight and mind. These victims and their situation are created by the same systems that deny their existence and their plight, systems that also create fear - fear of them, and of how they might react to the life into which they have been thrust without any alternative - and then use these fears to justify the crimes they commit with impunity.
Remembering the massacre of the innocents forces us to look with open eyes at the societies that allow the politics of fury and reveals their miseries. The hidden massacre of debt or the open slaughter of war demonstrate the vaunting ambition of the powerful and the corruption of the peoples that choose to believe and support them.
And so the wailing of Rachel continues to be heard. Rachel - she who so wanted children, she who died in giving birth to her second baby, beautiful and healthy - lifts up her voice in lamentation and weeps for the infants born for death.
Rachel weeps and will not be comforted. The arguments of those who try to justify the fact that people are born like animals do not convince her, even though they want her to understand that they do not have the support of any health system, that there are no beds in the hospital, that the father of the creature is unknown, that that girl was not ready to be a mother. They do not convince her, because all of that is part of why she wails so loudly.
She will not be comforted by the technical experts who say that in the South there is an excess of population. Her tears do not dim her capacity to see that this argument is illogical. If in Argentina there are 10 inhabitants per square kilometre, and in the Netherlands there are 347, but nobody dies of hunger there, then the problem must be something else.
Rachel does not want them to pat her on the head and tell her, "Don't be silly, don't cry - be angry, shout at me, but don't cry." For a long time patriarchal ideology has led her to disbelieve her own ability to play anything but a minor and subordinate role, and to accept that this is the way things are and always must be. But today she takes the "essentially feminine" things of maternity and lamentation, to which she has been confined, and turns them into prophecy.
Rachel will not be comforted until her wailing forces us to see that - just as in the time of exile in which Jeremiah lived, just as in the time of imperial domination in which Jesus lived - so too today, in a food-producing country where half of the babies aged between six months and two years suffer from anaemia, Herod still commands the death of children. Her wailing continues to be prophecy, a word that is fulfilled, in which she observes and endures reality, denounces it and cries for change.
Does this wailing touch our heart and conscience? The church must write into its history the wailing of Rachel; it is urgent that it be heard. We must use what means we have to bring about change, even though those resources, like the wailing itself, are only what the system has left over.
We mothers who, like Rachel, had the opportunity to desire the birth of our children, brought into the world boys and girls who, like Joseph and Benjamin, are people with possibilities, people who can become leaders in different areas. We must weep for the children of other wombs, who are also our children. We can no longer allow ourselves to be consoled and comforted by deceptive words that justify death, that bind us subtly or brutally to injustice.
Let us be comforted only by a system in accordance with the will of God, even if that means rethinking all our present orders. Let us embody the real commitment of being the people of God, following his commandments of love and justice. Let us encounter each other among sisters and brothers to establish strategies that allow us to journey on the way of building the reign of God.
When Christ reveals himself to us, his presence illuminates everything. Christ presents to us his offer of life, shows us also the true reality of those who deny him, and moves us to decide between the two. Let us add our deeds to his intentions. Let us centre our faith and our hope in his justice and let Jesus, who already as a baby was displaced and driven from the system that still governs us, find room in our lives for our liberation.
Let us find strength in the only one who can give true consolation. Listen to him who says to us: "Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the Lord: your children shall come back to their own country" (Jer 31.16-17).
