The Bethlehem Massacre

Everyone has heard the news. Most have heard it over and over again. Last Friday, a twenty year old man shot and killed his mother in her bed in Newtown, Connecticut, then got in a car, drove a short distance, walked into Sandy Hook Elementary with an assault rifle and shot dead twenty little children, along with six adult staff members, then took his own life.  

Amidst all of the shock and grief being experienced and broadcast all over the world, the whole episode is made even more excruciating by the fact that this is all taking place at Christmas time. So all of the grief and horror ends up on display, juxtaposed the wonderful message that the Prince of Peace has come.   

For most people this is all just too much. But as our society fails in its struggle to reconcile these two competing realities, it is really nothing new. As horrible as this tragedy is, and it is that beyond measure for the families of those children, it is not something that is not addressed by the biblical narrative.   

The gospel of Matthew tells us that soon after the birth of Christ (one could even say in response to the birth of Christ!) a massacre of innocent children took place at the hands of a crazed king.

Matt 2:16-18

“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.’ ”

So, right here in the biblical record we have the great proclamation and arrival of the Messiah followed almost immediately, speaking chronologically, by the mass murder of innocents. We have no way of knowing how many children were actually killed in Bethlehem by Herod’s violent rampage, but we know that one is one too many.

But rather than negate the message of the Messiah, these realities only serve to make our need for Him more obvious. One of the key reasons we are so scandalized by these more recent events is because we want to believe as a society that we are beyond these things. We have convinced ourselves, against all evidence to the contrary, that we are getting better and better. We see ourselves as being so sophisticated and so intelligent. And those are the same reasons we don’t think we need God anymore. But the reality is that we need God just as much as we ever did if not more. Because the simple truth is that we don’t have the answers even though we want to think we do. We are not getting better and better. In spite of our vast accumulation of collective knowledge and all of our technological wizardry, our social problems are in fact compounding. And the farther we get away from the message of Christ, the more we will see just how acute and chronic our need really is as the whole situation continues to escalate.  

So, as everyone continues to scratch their heads and wonder how this could ever happen, maybe more of us will wake up to the realization that we are not nearly all we like to think we are, and that we really DO need a Saviour, if for no other reason than to save us from ourselves.