Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 2 vii-xviii

Troubled at the birth of a mightier and less merciful ruler than himself, King Herod summons the Magi on their way to Bethlehem and tells them to inform him when they find the child. Once the Magi have made their visit to the stable, they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and depart by another route. An angel warns Joseph to shelter in Egypt until Herod's death, and the enraged king has every male child in Bethlehem under the age of two years murdered.

While the Gospel does not state whether Herod's heart was hardened by the personal intervention of the Heavenly Father, God's responsibility for ensuring the massacre of Jewish infants is transparently clear. He could have caused Herod's death before the massacre, or struck down his mind like Nebuchadnezzar's; instead, He chose to allow the tyrant to survive and perpetrate the atrocity which, like all other events, He must have anticipated since before the beginning of time.

Aside from hinting unsubtly at the breach of His covenant with the Jews and the conferring of His dubious favour upon Christians instead, God's purpose in orchestrating the massacre is to fulfil two prophecies. The first is a bizarre context-free reading of Hosea 11 i, which recounts the Exodus; the second is a reading of Jeremiah 31 xv, which speaks of the Hebrew matriarch Rachel lamenting the loss of her children. In Jeremiah, God goes on to promise the transmutation of grief into joy, although the Evangelist does not trouble to record how many of the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem received new and better children to replace the ones He allowed to be killed.