2023.01.01 | Echoes of Ramah
Echoes from Ramah
Matthew 2:13-23
Preached by
Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
01 January 2023
Shhhhh. Do you see that? Over the ridge there? Those flames in the night? That’s Tzipori. The Roman legions are burning it. I can’t get the screams out of my head. Dear God. Why must this war wage on? What have we done? What are we to do? We must flee. I’ll take the dagger. No don’t, it’s better not to, I am told. Annoyed, I oblige, but I don’t know why I do, everything is happening so fast. Let’s leave the livestock, pack only enough meal for us and feed for the donkeys. Shall we go into the mountains or risk our chances on the King’s Highway? What will become of the baby? God, show us the way.
The seventh decade of the Common Era is drawing to a close, the once commander and now Roman Emperor Vespasian has sent his legions to Syro-Palestine, consisting of thousands of troops. Their staging area was not too far from the modern-day port city of Haifa. During the Jewish War they would venture inland and burn entire villages, Tzipori one of them, just 6 km to the north of Nazareth; its surviving inhabitants, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells us, were reduced to slaves--this a quick jog away from where Jesus grew up, the same distance as from here to Lake Chabot. Undoubtedly, at some point, similar travesties also occurred down the road in Nazareth and perhaps as far south as even Bethlehem.
While the so-called Massacre of the Innocents by Herod, remembered last week on December 29th in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Christian traditions, is dubious from a strictly historical perspective, especially the 144,000 lost according to Coptic tradition, Matthew’s account of the Gospel most likely was written after the reign of Vespasian and the Jewish War, and so no doubt he knew of many flights away from slaughter that had occurred with disturbing regularity. Mothers echoed the laments of Ramah of the Neo-Babylonian invasion once again in the Judean countryside.
Matthew tells us that 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.”
In one uninterrupted flow of consciousness and masterful storyweaving, Matthew Pharaoizes Herod the Great, Roman vassal king of Judea, and equates Jesus with the Prophet of Prophets and the ancient Israelite Lawgiver, Moses, and by extension, ancient Sargon the Great of Akkad before him on whom Moses’ birth narrative is patterned. Both Moses and Jesus are born into darkness, even into genocide, among forces of chaos that sought their ultimate eradication. Recall Pharoah’s proclamation to slaughter all Hebrew newborn boys. Herod, as the story is told, like Pharoah, in response to prophecy and dreams, sought to destroy the one born into Israel who would protest empire. And while western Christian traditions now discount the historicity of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, it really is no stretch of the imagination.
Herod was known for his authoritarian and tyrannical rule. Josephus tells us that he was extremely impulsive, driven by power, narcissism, and mental illness, even having one of his wives and two of his own sons executed. Josephus tells us that Herod was so unfavored by the public that he was so concerned that no one would mourn his death, that he commanded a group of men be killed at the time of his death so that languishing would be certain. No stretch of the imagination needed.
Matthew then was but connecting the dots for us and casting the Christmas story in the mold of the Exodus tradition his audience knew so well, drawing from text and his own context, Judean families fleeing the Roman legions all around, and characterizing Judean Roman vassalage as evil. John of Patmos, author of Revelation, does the same, ensconcing the birth of Christ in Revelation 12 in the Roman mythology of Leto, Apollo, and Python, simultaneously subverting Roman myth and Roman imperialism.
When the Magi had left the guest house where Mary, Josephus, and Jesus were staying, presumably with relatives during the mandatory census, Matthew tells us, Jesus’ life was in peril, and so the young family depart their relatives and leave the home of their ancestors for a distant land, some 500 km to the southwest. This would have been a multi-week treacherous journey.
Shhhhh. Get down off the donkey. Get in the bush. Outlaws are approaching. They wield weapons. Do not utter a word. Oh God, I knew we should have gone into the mountains. Why did we take the King’s Highway? . . . Yes, take the donkey. I have no denari, but please take my cloak. Spare my life, I. . . The light dissipates as the flames of the torches of the riders fade into the night and disappear beyond the horizon darkening, and my eyes close, for the last time I know not. A babe wimpers from under the cover of bushes and all falls silent and still.
Meanwhile, not too far north where the young family had earlier embarked from, laments continue to ascend, the echoes of the cries heard in Ramah could once again be heard in the Judean countryside. Jeremiah tells us that it was in Ramah in the early 6th century BCE during the siege and falling of Jerusalem, that ancient Judahites were corralled and logistically staged before being forcibly deported from their lands and homes and imported for forced labor in Babylon. It was here that mothers wept and wailed for their children who had been slaughtered back in Jerusalem. Later, as grief fermented into anger, it was by the irrigation canals in Babylon that mothers sang, “blessed be the one who seizes and smashes Babylon’s children against the rock.”
Earlier, the prophet Nahum rejoiced at Babylonians dashing infants into pieces at every street corner at the fall of Nineveh, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire, besieged by Babylon. But as the Book of Daniel reveals and the mothers at Ramah experienced, for every empire felled, other sometimes more notorious ones replace it. And so the cycle of violence repeats itself.
Here we recall Micah’s prophecy that the anointed one will be born in darkness. The babe is born in violence. Jesus the babe, was a pitting of the God-appointed King of the Jews vs. the Roman-appointed King of the Jews. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan write in their co-authored book, The First Christmas, that two narratives were being offered in the first century: one, by Caesar Augustus, Son of God, that is, the god Apollo, a narrative of Pax Romana, or an ultimate victory via world domination, which many experienced as raping, pillaging, and brute force, with massive collateral damage along the way. The counter narrative is offered in and by Jesus Christ, Son of God, who offers Pax Christi, a peace of another sort, produced non-violently, which declares it’s about the means, not only the ends. Process and journey matters, and how we get there and treat our neighbor along the way. Ceasar’s peace is produced through violence, Christ’s is non-violent. This is the Christmas contestation. The ultimate remedy for Ramah.
Christmastide then is a time to consider by what means we will work toward peace. The way of the Prince of Peace or the way of Caesar? One’s parousia or advent is perpetual and its banner is constant, the other’s parousia is accompanied by military parade, and banners are ever changing.
But the Christmas story is ultimately about the boy who lived? Even amid all the darkness and violence, right? Correct, just like Harry Potter, the boy who lived to take down the nameless Pharaoh--I mean, he who should not be named. But in a way, it’s also about all those who did not live. Matthew’s story, as was the Exodus story, is about a boy who lived, who like Moses will become a deliverer. Which also begs the question, what of all the innocents murdered? What about all those who didn’t live? In Egypt, in Judea? What of the echoes of Ramah? Can we still hear the echoes from Ramah today? What of those children who didn’t make it out of the Holocaust, the Ameri-Indian, Armenian, Bangladesh, Romani, Guatemalan, and Rwandan genocides, just to name a few? Even more recently, this year, the “Man of the Hole,” as he was known, who was the last of his Amazonian tribe in Brazil died this year, a whole people gone due to empire. No one even left to wail into the night. We think of how the course of world history has changed with just one life. What if Jesus had not lived? What if Abdul Lateef Jandali’s Syrian father had not escaped his tumultuous homeland as a political refugee to the U.S.? Many know Abdul Lateef better by his name given upon adoption, Steve Jobs. How different would our world be? Think of the flights from slaughter paused by the imperial invention of migration control, like today’s Title 42. Think a moment of God’s created potential plundered at the expense of peace via empire, the way of Caesar, Son of God, as opposed to Yeshua the Son of God.
By aligning ourselves with victory in the way of the world and its path to peace, via imperial population control and domination, conquering and pillaging, confiscating and depleting resources, we participate, however indirectly, in the replication of the languishing echoes of Ramah worldover.
Christmas is about the advent of a new world, one wherein the echoes of the voices of Ramah no longer reverberate ad infinitum, but this can only come about if we choose Peace as Christ gives, not as Caesar gives.
The way of the Christ child is vulnerability, neighborliness, and generosity, also echoing Micah the prophet, “learning violence no more.” In a land where more than 4,000 children die from firearms each year--the leading cause of child death in this country--finding Jesus is to beat guns into plowshares.
Around the time of the first Christmas, during the reign of Caesar Augustus, close to the time when Mary, Mother of Jesus, prayed for the downfall of empire, a portion of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles in the face of empire were penned:
“The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together. (2.319-24).
But for this to be accomplished, this involves each and every one of us, What Borg and Crossan term, participatory eschatology. We’ve been preparing the way throughout Advent, now the real work of Christmas begins. There is hope of transformation yet to come, when there will be no more weeping as Isaiah foresees, no more slaughter of life as Micah foretells. We see glimpses of this all around, take Moms Demand Action against Gun Violence for example, and so many other manifestations of the Christmas spirit of Pax Christi. God is waiting for us to be co-conspirators on the way to a peaceable kingdom, where the echoes of Ramah are no longer heard, but in their place, but shouts of joy from sentinels throughout the land, exclaiming this good life-giving news which counters empire’s tyrannical grip.
Startled, I open my eyes as I come to. Thank you God for my life spared. My head is pounding from the blow dealt. My blurred vision begins to focus and I see the outline of a woman bent over me. I see a babe swaddled and wrapped around her back, peering over at me, almost grinning. She outstretches her hand to me. I take it. She hoists me upright with such strength and exclaims exasperatingly, “the Mighty One has done great things for me, holy is God’s name. Continue on with me to Mitzrayim so that the boy may live.” I marvel at her tenacity and begin walking anew, this time beside her instead of in front of her. I think what would have happened if I had brought the dagger? And I ask, “Mary, did you know?”
Blessing:
Paul reminds us that God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are (1 Cor 1:26-28). Isaiah saw an era when weeping would be no more, when the languishing echoes of Ramah would forever cease. Christmas is come. May we engage in the Christmas work of making this a reality, so that the stories we tell be filled with many more who lived and thrived despite chaos and darkness. May we receive and live into the epiphany of the peace and deliverance of Christ this Christmastide, always outstretching our hands to others and fear not receiving the outstretched hands of others. Amen.