The end of the first verse of Silent Night, Holy Night ‘sleep in heavenly peace’ or in Welsh ‘cwsg mewn gwynfyd a hedd’ does not sit easily with the story of the death of the Holy Innocents, detailing as it does the cold blooded murder of the infants by the despot Herod the Great. I am afraid I use this deliberately to challenge us, waking us from the slumber of figgy pudding with brandy butter. I happen to take this as a historical event rather than Matthean midrash. Sometimes it is dismissed because our Evangelist is the only one to have recorded it. We know enough about tyranny not to allow this to happen.
This
story brings certain images of Christmas crashing down. We are each one
of us captivated by the depictions of the baby in the manger surrounded
by doting parents, poor shepherds and wandering magi. This is not
unusual given that within our experience, babies often entrance and
entrap us offering us a new world of wonder. For a moment, the sleepless
nights, anxiety and the impotence every parent feels from time to time
are forgotten as we are held spell bound by an image that does not match
up to reality.
The danger for us is that we create an image of Christmas that does not stand up to the rigours of reality, and is rendered meaningless or neutered by the manic actions of a despotic monarch or the grind of daily life.
The danger for us is that we create an image of Christmas that does not stand up to the rigours of reality, and is rendered meaningless or neutered by the manic actions of a despotic monarch or the grind of daily life.
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