And three days after Christmas, in the middle of Christmastide, our liturgical calendar marks the slaughter of the innocents. Herod, realizing that he had been outwitted by the Magi, became furiously angry. He ordered the massacre of all the boys two years old and under in Bethlehem and its entire neighborhood. . . . Then what was said by the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A cry was heard at Rama, sobbing and loud lamentation: Rachel bewailing her children, she would not be comforted because her children are gone" (Matthew 2:16–18).

Next to the Christmas image of mother and child—the child who in his birth brings joy, grace, and love—are placed the images of other mothers holding small bloody corpses, dead children savaged by hate, killed by envy and blind fury. Goodness and evil are not far apart. We see one in the light of the other. One child is born; other children die. One mother receives the infant to her breast; other mothers bury their infants in the cold ground.

Wars still go on. Death continues to rob us of our loved ones. Hatred makes its force felt, and our own unrecognized animosity is loosed into the world. In this community of people who are believers in God and in Christ—or long to be—we know the ever-present force of evil in our midst, the destructive effects of paralyzing fear, the temptations to suicide, the fear that turns to manipulation, the urge simply to disrupt and destroy, the emptiness that turns away from filling up to persist in emptiness.

In our world illness and madness continue, suffered especially strongly at Christmas. Depression, despair, and crushing isolation overcome many persons at the time of year when we sing of hosts of angels heralding our savior's birth. In the midst of joy, for many there is only dark misery. In the midst of the revelation of the godhead, there is, as with Herod, a savage fury, a perilous gnashing and tearing to pieces of new life by a tortured soul.

Opposites lie beside each other—the birth of Christ revealing the grace and the good, saluted by the release of a killing hate, of envy so great that if it cannot have the good for itself alone it will kill the good and prevent everyone from having it. This kind of envy, this terrible fear of the good, is an enactment of our dread of the good. It is a refusal to receive the gift as it is given.

How often at Christmastime are we swept up into giving gifts, gifts that we buy or make for family and friends? How often do we neglect to receive the gifts given to us—really to take to ourselves the feelings behind the presents others give us? We forget and find ourselves unable to receive God's gift to us of love and grace.

Our failure to receive is not just one of neglect. Often it stems from an active refusal, a stolid impenetrability, a resistance to the rearrangement of our lives and our perception of our lives, by the breaking in of God's goodness upon us. Like Herod, we will not take this rearranging of our principalities and powers. We reject putting God's goodness before what we value as good—before our causes and ambitions, our plans for getting a degree or tenure, for our school, for our world. These values of ours must come first. We refuse God's good. We will smash it if necessary, and try to blot it out to secure our meager position in the world.

In dreading the good, we are not the only ones who suffer from refusing what God would give us. Others suffer, too, from our refusal to receive the good. The slaughter of the innocents—these are the real innocent bystanders of our world—new life, young life, killed off before it has matured or perhaps even lived at all. We all have children of our own—our own new insights and new possibilities, our hopes and wishes, our secret plans for the future. These bits and pieces of our lives promise new life, life still to be lived, much as children see hope for the future. It is this new, not yet strong life, this possibility for being, that is slaughtered in our refusal to receive God's gift, in our preferring our own order over what God offers.

When such smashing envy as Herod's is let loose into the world, when such adamantine refusal to open and receive what is given is joined with the impulse to destroy what is given, then all young life in our surroundings is threatened. Children wilt in an atmosphere of hate; new imaginations are throttled at birth by a savage insistence on one way and one only. Nothing can get through to consciousness from the unconscious when such intense fear and desire to control are dominant. Young life, the innocent bystander, suffers terribly from such dread of the good. Unwillingness to receive God's gift works terrible suffering, gratuitous suffering, the very definition of unnecessary pain.

If the first way we resist God's gift is to put our need for power in place of it, as Herod did, the second way we fail to take the goodness offered is to sentimentalize it. For example, any mother of a young child is easily tempted to identify with this story, to feel how she herself could not be comforted if her child, an innocent bystander, was slaughtered because of someone else's hate and dread of God and the good. Such a story is simply insupportable if it is read with identification. For then we are saturated by the suffering welling up inside us, and we cannot help thinking of all those times when children—and not just one's own—have been innocent victims of others' greed, prejudice, and evil. We remember then those who starve, those who are denied the possibility of a life, of free choice, and of self-realization. In such meditations our emotions often overwhelm us and we feel we cannot survive them. The fact of evil threatens to obliterate us.

But this turmoil of emotions often turns out to be something less than significant feeling. It may be sentimentality instead of true feeling. We are led then to ask that indignant question so many of us have asked, are asking, will always ask: How can there be a God who lets this sort of suffering happen? What kind of love permits wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, the slaughter of innocent children?

How quickly we imagine it would have been better had there never been a God or an incarnation if all those children had to be slaughtered because of it! We fall into our own dread of the good and transfer Herod's action onto God. Doing so, we become Herod, feeling in ourselves a maniacal need to hunt down and stamp out the good. Sentimentality is not true feeling at all, but simply undifferentiated emotion mixed with aggression. We move from drowning in undifferentiated suffering to telling God what God should be and should not be, should permit and should not. We identify with the Matthew story and read it as our own personal story, failing to receive the tale the text is narrating, the instruction it would give us. We assert, instead, our own moral, our own lesson, which becomes a lecture to God on right behavior. On the one hand, such sentimental identification is not tough enough to survive—we are overwhelmed and drowned in misery. On the other hand, such sentimental identification is not soft enough to endure—it turns into its own brittle shoulds and should-nots.

What both this false toughness and false softness miss is the free gift of God's self in Christ. The scandal of love is freedom. You may respond as you will. There is never control or dictation. God permits us to be as we are, to respond as we will. God does not create evil but permits it in the world. When we refuse the gift—the free gift of love—we do not want God to be permissive, but in control. Spare us this suffering! Take it away! Do not allow it!

We cannot identify with this story. We cannot become one with any of its protagonists without suffering badly and fruitlessly. But God can become one with us with impunity. We need to read the text—not as our personal story—but as a story addressed to us as human persons, to instruct us, to inform us, to make us learn from it. What do we learn?

We learn to move out of unconscious identification with the slaughtered innocents and with the parents who see only the evil. We learn to give up our own dear children to God's care. We come to see all of life resting in God's hands. Our refusal to see this is what lets loose so much of the world's murderous fears and attacking hatreds. We learn to care for all that is given us for as long as it is given us—our children, our health, our loved ones, our sanity, our work, and to feel how threatening this can be.

When goodness takes on human flesh, when total incarnation of goodness as a human person occurs, we feel a tremendous power. We know that it is the most differentiating force that exists. When love comes in this way into its most exultant being, it marks itself off from all that is not love, distinguishes itself clearly from nonlove. When goodness is articulated in the flesh, it identifies evil more clearly than ever before. When light floods into darkness, we really see darkness. We see the invincible power of goodness in the light of evil.

What is not permitted us is to identify with darkness and become overwhelmed by the forces of nonlove. What is not permitted us is to become so filled with evil's horror that we fail to see the goodness it outlines so firmly. This is what the story of the slaughter of the innocents teaches. It is a hard teaching, but one much needed in our time of violence. The story shows us the threats, the terrors that happen to the Herods of the world—and to the piece of Herod that exists in all of us.

Goodness constellates evil. It performs a central ontic function, creating the precondition for consciousness of evil. Christ is born, and the effect is radical. That incredible birth in our midst rearranges all human life violently so that those who refuse its new truths—every time they refuse its new truths—must resort to violence to destroy the force of the event.

Goodness makes us see that evil is really there, however negatively, as the privation of being, defiantly unable to receive being, refusing it, preferring unconscious sentimental identification to a conscious tough seeing of what is there, preferring dread of the good to taking it into ourselves. Evil, when acknowledged, illuminates the good, points to it, witnesses to its powerful effect.

The presence of God alone makes visible to us the presence of evil. Then we can cope with it and deal with it. Now we can dare to touch it and find ways to deal with it. When evil remains a mere privation, an absence only, we cannot deal with it; all we can do is fall into it. But in the light of Christ we can really acknowledge it without sentimentality; we can see it for the ugly force that it is, the horror that refuses the good and murders others with that refusal.

The genius of Scripture in placing the story of the slaughter of the innocents so close to the Christmas nativity anticipates the insight of twentieth-century depth psychology. It tells us that without facing and acknowledging evil—evil outside us and evil inside us—we cannot find our own goodness, the good that is ours and no one else's, the good that comes to us in the light of the evil with which we are now equipped to deal.

In the birth of Christ we are reborn, taken out of childhood into a tough, realistic maturity, prepared to see that evil really does attack the good and does not hesitate to crucify it. Such a seeing prepares a way in our wilderness, where a rough mixture of good and evil gives us the great choice freely to consent to the good now given us in its most resplendent and tangible form, in the fleshification of love that we celebrate in both these feasts—the feast of the Nativity and the feast of the slaughter of the innocents.

We see evil in all its power, but we know that good is not overcome. In the light of evil the invincible power of God's goodness shines forth. It survives even the evil risen up to crush it. Goodness seen in the light of evil remains a constant love, love freely offered, a goodness intact, wholly itself, wholly present, coming toward us in this Advent time to be received into ourselves. God waits on us, given us for the taking, too good to be true, yet unmistakably true, beyond words and yet the Word itself—the first and the last. Nothing ends or begins the way we expect. Evil is not banished, yet goodness prevails.   GOD BE PRAISED.

Dr. Ann Ulanov, M.Div., Ph.D., L.H.D., is the Christianne Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. A psychoanalyst in private practice, she is a supervising analyst and faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute in New York City. With her husband, Barry Ulanov, she is the author of Religion and the Unconscious; Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer; Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality; The Healing Imagination; Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus; by herself, she is the author ofThe Feminine in Christian Theology and in Jungian Psychology; Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine; Picturing God; The Wisdom of The Psyche; The Female Ancestors of Christ; The Wizards' Gate; and The Functioning Transcendent. An Episcopal laywoman, she lives in New York City and Connecticut.




Copyright © 1999 by Ann Ulanov

From A Women's Book of Sermons, edited by the Rev. E. Lee Hancock (New York: Riverhead, 1999). Used by arrangement with Penguin Putnam Publishers, Inc.