By Dr. Jennifer Myhre
Jennifer Myhre is physician who
has served with World Harvest Mission since 1991,
and has worked in East Africa since 1993 – currently working at AIC Kijabe Hospital in Kenya. She is
married to Dr. Scott Myhre and has four children. She is also among the readers of the
Clothesline Report. Scott and Jennifer blog regularly at a fantastic site where
this was blog entry was originally
posted. Go check out their site: we link to it on the CR. I promise that you won’t regret it.
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Having spent 17 of the last 20 Christmases in Africa, the
wind which blows in a drier hotter season now feels familiar, and the flashing
spastic lights we bought in our capital a couple years back (our first
electrified season) feel appropriately chaotic. Last year was our first
in Kijabe (Kenya), and I remember the church Christmas pageant which
included a band of skinny little camouflage-clad Kenyan boys as Herod’s
soldiers marching in like a rebel resistance army, and Jesus’ parents fleeing
before them like any other refugees. I don’t recall much focus on this part of
the story in America as I grew up. Our plays ended half-way through
Matthew 2, with the gifts of the magi, while the scene was still serenely
beautiful and triumphant.
The slaughter of innocent children gives the story a
jarring, uncomfortable ending, dangling, unresolved, and terrible. Rachel
weeping for her children, because they are no more.
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| Poussin: Massacre of the Innocents |
Five years ago on this day I had just flown from Bundibugyo
(Uganda) to Kampala to see my own children for whom I had wept, thinking that
Scott and I might be no more, after surviving a 3-week ebola-exposure
incubation. Many innocents had died all around us. That Christmas
was awash in grief, much like Christmas in Connecticut this year. The 20
first-graders who died, and their six heroic teachers and administrators, are a
modern-day slaughter of the innocents. Angry evil lashing out at those
who are defenseless.
We should not have dropped this part of the Christmas story
all these years. Because slaughter is the context of Christmas. The
whole story hinges on the presence of rampant evil. When masses of
children are violently killed, it becomes hard to deny the reality of injustice
and suffering, the horrible brokenness of our world. And in Revelation
12, we see the evil pictured as a great serpent, seeking to devour God’s holy
child.
Christianity is not about a moral standard, who is right and
who is wrong, winning arguments or elections. It’s not about the right
songs or the right politics, or power, or influence. It’s not about an
intangible inward assurance of a distantly future eternal location.
Christmas and Christianity are about redemption of a real
evil in our real world. This is a serious business. People get
hurt. The evil that made Adam Lanza mentally ill, that tortured his life,
that deprived him of treatment or cure, that deceived him into believing this
last act of horror was something he needed to do. The evil that split up
his family, that lured his mother into buying assault weapons capable of firing
hundreds of rounds of deadly ammunition in a matter of minutes, the evil that
insinuates that limiting this sort of weapon to the military is an infringement
of human rights. The evil that kills twenty African children every three
minutes of every hour of every day of every year, over and over. The evil
manifest in viruses that turn love and motherhood into death, in greedy
dictators who steal from their own people and ruthless terrorists who throw
grenades into neighborhoods, in failed crops, hunger, ill-equipped hospitals,
careless drivers, floods and droughts.
On this continent it would be absurd to deny the horror and
heartache of evil, just as absurd as it would be to do so in Newtown. Or
in Bethlehem, when the bloodied bodies of baby boys were being buried.
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| Evil in Bethlehem: Leon Congiet's "Massacre of the Innocents" |
The birth of the child who is God ushers in a turning point
in the story. A foe capable of meeting evil, and defeating it. Disguised
and humbled in human flesh. The incarnation sets in motion a complete
reversal of all that is wrong, all that is sorrowful, all that is painful, and
in the course of this battle, a lot of people die. The baby survives and
becomes the man who will refuse to ride against Roman powers as a King. That is
a victory too small, a territory too temporary. This King will choose a
path of suffering, voluntarily taking on all that evil could throw at him, in
his own body, nailed to a tree. Like the teachers at Sandy Hook who put
their bodies in the path of bullets, trying to protect the children. This
King will defeat evil. He will walk out of a tomb, so that every 6 and
7-year-old gunned down, every starving baby, and even the Adam Lanzas of the
world, can be redeemed.
We saw the Hobbit movie a few days ago. The filmmakers
inserted a scene at Rivendell in which Gandalf muses that it is not so much the
power of armies that keeps evil at bay, but the ordinary acts of courage and
kindness that preserve our world – the community outpouring of love which will
heal hearts in Newtown; the tenacious pushing of a teenage girl who gave birth
to a baby; and the steady painful walk he took towards death. The daily
self-sacrifice of his followers who sweep streets and teach children and suture
wounds and defend the fatherless.
Evil is real. Innocents suffer. But the story
does not end there.
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From the Clothesline Report, we pray that the redemptive
power of the incarnation will invade your world – however broken it may be –
and ours, in the year ahead. And may God
bless you.
J. Elwood
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