Wickedness is inured of blindness. King Herod is an example of that blindness in us humans. Herod is a mad, lewd, decrepit and hypocritical schemer. His wickedness seems so deep that critics of the Bible's veracity took him for a cartoon character invented by the evangelist, Matthew ( Mt 2:1-18). No one could have been so depraved as to order the slaughter of a whole town's children on the hope of killing a future rival, and this by a man who would be dead in a couple of years. This kind of sin is a morality play, an invention of Matthew. Such critics lived under the delusion that humanity would grow to perfection through progressive education and high art. But this misplaced optimism ended when the guns erupted in August 1914 ushering in a century of slaughter of unparalleled proportions. Progressive education and high art divorced from God was put at the disposal of maniacal men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others, who among them slew their 100 million human beings. They did this to secure what they thought would be a better world for all people. So certain were they of this that they were willing to kill anyone who stood in the way of their better world. Their murderous reign over the age makes Herod look like a piker by comparison. Herod is likely to have been responsible for the death of a couple of dozen children in Bethlehem. He only came a close second to our Adam Lanza.

 

The slaughter of the innocents by Herod cannot merely be a fairy story made up to frighten children and the weak-minded, for it has been repeated here among us. How blind can people be? Are we so blind to human wickedness that we could only presume it in others and not in or among ourselves. We think of ourselves as, after all, good people, educated in the best schools, the very best and brightest of our society. Maybe our unwillingness to invest the Herodian wickedness with reality simply reflects our presumption that we ourselves would not be capable of true wickedness, certainly not the kind of wickedness that commands the death of children. We can't imagine how this could happen because we do not know the depth of wickedness in our own hearts.

 

Christ has loved every person, and has borne the sins of every person, even and especially of those first martyrs slain by raging Herod. He has loved those who were kept in Stalin's gulag, Hitler's death camps, Pol Pot's killing fields, and America's abortuaria, never to emerge in this life. Jesus did not flee for His own convenience as cowards do, expecting others to do their dying, but to do His dying at just the right time for all those who belonged to Him, both dead and alive. He did not love humanity, but every person; every little child slaughtered by our madmen. He loved them to death. Not theirs. His.