When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent
soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory
who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned
from the magi. This fulfilled the word spoken through Jeremiah the prophet: A
voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much grieving. Rachel weeping for her
children, and she did not want to be comforted, because they were no more. (Matthew
2:16-18)
Today, December 28, the church punches
us in the face with the commemoration of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. This
feast memorializes the children slaughtered in Herod’s preemptive attempt
against the life of the child Jesus. Herod had been alarmed by the arrival in
Jerusalem of “Magi” (wise men), most likely from Persia, astrologists inquiring
into an alignment of the stars which revealed that a “king of the Jews” had
been born. Herod (accurately) perceived that if this was the long awaited Messiah,
he embodied a political threat to the social order that he manipulated to his
advantage. However, Jesus and his family were forewarned of Herod’s plan, finding
asylum in Egypt as refugees, escaping the grim fate suffered by the innocent
playmates of Jesus at the hands of the dictator’s security forces. The church wastes
no time sugar coating angels lighting the sky with their welcome chorus to the “prince
of peace.” Rather, the liturgy of Christmas immediately invokes the violent reality
that the divine peace child was now an incarnate part of, only three days postpartum
after the joyful and luminescent celebration of Christmas.
The situation described soon
after the birth of Jesus sounds strikingly familiar 2000 years later as political
violence and social chaos cuts swaths of suffering across our world. The author
of the story connects the stricken response of the young mothers of Bethlehem to
the wailing of those who survived the savage siege and destruction of Jerusalem
nearly 600 years earlier, “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much grieving,
Rachel, weeping for her children…” As Jeremiah, the prophet at that time of the
Babylonian invasion, lamented, “If I walk out into the field, look! Those slain
by the sword; if I enter the city, look! Those consumed by hunger (Jeremiah
14:18).” Thus, it seems that the cycle of vengeance, violence and grief is
perpetuated incessantly through the ages.
In our Mindanao, and across the
Philippines, cycles of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence have
left legions of “Rachels” weeping for their lost children, and scores of “Isaiahs”
documenting the human rights violations and state-sponsored terror; tagging the
victims of extra judicial killings and the remains of revolutionary justice. Jurma
Tikmasan, is one such Rachal, recounting her experience of the burning of Jolo
in 1974 by the Armed Forces of the Philippines that left an estimated 20,000 dead,
The cries of
boys and girls, women and men scrambling to safety, or being hit by the
bullets, was deafening. I still remember the humanity moving seawards in an
attempt to catch the boats that would bring us to safety. I cannot ever forget
the image of a mother with her infant and a pot of boiled rice: she succeeded
in boarding the badjao’s pump boat with us, but her other children were left swimming
in the sea trying to get hold of the boat, while she begged the badjao to wait…
I remember getting wet from the splash of seawater being hit by the bullets
from a helicopter above us. I remember watching the burning of Jolo from my
perch on the Badjao’s banca in Bangas - and almost being able to feel the heat
of the Jolo fire from across the sea. After experiencing the destruction,
suffering, and deaths, I could not stop to asking myself: Why?
Thus we are left asking, is there
a way out of this mess?
