“His Own Received Him Not”

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

He came unto His own and His own received Him not. It is not merely wicked Herod, but all of Jerusalem with him, that is deeply troubled at the coming of the wise men from the East. The wise men want to know where the King of kings, that Prince of Peace, is to be born. These wise men are wise by virtue of Daniel who prophesied in their country. And yet, they have more of the Scriptures, more of God’s wisdom, than merely Daniel. By God’s Grace they also have Moses. From Moses they have Balaam’s promised sign of a star. They have seen it fulfilled and with faith, with trust that the God of Moses has fulfilled these things and provided a Savior, they come to worship the One thereby announced.

But they do not have everything.

The One Who Is - For You

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only outlined by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily, not by His Essentials, but by His Environment.

 

Many images and ideas of God abound, one image being gotten from one source and another from another,. Combined into some sort of presentation of the truth, it escapes us before we have caught it, and takes to flight before we have conceived it. It blazes forth upon our soul, even when that is cleansed, as the lightning flash which will not stay its course, does upon our sight. That part of it which we can comprehend draws us to Himself (for that which is altogether incomprehensible is outside the bounds of hope, and not within the compass of endeavor).

 

By that part of It which we cannot comprehend to move our wonder, and as an object of wonder to become more an object of desire, and being desired to purify, and by purifying to make us like God; so that when we have thus become like Himself, God may, to use a bold expression, hold converse with us as Gods, being united to us.

For Those Who Were Not

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this day, the earth rings once again. But whereas only a few short days ago, the earth was ringing with the exultant cries of the angels in the Judean sky and the joyous songs of all creation at the birth of our Savior, now the earth rings with the blood-curdling wailing of the mothers of Bethlehem mourning for their sons who are now no more – slaughtered at the command of lunatic Herod. Instead of “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth!” is now heard “weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

The Magi – wise men from the East – had passed through the courts of Herod in Jerusalem. That great pretender, the usurper to the throne of David, feared for his ill-gotten position, and so he plotted how he might rid the land of this newborn King of the Jews. When the Lord thwarted his plans by sending the Magi home another way, Herod determined to spend his murderous wrath on the whole land. So he gave the decree to have all male children in the region of Bethlehem two years old and younger slaughtered, according to the time he had ascertained from the wise men.

All this took place while our Lord was spirited away to Egypt, his guardian Joseph having been warned in a dream to flee with the Child and His mother. So the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem shed their blood in order that the Christ Child might not spill His yet.

"They Shall Come Back"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.” Thus took place the slaughter of the boy children of Bethlehem, known to the Church throughout the ages as the Holy Innocents. These otherwise innocent children had committed no extraordinary sin, except that they had been born the same gender as our Lord.

Herod had been tricked, and he became furious. And then he sent an order and had all the male children under two in the region of Bethlehem killed. It is unclear the extent to which those two facts were connected. Given Herod's violent history, it is entirely possible that he may have had the Innocents slaughtered regardless of the word sent back by the Magi.

The Wisdom of the Wise Men

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

After Jesus had been born in Bethlehem of Judah, in the days of Herod the King, look at that – Magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem. They wanted to know where to find the one born King of the Jews, because they had seen the rising of a star, or some other astrological phenomenon, and they wanted to fall down before this child, who was no longer a babe in arms, but a toddler.

At this question, Herod the Great – perhaps better called Herod the Terrible – was greatly troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. They were not troubled in sympathy with their great leader; they were shaking in their boots because when Herod was troubled, bloodshed happened.

Herod gathered together the smart people, the theologians of Judah, and asked them, “Where is the Christ to be born?”, and they told him, according to the words of Micah the prophet, that the Ruler to shepherd Israel would come out of Bethlehem in the land of Judah. The greatest would come out of the least. And Herod laid plans to discover this new usurper, with the Magi's unwitting help.