The contrast between the joyous Feast of our Lord’s Nativity and, on the other hand, the commemorations and readings of the following Sunday has long fascinated me. The Gospel for that day reports King Herod’s slaughter of guiltless children in his attempt to murder the newborn Christ (Matthew 2: 13-23). The Apostle reading comes from Saint Paul’s autobiographical sketch in Galatians 1: 11 – 19, which commences with his persecution of the Church. One of the saints commemorated on this day is the great prophet and King David, whose career included an adulterous relationship with another man’s wife which he attempted to cover up by having the man killed (II Samuel 11-12). Taking these things together, I think we might be justified in calling the Sunday after Nativity “the Sunday of the Murderers.”
Herod, Paul, and David are alike in having shed innocent blood. Yet their attitude towards their deeds and their subsequent lives are radically different. King Herod’s life, both before and after the massacre, was awash in blood. Even his own children did not escape his homicidal impulses. Contemporary accounts depict an unscrupulous, ambitious, and cruel man, lusting for power and maniacally suspicious of potential rivals. The slaughter recorded in the Gospels was neither the worst nor the last of his crimes. Jerusalem greeted his death with rejoicing.
Saint David was also a king, but here the parallel with Herod ceases. David’s reign spanned an extremely unstable and violent era. David’s Israel was beset by enemies both from within and without. Early on, the Philistines, Moabites, and Edomites harassed the borders of the kingdom. The twelve tribes shared a common ancestor in Abraham, a common defining history in the Exodus, and a common worship of the one God who had chosen them to be His people. But inter-tribal resentments and rivalries were strong and threatened the kingdom as much as foreign incursions. War and rebellion defiled much of David’s career. Yet, paradoxically, this warrior king was a truly spiritual man, gentle and introspective, a prophet and a poet. Much of the book of Psalms flowed from his heart and pen. These radiant hymns disclose a man with a penetrating insight into fallen man’s spiritual situation, an unequivocal appreciation of his own soul’s condition, and a deep humility which allows him to reflect his relationship with God in his poems without reservation or embarrassment. The Psalms portray the full range of religious emotions – praise and thanksgiving, contrition and repentance, love and reverence, anguish and quiet confidence.
The complexities of Saint David’s character are most evident in the event alluded to above, recounted for us in II Samuel 11-12. One evening, while idly gazing out over Jerusalem from the roof of his palace, he spies a woman bathing on her own rooftop. As an early Father writes, “This woman the holy man saw, and was thoroughly captivated with desire by the sight of her.” David has her brought to him and seduces her, making her pregnant. She is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, an officer in the king’s army, which is currently on campaign. In an attempt to cover up the adultery David orders Uriah’s unit sent on a suicide mission. The ploy is successful and Uriah falls in battle. However, the prophet Nathan learns what has happened and confronts King David. The king admits his guilt and turns to God in humility and confession. To express his contrition he composes the great penitential Psalm 50 (Psalm 51 in English Bibles).
Saint Paul relates his story in several of his letters, and Saint Luke recounts it in the Acts of the Apostles. In Galatians the apostle tells us, “I progressed in the Jewish religion beyond most of my contemporaries among my people, since I was more fanatical than most for the traditions of our fathers.” His fanaticism extended to violent attacks on Christians: “I persecuted God’s Church beyond measure and pillaged it” (1: 13-14). Yet, as we read in Acts, our Lord reached out to this brutal fanatic, appearing to him in a vision and calling him to repentance and renewal as an apostle of the Faith he had so fiercely repudiated.
Thus we see three men who are alike in committing in the worst of crimes, the destruction of human life. Yet in the case of two, the story has a glorious ending. Herod goes on to further outrages and finally dies in his sins, to the very end snarling at enemies real and imagined. Saint Paul and Saint David, on the other hand, repudiate their misdeeds. David renews and deepens his earlier piety, and Paul embarks upon his new vocation, spreading the Gospel with the same vigor that he had formerly shown in persecuting its adherents. What accounts for this difference?
At first glance, we might suggest that divine intervention was the key to the change of life. The two saints each benefitted from a divine call. The prophet Nathan discovers Saint David’s sins and openly rebukes him. The risen Savior Himself confronts Paul the persecutor and strikes him blind. Yet, Herod is not without a divine call; he too is visited by God through the agency of the Magi. What could be more likely to inspire amazement and faith than the appearance of these mysterious figures, speaking of omens in the heavens and evoking the inspired predictions Israel’s prophets? “And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art not the least among the princes of Judah: for out of thee shall come a governor, who shall rule my people Israel” (Micah 5:2; Matthew 2:6). As Saint John Chrysostom notes, these marvelous events were surely “a thing sufficient to astonish the tyrant.” Yet Herod is not brought to repentance and faith even by these wonders. Truly he confirms our Lord’s words, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16: 31). As the apostle affirms, God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Timothy 2:4). God spoke to Herod as forcefully as He did to David or to Paul or to any of us, but Herod would not listen.
What made the difference was the thirst for God that the old king and the future apostle had demonstrated throughout their lives, though they had for a time lapsed into sin. For them humility and spiritual self-awareness were ways of life.
David ruled in a harsh and bloody age. For much of his life he was a warrior. Perhaps his history led him to shed Uriah’s blood too willingly and to see murder as a solution to every problem. But he was also a man who yearned for peace and who truly hungered and thirsted after righteousness. He has left us the Psalms, with their stirring and insightful passages of introspection. Surely his misdeeds already lay heavy on his soul, though fear and shame temporarily blinded him to the true significance of his actions. Thus, when Nathan walked into the sinner king’s presence that day, he was ready to repent. The prophet’s denunciation merely opened the floodgates of a soul already brimming with remorse.
Likewise, before his conversion Paul was consumed with zeal to know and do God’s will. His striving, however, was ignorant and misdirected: It led him to persecute even men and women who shared his longing for the Kingdom but who, unlike him, had found its fulfillment in the crucified and risen Savior. He too was doubtless already plagued by guilt. The love of righteousness was already at war with his fanaticism; his conscience already denounced the bloodshed which his sense of duty impelled him to embrace. The vision of the Lord which greeted him on the Damascus road, the days spent in physical blindness which opened the eyes of his soul and turned his spiritual gaze inward, and the visit of Saint Ananias to gather him into the fellowship of the Church he had persecuted – all these opened a more glorious way to one already struggling toward a new and better life.
Our love for God does not insulate us from temptation, but it can help awaken us to our true situation when we fall and enable us to submit more readily to the demands of repentance. Our inner struggle sensitizes our conscience so that we bear our own Nathan in our heart and soul, ready to rebuke us for our sins. A life pursuing the virtues is already a Damascus road, where the true nature of our thoughts and actions will be revealed to us.
We find it easy to repent if repentance is already part of our life and if we are already diligent in rooting out our passions and pursuing the virtues. If we look for the image of God in others, if we actively seek self-discipline through prayer and fasting, if we try to fill our heart and soul with the love of God and neighbor, then our transgressions will be fewer, and, if we do fall, our contrition will be more quick and true. Frequent participation in the mystery of Confession especially helps. It accustoms us to looking into our soul. So also, fasting and daily prayer and Scripture reading are indispensable. These are simple disciplines, but they stand us in good stead when temptation and moral weakness threaten. If we want the spiritual resources to face tribulation, we must turn to God in the easy times, filling our souls with His grace and comfort and storing up for ourselves treasure in heaven.
The Sunday after Nativity we hold up to scrutiny the lives of three murderers. Two of them we revere as saints, not because their transgression was less grievous, but because they resolutely turned their backs on sin and embraced the forgiveness and the renewing love of God. As Saint Basil says, “Learn then, brother, that it is not he who begins well who is perfect. It is he who ends well who is approved in God’s sight.” Let us open our hearts ever wider to the Spirit’s grace and thus grow close to our Lord and Savior. Then, when we seek Him for comfort or forgiveness, we will find Him already there.
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