Newtown Is Christmas

Gun Control, Adam Lanza, and King Herod

by Gloria Merle Huffman

1/6/2013

996 words

I wish you all a very Happy New Year with much more happiness than sorrow.

Isn't it just amazing how the 12 days of Christmas always end on Three Kings Day, January 6? This is the gift-giving day for Spain and South America.

The gift-giving analogy between the response of people to the Newtown tragedy in Connecticut on December 14, 2012, and the Christmas story of the bearing of gifts over a long and arduous journey by wise men is interesting.

On the one hand, the kings made a huge effort to personally carry their gifts (Love Incarnate) to an obscure baby ("God Himself, Incarnate") born far away, not in royal surroundings like themselves but in poverty. They were responding to a message, to news they had astutely read in the starry skies. Nowhere does it say that the kings loved that baby, only that they wanted to go and worship him. But worship is extreme love. Did the worshiping and adoration begin when they got there? Or was every step they took an act of adoration, a material manifestation of the magnetic drawing power of the great love they already had for such a tiny thing? They didn't even know the address when they started out, but they knew enough to ride on the coattails of a star with a tail "as big as a kite," to quote from Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. It guided them with high-tech GPS precision ("Turn left," "Turn right," "Go straight ahead") to the exact child they were looking for, the one who would "save" the "lost."

Fast forward a couple of years to the jealousy of King Herod, who would have gone out armed with an AK7 assault rifle himself if he had not had the power to wield his sword by proxy against his potential rivals: all male children age two and under in the little town of Bethlehem "and in all the coasts." (Matthew 2:16) He had to take a shotgun approach because, unlike the wise men, he had no idea how to pinpoint who and where his rival was. He was wild and blurry-eyed with rage, slashing right and left in a frenzied attempt to maintain his lofty position, causing untold grief throughout his kingdom. How could he not know that this would not endear him to his subjects?

On the other hand, the Newtown story was King Herod (Adam Lanza) and the gift-bearing Wise Men in reverse. Whether true or not, it was reported in the news that 20-year-old Lanza was jealous of the young schoolchildren his mother helped teach. Not knowing which child was the rival for his mother's love, he assumed they were all his rivals. In order to eradicate the entire bond of love that enraged him, he started with the end he could pinpoint: his mother. Then he went to the school in a wild and blurry-eyed rage and proceeded to eliminate six educators and 20 beautiful children (sacrificing "God and Love Incarnate") before realizing he had made everything horribly wrong, not right. How could he not know that you can't get love by killing the people you thought didn't love you enough?

People who heard the news of the senseless slaughter and death of innocent children and teachers in Newtown had the same response as the Wise Men to the news of the birth and life of a certain other child: some went to Newtown in person, some corresponded by the internet, some sent checks in the mail, and some sent gifts by proxy that were carried by various delivery networks (Love Incarnate).[1] All of these means of travel (which, by the way, didn't include camels) were material manifestations of the magnetic drawing power of the great love they instinctively felt for both the lost (the dead) and the saved (the ones still alive). Previous massacres had elicited reactions of horror and shock, love and compassion in almost everybody, but this point-blank murder of innocent little children unleashed a torrential outpouring of love that galvanized people into action, not just sympathy. It was the straw that broke the camel's back: "Enough!"

When King Herod ordered the slaughter of a similar number of innocent children in Bethlehem,[2] nobody held town meetings or news conferences to suggest that the king and all the king's men should have their swords taken away so that such bloodbaths would not happen in the future. Why? Because the King *was* the government, the one making the laws, and no one had the power to disarm *him.*

There is a reason the story of the innocent babe in the manger, the Wise Men, and King Herod has lasted for so many centuries. It uses the power of The Word to clarify the good guys and the villains, to shine a light on the perpetual war between good and evil and the relationship between leaders and the general population. It gives us preformed phrases and code words to use in reacting to events that seem to keep repeating themselves: new places, new faces, same old same old.

The Newtown massacre revived the arguments for and against varying levels of gun control. But King Herod and Adam Lanza boil the facts down to this: how do we try to prevent a deranged citizen like Lanza from enacting the role of a deranged King Herod? Would it be by making sure that only King Herod, the government, has the swords and the guns? We know that the government has the power to eliminate its opposition and to arrest and detain or even incarcerate people suspected of dissent: rivals to the throne. What degree of slaughter of innocent civilians would we open ourselves up to if we depended on love in the hearts of the people in power to prevent them from abusing their unilateral access to weapons?

The story of Christmas is not just a sweet little fable about an improbable Saviour of the world. That's the milk of the word. But the meat of the word is the stuff that's a lot harder to chew.

Footnotes:

[1] Christmas Eve sermon, "A Time of Love Incarnate," by Reverend Suzanne Wagner, Wilton Congregational Church, Wilton, Connecticut, USA 12/24/2012.

http://anitinerantpreacher.blogspot.com/

(accessed 1/6/2013)

[2] "Massacre of the Innocents," Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents

(accessed 1/6/2013)

[Minor edit 1/18/2014]