Texts: Psalm 72; Matthew 2: 1-20

It would, of course, be an understatement to say that Herod was not a nice guy. For kings in the ancient world, however, he was long-lived. Born around 74 or 73 BCE, he survived until he died of natural causes – unlike some of his wives and children – in the year 4 BCE. Five days before his own death, Herod executed his first born Antipater II, the son of his first wife Doris, whom he divorced. We hear nothing of her afterwards. He set up a trump trial with perjured witnesses to have his second wife Marianne I executed on charges of adultery. In fact, to save her own skin, Marianne's mother testified against her. So much for motherly love. When the former mother-in-law conspired with Marianne's two sons fifteen years later, they were all murdered.

Wait! It gets better. Herod murdered so many people in his own and extended family that Cesar Augustus was known to have said that it was better to be one of Herod's pigs than one of his sons. But, in fairness to Herod, he also changed the face of Judea, especially Jerusalem. He rebuilt the temple in just two years, employing over a thousand priests as masons to comply with religious law. He created new cities and fortifications and created a system of aqueducts like those of the Romans. He was not just duplicitous; he managed to survive several Roman abrupt changes of government, switching his allegiances from one ruler to another in order to cement his power.

Evidently his death was pretty awful. He suffered from what may have been a kidney ailment, complicated by Fournier's Gangrene, a bacteriological infection. The story is that Herod, realizing he was dying and knowing there would be no mourning at his death, ordered a surviving son and his sister to have a group of scholars murdered in Jerusalem so there would be mourning. Fortunately, these orders were ignored. One could imagine such a person as having ordered what is now called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” usually depicted in art as mothers wailing as their sons are being murdered by Herod's troops, no paragons of virtue themselves.

There is no historical reference to any such massacre, not even by Josephus who chronicled pretty much all of Herod's infamous crimes. Many scholars believe that the massacre story was designed by the Gospel writer in order to create the scenario for the child going into Egypt to use certain verses as prophecy. The gifts given the child by the visiting Magi were also designed to be symbolic as the hymn "We Three Kings" so nicely puts: God for a king born on Bethlehem's plain; frankincense to draw a deity nigh; myrrh the bitter perfume of burial. All in all, the story is a magnificent construction with many overlapping layers.

All that aside, what can we draw from this narrative which is known to the Christian calendar as the Feast of the Epiphany? Usually, the reading for the day is only the story of the Magi and their gifts. The second part, Herod's rage and revenge upon the tiny village just a few miles outside Jerusalem, is usually read separately. But they really do go together: Epiphany and its response.

Very often we have epiphanies in our own lives; those "aha" moments when we suddenly realize something important has happened – to us or to people we love. But, as we all know, we are confined by the tyrannies of our inability to respond to those aha moments in positive ways. I say tyrannies because each small tyranny can destroy the beauty of an epiphany.

Some of those tyrannies are the demands of the material world around us. It's not that we should not respond to those demands but how we respond to those demands. The demands of reality, as we call it, have to be taken into context. There are also internal tyrannies of the mind and of the spirit. Those tyrannies can constrain us so much that we are unable to move beyond the aha moment into a new way of thinking and behaving.

At New Year's we make resolutions about many things, ways to improve our lifestyle or change our priorities, often in response to our own epiphanies of awareness. But living out the resolutions is another matter. I know I have already broken at least two or three of my own resolutions just from the press of time – at least that's my excuse. So, like many others, I muddle about after certain epiphanies I have had trying to figure out how to live afterwards.

It's not the epiphany that's difficult to see, to accept, but it's living after the epiphany that's the most difficult thing to do. The best laid plans... well you all know the rest. So, it seems for us, or at least for me, that we need to find the strength to continue living life after Epiphany as if Epiphany really mattered. Here I'm not talking about the little epiphanies we all have in our lives, but the Epiphany. And by the Epiphany as recited by Matthew's Gospel.

Matthew's telling of the Magi, Herod's response, and the flight into Egypt is a marvelous piece of advocacy. It serves to explain why one should accept Jesus the Christ as Lord. That acceptance has certain consequences, of course. It means that we have to live as if life really mattered. Because it does – not for the pie in the sky after death but for the here and the now. Life matters. That is the real lesson of Epiphany. Just as Matthew's women wept and could not be comforted, so women today who watch their children murdered in either Kabul or Newark or who see their children starve in either Haiti or in Camden cannot be comforted.

If we refuse to recognize what happens after Epiphany, then we are shutting our eyes to the world and that is certainly one thing that Jesus never did: he never shut his eyes to the world. The other night I was talking with one of my clients, a refugee who first came from Sierra Leone in 1999. He had seen two of his brothers murdered before his eyes, his sisters raped, his cousin with her arms cut off-- that was a specialty of the RUF, and things even more unspeakable. He had been driven into a spiritual Egypt and had been brought out by not by his parents, who had also been killed, but by an international refugee organization. Mohamed – that's his name – had an epiphany showing him it made no difference no matter what one's particular religion was. What counted was the way people showed love – God's love. The people who took him in were Christian; he was transferred to a Jewish refugee organization and came to a country where he could learn to life after Epiphany. As a U.S. citizen now he works with an interfaith development organization helping those who survived the war in Sierra Leone. Our epiphanies and our post epiphany lives may not be so dramatic – in fact, we hope with all our hearts that they will not be. The question remains for us, however, how we live after Epiphany.