Herod Built, Jesus Wept

A Home Office Vigil reflection given by former LCW volunteer Francisco Leitão.

Gloria in Excelsis, CW (1947)

It is a rare occasion when the slow and dusty work of archaeology manages to find an audience beyond the small world of academic journal subscribers. Yet, in 2007, the casual Daily Mail reader could have opened the paper to find the following bombastic headline: “A New Discovery May Solve the Mystery of the Bible’s Bloodiest Tyrant”. After 35 years of digging, the late Ehud Netzer and his team had finally found the tomb of the infamous Herod the Great. For those who don’t know, Herod was a member of the Jewish elite at the time of Jesus, and ruled over Judea as a client-king of the Roman Empire. Most of us remember him for the brutal massacre of the innocents that we read in Matthew’s gospel, according to which he ordered all boys under the age of two in and around Bethlehem to be put to death after being informed that the Messiah was coming. Even if that specific incident cannot be historically confirmed, his reputation for ruthlessness appears in many other extra-biblical sources and is almost impossible to deny. But cruelty is not the only thing he’s remembered for. Among archaeologists working in the Holy Land, Herod is mainly known as the greatest builder in the history of the country, leaving more of a lasting imprint on the landscape of Israel than any other single person in history. There is, famously, the reconstruction and expansion of the Second Temple, the supreme symbol of Judean identity, but his architectural ambitions sprawled far beyond Jerusalem. He built fortresses, palaces, aqueducts, ports, and even entire cities from scratch. This, then, raises a question: If the region is already filled with monumental evidence of his reign, why was the discovery of his tomb considered such a defining moment? One possible answer lies in its geography. The tomb was discovered inside a massive man-made mountain, rising some 700 meters above sea level, and housing an elaborate complex of fortified palaces and lush gardens. What makes this site unique, though, is its name. Herod had raised countless buildings in honour of friends, patrons, and emperors, but only here did he choose to name it after himself: Herodium. This decision clearly reveals his intentions: He wished this mount to be his everlasting memorial, a sort of proclamation of how he wanted to be remembered after his death. In the words of the great archaeologist Jodi Magness, “it’s like we’re hearing from Herod in the first person”. So what does he want to tell us?

Netzer’s findings revealed a tall stone mausoleum resting on a square podium, encircled by eighteen Ionic columns and crowned with a conical-shaped roof. Historians and archaeologists were quick to notice a clear resemblance with the mythical tomb of Alexander the Great, and with those of later rulers who sought to place themselves in his lineage, all the way up to Augustus. Alexander, of course, was the prototype of the heroic and deified king, and anyone in the Hellenistic world of that time who wanted to legitimise their power would try to draw a connection with him. So here is Herod saying that he too was a dynastic ruler, one who laid claim to an outright divine status.

But Herod wasn’t just a Roman king, he was also the “King of the Jews”, and as such he needed to present himself as a legitimate ruler in the eyes of his Jewish subjects. Here, too, his monumental project can help us understand his intentions. Herodium was raised to such heights not only for the sake of grandeur, but also to command a view of the neighbouring town of Bethlehem, the birthplace of David. So, by restoring the Temple to its former glory and by establishing his tomb overlooking Bethlehem, Herod sought to claim his place as a royal Messiah in the line of David, coming to redeem the kingdom of Judea and restore it to its former glory. Against this posturing of royal pretension, Matthew’s gospel reading appears as a clear counter-narrative. He’s engaging in a battle for the memory of Israel, a contest over what defines true kingship according to Scripture. The Hebrew bible, for Israel, is not just a text; it’s the living memory of the community, the foundation of their identity. It answers the questions that we all ask ourselves: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?  It’s a story that lays claim to the present and the future of the community, it’s contested and alive, constantly reshaped by those who claim to interpret it.

So Herod tried to shape that memory through monuments of stone and symbols of power, promoting a royal ideology by showing, for example, that he too was born in Bethlehem. But Matthew goes further. Not only is Jesus in the line of kingship, he is also in the line of the great prophets of Israel. He enters into this shared memory not as a builder of temples but as the fulfillment of a prophetic tradition, one that calls for justice, compassion, and liberation. And so throughout his gospel, Matthew will establish, for example, a clear correspondence between Jesus and the biggest of all prophets: Moses. Like Moses, he is rescued in infancy, travels to Egypt and is later called out of it, thus fulfilling Hosea’s famous prophecy (“I called my son out of Egypt” Hos. 11:1). Like Moses, he endures a time in the wilderness; this time not for forty years, but forty days. Like Moses, his law is proclaimed from a mountain. Like Moses, he will speak for a God who sees through the imperial religion of order and triumph, a religion that guards the interests of those in charge, and like Moses, he will come to liberate people from bondage to that oppressive system.

But Matthew, again, goes further. His retrieval of scriptural memory doesn’t stop with Moses. After describing the bloody massacre of Herod, he will quote the great prophet of grief, Jeremiah, known to many as the “weeping prophet”. Jeremiah lived very near the fall of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon, 500 years before Christ. He is often misread as a doomsday spook, a pitiable soul sulking in his miseries; but his words of anguish served a specific purpose, a purpose that goes to the heart of the prophetic vocation: to form a consciousness that represents a genuine alternative to the royal narrative, one that contradicts the presumed world of kings, showing both that this world fails to align with reality and that we have been taught a lie, after all. It’s a defining feature of this royal consciousness to lead people into numbness, into an inability to care or suffer. The culture of Jeremiah’s time was numbed and therefore unable to face the drastic historical ending that was to come. So Jeremiah knew that the only way to penetrate this numbed consciousness of denial was by the public presentation of grief. As the late Walter Brueggemann put it, “he knew that anguish is the door to historical existence”, that embracing the end, even if painful, is what allows for a new beginning. The paradoxical insight of biblical faith that Jeremiah represents is the awareness that new life is born from despair, that genuine joy is forged in the crucible of lament, and that only by embracing the end can we speak the language of hope. “It is precisely those who know death most painfully,” writes Brueggemann, “who can speak of hope most vigorously.”

So Matthew presents Jesus not only as king, but also as prophet; and it’s the job of prophets, as Jeremiah shows us, to weep. Like Jeremiah, Jesus will weep later on in the gospels, when he approaches the temple and sees its looming end. It’s the work of the prophetic tradition to grieve the end, the very end that the king cannot face, cannot prevent, and surely cannot grieve. So it is with us too, who find it unthinkable to imagine the end of our public institutions, the end of our ways of life, and the stories we tell ourselves. So it is with us too, who inherit this all-too-worldly consciousness that leads us to numbness, incapable of grief, anxious to preserve our identities, and blind to the violence around us. Bombarded with the constant influx of mass-mediated content, we’re happy to drift along with the narratives we’re fed, as long as our illusions of safety are kept intact. The current refugee crisis, with all its frantic political posturing, is only the visible fracture of a world already cracking at its foundations. It’s a symptom of a much deeper problem that we haven’t begun to reckon with, of an old world order straining towards its end. But make no mistake: Until that end comes, our leaders, like the royals at the time of Jeremiah, will ignore it. Like Herod, they will anxiously attempt to preserve things the way they have always been; and they won’t shy away from the most brutal violence to hold on to the old ways. So, like Matthew, we too must enter into a battle for memory, for deciding what we should remember, what binds us as a community, and what answers we give to the questions of who we are, where we come from and where we’re going. And so we remember the lives of all the victims of our fortress policies. And we decide to let go of the rabid nationalisms, the triumphalist claims and the supremacist views that are only bound to grow in the years to come. As Christians, we remember the God who came down, was born in a manger, spent his earlier years as a refugee and was finally put to death outside the gates of the city.

Like Matthew, we understand that accepting the coming of this man means letting go of a certain world. To accept this child as our Saviour, we must first accept the grief of a dying age. And so let us use this time of Advent to grieve. Because only through grief can we truly enter into the joy of Christmas.