Matthew 2: 13-23 (The Slaughter of the Innocents)
Herod (and us): from temptation to possession
Five Steps of Sin
- The temptation (logismoi) occurs. We are NOT accountable for this.
- Interaction with the thought – what are the options? What would it look like? In his summary of Orthodox Spirituality in Mountain of Silence, Fr. Maximos (now Mp. Athanasios of Limassol) says that this is not sin, either. I disagree – a symptom of the disease we have is that it is all but impossible for us to imagine possibilities objectively.
- Consent to do the sin. This is always a sin, even if we do not carry out the action.
- Defeat to the idea. Not only is this sin, it weakens us to future temptations.
- Passion, obsession, or possession by the temptation.
Let’s look at Herod’s descent into madness.
- He had an idea to kill all of the male infants. This was not the only choice he had; others would have been less wicked – some may have even softened his heart enough to meet the Christ with joy. This was the temptation.
- What happened when he interacted with this idea? Moreover, what happened when he considered all the possibilities? Was it a simple cost-benefit calculation, comparing all the options about how to react to the birth of the prophesied Messiah? When he did the math, was it purely objective, or was the scale weighted in a certain direction by his feelings, feelings that were driven by his pride and desire to rule? Remember that, as the King of the Jews, the people of God, he could have brought the Christ child into his palace and raised Him there to rule. But that option was not the one that drew his attention – it was drawn towards murder. It was drawn towards regicide and the slaughter of as many lives as necessary to guarantee it. This was not because it was the best solution – it probably wasn’t even the best way to keep himself in power. But it felt right. And so of all the ideas, or all the logismoi, both sinful and graceful, he focused on this one. He imagined what it would look like, how it would work. Which takes us to consent.
- He consented to the idea. He entertained it, not just to imagine whether or not it could work or to figure out the best way to get it done – it was more than that. He chewed on it. And somewhere along the way, he made it happen.
- Next, he was defeated by it. Not just because he pulled the trigger, but because it came to define part of how he defined himself. He was a man who did whatever was necessary to keep himself in power. All other things were defined and valued in relationship to this identity, to this desire, to this obsession.
- And this is the final step – he was possessed by it. And here is a difficult truth about his path to possession: this was not the first time he had united himself with this kind of sin. He had assassinated rivals, to include his own wife, to consolidate his power. Even before that, he had waged war against his own people in order to capture Jerusalem. Not to free it from the Romans, but in cooperation with the Roman general Marc Antony in order to put himself in charge.
Do you see how, once he had given in to sin – in this case, violence – for personal gain, it made it easier to do so in the future? All of his fallen psychology kicked in to make repentance more and more difficult. For example, the devaluation of the lives of others, the web of justifications and lies that he had to convince himself of in order to keep himself going? For someone like this, it takes a real wake-up call to get them to change. He got the call when the wise men came, but he didn’t just hit the snooze button, he threw away the clock.
“Send word so that I can go and worship Him myself.” Doesn’t that just drip with evil? How would Herod worship Him; with gifts? With prostrations? That is how the kings from the east did! Not at all. Quite the opposite.
What about us? The wide road to sin-full-ness
Now here is the rub. I’ve been describing Herod’s descent into madness, but that is the same wide road that beckons to us all.
What sins do we entertain? What sins do we chew on? Are we obsessed by? What wickedness have we justified so fully that we feel its evil as good?
And as if it wasn’t enough that each of us individually, thanks to ancestral sin, cannot imagine sin without engaging with it, we are surrounded by cultural systems that seek to deaden our instinct for the holy and replace it with other things, like hedonism and power and self-loathing and anything else that the marketers of the powers of the air can distract us with.
It’s easy to see this happening in others. We know people who have fallen into all kinds of sin and justified it. They immerse themselves in an internet subculture and the next thing you know they are defining themselves in new ways that separate themselves from the good, the true, and the beautiful.
But it’s so hard to see this in ourselves. Herod had several baths of purification built into his temple. He was so far gone that he didn’t see the irony of maintaining ritual purity while living such a debauched and self-aggrandizing life. We should be very concerned lest we fall in the same way.
What sins do our own personalities, conditions, and cultures lead us to accept as normal or even good? How can we get around the unreliability of our feelings – what we like to call our consciences when it comes to seeking the good? How do we deal with the fact that we are so far from being able to see things as they are and weight alternatives objectively?
What then, can we do?
The first step is to admit that we have a problem. To admit that the “old man” we put to death during our baptism is not entirely dead.
The second step is to cultivate an instinct of humility, including the willingness to admit that we rarely as right as our self-confidence would have us believe.
The third is to build relationships of accountability and discernment. How do you react when people correct you or offer a version that differs from your own? Taking criticisms well is a sign of spiritual maturity. It’s one that tyrants, narcissists, and sociopaths don’t have. And it’s one that we are missing unless we work on it. But we need it. We need to have people in our lives that tell us the things that we miss, the things that we get wrong.
Herod skipped all these steps, and he died in his sin.
We have given our lives to Christ; we are called to something better than tyranny and the slaughter of innocents.
Let’s learn to live the kinds of lives – lives in communities of mutual love, trust, and support – that give no place for temptations to grow.
Let’s live in Christ, together.
