Advent 2024 : 1

 

At this time of year, I mobilise friends to deliver Christmas cards to every household in the parish. This year, the card features an image of a mother and her child fleeing their home by night, The Flight to Egypt.

Several decades before the birth of Jesus, an Idumean nobleman fled to Alexandria, by ship, by night. A convert to Judaism, Herod had first been appointed provincial governor of Galilee, and later Galilee and Samaria, by the Romans, who ruled the territory indirectly. His older brother, Phasael, held the equivalent position in Jerusalem. It helped that their father was a friend of Julius Ceasar. After Caesar’s assassination, Mark Anthony named them both tetrarchs, under Hyrcanus II, but Hyrcanus’ nephew usurped the throne. Herod, who had sent his first wife and son into exile – common enough behaviour for rulers – and married Hyrcanus IIs granddaughter, Mariamne, fled to Alexandria seeking help. They travelled by ship, guided by the Pharos, the lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. A light shining in the darkness. Herod hoped to enlist the support of Cleopatra VII, former lover of Julius Ceasar and now wife of Mark Anthony. Cleopatra welcomed him and offered him an army, to serve her as general in territories that had been ruled over by her family, the Ptolemaic dynasty, since lost, and that she hoped to regain. But Herod’s ambitions were greater; he departed Alexandria for Rome, where he was declared sole king over Judea by the Senate.

Almost immediately, his rule faced a threat from his mother-in-law, who wrote to Cleopatra – one mother and powerful woman to another – requesting that her son be made High Priest. Considering this a power play against him, Herod had the young man assassinated. His mother-in-law again appealed to Cleopatra, for justice; and the Queen of Egypt (who now had reason to see Herod as an enemy, and not an ally) sent her Roman husband to bring Herod to trial. Herod evaded consequences by siding with Anthony in his quarrel with Octavian – though when Octavian defeated Anthony to become the first emperor, Augustus, Herod would find himself needing to twist and turn again to survive.

Several decades after Hero’s flight to Egypt, Joseph, a descendant of King David but himself an artisan, would flee to Egypt to escape the paranoid wrath of Herod – now styling himself The Great. The family fled by night, perhaps, like Herod before them, travelling by ship, guided by the Pharos. Seeking a welcome among the large community of Jewish merchants and artisans, philosophers and scholars, who made up a large part of the population of Alexandria. Somewhere a builder could find work and fashion a home for his family. Not a forever home, perhaps, but a safe haven in stormy season.

It is striking how the lives of those we consider our enemies and a threat to our way of life parallel our own lives and experience so closely.