Hauerwas on Herod. You would expect Hauerwas to have some astringent comments about power politics, Herod and the slaughter of the innocents. Two of his comments on Matthew 1 indicate the depth of Hauerwas' commitment to the politics of Jesus, because he is less interested in Herod bashing than in emphasising the significant alternative that is Jesus, born of Mary, son of David.
Matthew's gospel is about the "politics of Jesus", which entails an alternative to the power politics of the world. The politics of Jeus, moreover, entails not only the politics in the gospel but also the politics of reading the gospel. A right reading of the gospel requires a people who are shaped by "the oblation familiar to the faithful", that is, a community whose fundamental political act is the sacrifice of the altar - an alternative to Herodian power politics. (Page29)
So a right reading of the gospel is when its story, its plot, its narrative drive, is expressed in self-giving love for the other, sacrifice - and this embodied in a lifestyle redolent of political implication, cruciform in shape, and offered as the only true reading of the gospel - Christlikeness.
To be trained as a disciple is to learn why this Jesus, the son of David, the one true king, must suffer crucifixion. Matthew's gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognise that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father's refusal to save us according to the world's understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies.
When salvation is thought to depend on having more power than my enemies, the only way such salvation is effective is if that power is used - to retain, increase, secure its own survival. The result of herodian politics is, all too often, the slaughter of the innocents.
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