Speaker 1: One of the strangest elements of the story of Christmas
is the Massacre of the Innocence. That is in the
story of Christmas, when King Herod finds out that the
wise men are coming to worship the new King, he
in order to get rid of this insurgent king, he
decides to kill all the children under two years old
in Bethlehem and the region. Of course, it's a very
dark aspect of the story of Christmas, and I understand why.
It's one word that we don't mention as much when
we talk about the story, but it is a very
important part of the story, and it also happens to
be a part of the story where Christ's story manifests
a let's say, a coming together of all these ancient
stories that were there before. I've often said that. I've
often said that Jesus's story is a culmination of all
the Old Testament stories, of all the Old Time Testament prefigurations.
And you know, it's easy to say that, but it's
also a good idea to be able to show it.
And in the case of the story of the Mask
of the Innocence, we can really see this story.
Speaker 2: And so we're going to go through what it is that.
Speaker 1: This story is showing us how it's collapsing all these
Old Testament stories together. But then also we look at
what the story means or what it is, you know,
why it is.
Speaker 2: An important aspect of the story.
Speaker 1: What's it pointing to and what does it reveal about
the very structure of reality the way that most stories do,
and especially the story of Christ.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Peshel Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 1: And so the text for the Mask of the Innocance
is very short. You know. Herod finds out about the
wise men that are coming to worship this new king.
And then when the wise men come and find Jesus
in the home with Mary. When they leave, Joseph has
a dream. He sees an angel in his dream, says
an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
Get up, he said, take the child and his mother
and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you,
for Herod is going to search for the child to
kill him. So he got up, took the child and
his mother during the night, and left for Egypt, where
he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was
fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet out
of Egypt, I called my son. When Herod realized that
he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious,
and he gave orders to kill all the boys in
Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under,
in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
Speaker 2: So basically, what.
Speaker 1: You have is the prophecy or the idea that there's
a new king coming or someone who is going to
be a threat to the authority of the current king,
and because of that, the current king decides to slaughter
all the children of Israel of Bethlehem, while while his
father and his mother flee to Egypt with the son. Now,
what's going on in that story. The first thing to
kind of understand is the very funny way in which
it plays with the Old Testament stories, you know, the
way in which it, like I said, collapses the Old
Testament stories together. Now, the first thing your mind goes
through to, obviously, is the idea that the pharaoh wants
to kill the children of Israel, and he kills all
the children, and out of that killing of the children,
there is a child that is born that is saved
and becomes the Savior of Israel, and that of course
is Moses. So that is the first thought that comes
to you, Like it makes sense to think of that
as being the story. And then that child, when he
grows up, Moses, he leads the children of Israel out
of Israel into the Promised Land. Now when you think
about it, you realize that it seems to be the
opposite of that story. Actually, it seems to be playing
with the story but doing it in a way that
makes it almost the opposite of that story.
Speaker 2: Think about it.
Speaker 1: In the story of the Exodus, the pharaoh wants to
kill the children of Israel, and because of that, he
reveals the Messiah, the Savior, and then that leads Israel
ultimately out of.
Speaker 2: Out of the court.
Speaker 1: And the child doesn't hide, you know, outside the child
hides in Egypt, but hides with the pharaoh, right, and
so the pharaoh threatens the child. Now the child is
saved by being hidden in.
Speaker 2: The house of the pharaoh.
Speaker 1: So he is hidden in Egypt, but he is also fleeing,
like ultimately Israel will flee Egypt. So you can see
that it's similar, but it's different, and it's very fascinating.
And you'll see as we accumulate the stories, it will
become actually very difficult to think about the story of
Jesus because you'll notice all the images kind of crashing
in to the story of Jesus. Okay, now, this is
not the only part that relates to this story, because
there is another story in which Joseph, the son of Jacob,
the son of Israel, is sold by his brothers. He's
threatened by his brothers. His brothers want to kill him,
and so they put him in a hole, and instead
of killing him, they end up selling him to Midianite
or an Edamite, it's not clear in the text, it
seems to be both a Midianite and Edomite, and that
way Joseph then ends up through this transaction as a
slave in Egypt, and ultimately he.
Speaker 2: Saves Egypt from a drought. All right.
Speaker 1: So that's the second image, all right, So try to
keep all of that in your mind. Now in the
story of Jesus, you can see that it's similar because
it's the King of Judah, right, It's the King of
Judah that is going after the Messiah and wants to
kill him. And because of that, the Messiah, the chosen
one flees into Egypt and is protected in Egypt. So
you can see how it's very similar. It's close, but
it's playing with these elements in a way that is
bringing them together in another way. Now, there is of
course a third story that we have to consider when
we're thinking about the story of Jesus and the mask
of the Innocence and him going to Egypt, and it is.
Speaker 2: The story of Jacob and Esau.
Speaker 1: Now you have to think about the idea that in
this case the king of it's the King of Judah. Now,
the King of Judah is a particular character in this
story because the King of Judah, Herod is not a
descendant of the line of David. He is an Edomite.
Now remember what I said about the Edomites. They are
the ones that sold Joseph into Egypt. But edom is
Esau actually is another word for Esau.
Speaker 2: And so you can.
Speaker 1: See that in the story of Jacob and Esau you
have a similar situation, which is that Esau wants to
hurt his brother. Esau wants to kill his brother because
his brother has the blessing, and he does it. You
could say it in different ways, but in a way
it's because he is the one who will replace Esau.
Speaker 2: Just like in the.
Speaker 1: Story of Herod, Jesus is the king that will replace Herod,
at least in his perception and at least in the
way that the magi seemed to come and say a
king is born here. And so because of that, you
could say Jesus is the one who has the blessing
of heaven.
Speaker 2: And so Herod is also, you know.
Speaker 1: Chasing it, wanting to kill him, and because of that
he goes and flees into Egypt. And so in the
case of Jacob and Esau, Esau is dam It's edom.
He is the ancestor of King Herod, and he wants
to kill his brother because he has the blessing. So
because of that, his brother has to flee into Lebanon. Right,
he has to flee to his brother, to the brother
the brother of his Is that the brother of his
mother Lebon? I think that's what it is, And so
he has to flee into Lebanon. Now again there's another story. Sorry,
there's so many stories in order to understand this. And
of course the other story is the story of King
Saul and David.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Now King Saul is the king, and now there's this
new king that is rising up, that is coming, you know,
up the ranks. And because of that king, Saul wants
to kill David and forces David to hide, and forces
David to hide. He hides in several ways and can
help you kind of understand. He hides among kind of criminals, debtors,
people who are miscontents in society, and he also hides
among strangers. He spends some time becoming, you know, a
secret he becomes a he looks like he's fighting for
the enemies of Israel. He's not really, but it looks
like he's fighting for the enemies. He's helping the enemies
of Israel. Now, this is of course something that Joseph does,
because Joseph goes to Egypt, saves Egypt, who will become
the enemy of Israel as well.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, so I hope you can kind.
Speaker 1: Of see the whole thing in your mind, hopefully can
hold it together. It's very difficult, and so you can
see that in the story of Jesus, all of those
things seem to be happening at the same time.
Speaker 2: That is, Jesus is fleeing.
Speaker 1: His own people, right, He's fleeing the King of Judah
in order to go into Egypt to hide, fleeing the
legitimate king in order to hide with the stranger. But
the King of Judah is not is his brother, but
he's not really his brother, or he is his brother
in the sense of the hostile brother. That is, the
king is also Edam, and therefore he is fleeing the
esau in order to hide again with the stranger. Now,
like I said, in the story of Moses, Moses ends
up hiding with the Pharaoh and saves the Pharaoh. In
the case of the story of Jesus, Jesus also ends
up hiding with Egypt and then returning later. Okay, he's
leaving the Promised Land in order to go into Egypt.
He's kind of doing the opposite of what Moses did.
And so it's like, even when I tried to bring
all of those stories together, they kind of hurt my
head because there's so much going on in this little
in these few little sentences that it's hard to it's
hard to maintain. But you can see exactly what Jesus
is doing. Now, what Jesus is doing in the story
of the Massacre of the Innocence is in some ways
also a prophecy of what is going to happen later.
It's also a prophecy of how Jesus will be hated
by his brother and will be put into the ditch,
put into the pit by his brothers. Right, he will
be killed by his brothers in that case, in the
case of Joseph, they don't go all the way. But
in the case they make a scapegoat sacrifice. Right, they
kill a goat to replace Joseph and put blood on
his garment and then tell their father that it was
the it's Joseph that died. But in the serve of Jesus,
Jesus is the scapegoat's sacrifice. And so Jesus now is
killed by his brother, his brother Judah and part and
then he will also be sold into Egypt. But he's
not only killed. It's so interesting, he's not only killed
by his brother Judah, He's also killed by the stranger,
the Edomite. He's killed by Esau. But the Esau is
also Rome, you know, and so in some ways more
like Egypt, or more like really the stranger, the one
that has very little to do with, you know, with
the story of Israel. Although you know, Jews in the
first century, and many Jews until today call rome Edom,
you know, and call rome esau. So the whole symbolism,
there's a kind of deep symbolism about understanding what it
is that's going to happen. And then it all becomes
very strange because there is also a larger massacre of
the innocence which will happen, which is that.
Speaker 2: Jerusalem will be destroyed, and.
Speaker 1: The entire sacrificial system, the entire tradition you know that
led up to Jesus will be destroyed, with the temple
being destroyed, you know, not to be rebuilt again, at
least not until now. And the one that saved, you know,
the Moses figure, you know, the Messiah figure, the David figure,
the one that flees will then go into Egypt, will
go into rome will go It's weird because it's like
he goes into the very people that destroyed the tradition.
He goes, he goes along with the very people that
destroyed the temple and that destroyed Jerusalem, and then he
saves them. So it's almost as if we're going back
backwards in time, you know. And if you see the
stories together and you don't necessarily you look at the
causality kind of going backwards. It seems like that Jesus
is doing something with that, because you know, in the
story of Joseph, Joseph saves Egypt, Egypt becomes you know,
the slavery of the Israelites, and then Moses takes Israel.
Speaker 2: Out of Egypt into the Promised Land.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know, and then they're the Egyptians trying to
like kill the Israelites. And then after that Moses takes
into the Promised Land. So now it's as if it's
going backwards, moving from the Promised Land, and then the
Egyptians or the Romans the strangers killing, destroying Israel, and
then you could go you go backwards. That is, the
character flees nonetheless into Egypt, becomes friends with the pharaoh,
becomes friends with their Roman emperor, and then saves Rome. Yeah,
it's hard to think about all this, but this is
what Jesus does. When I say that, like, when I
think about Jesus's story, I just it just shatters my category.
Speaker 2: It just blows me away. This is what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's very difficult to hold all of this in your
mind because it it's just too much.
Speaker 2: It's really too much.
Speaker 1: Jesus is just collapsing all of this together, kind of
bringing it in a way that is that you can
see it just glows. But it's hard to get to
the end of it's hard to totally see completely what
it is that Christ is doing. But nonetheless we can
still think a little bit about why is this necessary?
Why why is it necessary? Why is it part of reality?
Why is there this massacre of the innocence of the innocent.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: This is something that now we have to kind of
step out of the moral frame to kind of just
un understand how some of these things work, you know,
and understand in some ways what it is that exterior
pressure does to something. The way to understand it is
that the Egyptians start to kill the children of Israel. Now,
what that does, just pragmatically, is it, of course makes
the children of Israel, for the Israelites, become very precious,
more precious than what they were before. And then there's
this great effort right to protect the children of Israel,
to save them, this great effort that requires more energy,
you know, more time, more deliberate action in order to
preserve the children of Israel. And what happens is that
the external pressure creates a form of purification. It creates
it's a form of burning off of the chaff. I'm
not saying that the children are chaff, but what I
mean is that it kind of reduces things to their
essential right because if you have external pressure on you,
you have to decide what's essential and what isn't. You know,
in a time where everything is relaxed and everything is
cool and there's nothing, you know, dangerous going on, things
can kind of get out of control.
Speaker 2: You know, you can just let things go. You don't have.
Speaker 1: To be extremely deliberate about everything you do. But when
all of a sudden there's some kind of external pressure,
something that is you could say, pushing you towards survival,
you know, one of the things it does is that
it makes you have to choose that which is precious,
and not only choose, but care about. All of a sudden,
you become deliberate about preserving that which is essential, essential
to what it depends, obviously essential to the survival of
whatever you're of, essential to your family identity, to your
national identity, to your to your story, to your company,
to to whatever right to their you know, to your
government agency, like if you cut budgets on people, then
you know, what they have to do is they have
to cut the fat, and they kind of have to
decide what is the most precious and what that can
do in the proper context. If you survive it, that is,
if you survive an external attack, if you survive a
external pressure, something that is trying to eat you and
devour you and destroy you. What you develop which comes
out of that is something stronger, something that is refined
and purified, like gold, something like a seed that can
then be planted into a new world and grow again
and have fruit. And so that is why that story
of the danger or the you know, the threat of
the brother, the threat of the the important character is important,
you know, and it happens in all kinds of context.
Of course I showed you different versions of that in
the Bible. But in many, many stories, you have the
idea of the child, the precious child, you know, the
golden child, the one that is prophesied to be king
or to become important, is in danger and is threatened
and is put through the ringer.
Speaker 2: And what that does. The reason why that they're in
the story, at.
Speaker 1: Least one of the reasons is in order to show
that if think about it this way, like if the
child survives, or if the character survives, or if this survives,
it is a sign that it is the indestructible thing,
that it has something in it that is worthy of attention,
worthy of care, and worthy of being brought into the future.
And so we can understand this story, the story of
this external pressure which comes on P P. And I
don't want to I want to be careful. I don't
want to diminish how serious it is. I'm not trying
to to to make it trivial. It is not trivial.
It is actually it could be. It is extremely dramatic,
dramatic like the story here, and in some ways, for example,
like dramatic, like the story of the Holocaust. You know
this idea that in the twentieth century, you know, as
the Jewish nation, for example, in the twentieth century went
through horrible persecution and horrible threat out of that they
came out much stronger and much more concentrated. And like
I said, I don't want to make it trivial. I'm
not saying that we should wish this on anyone.
Speaker 2: That's not the point. But it is simply a structure
of reality.
Speaker 1: And that is why it happens in the case of
the Israelites before they are going to flee Egypt. This
type of pressure happened on Jacob from his brother Esau,
it happens on David the from King Saul, and ultimately
it happens on.
Speaker 2: Christ in the story of Christ.
Speaker 1: And you know, and also we believe in some ways
that it also happened in a bigger way, in a
meta way. That is, because of the fact that Jerusalem
was destroyed in the first century. What came out of that,
the seed that emerged from that was so powerful that
it could take over and save even those that destroyed it,
even those that destroyed Jerusalem. And so that is the
power of the story of the Mask of the Innocence.
Hopefully this is clear. Hopefully also the examples I gave
you in the real world are clear enough, you know,
to help you understand how that works and why it
is a motif that appears in so many stories because
of what the idea that when something goes through fire
and survives it, it is the essence of that which
would threatened that has to survive. It is that which
we cap which is the most important, you know. Think
about it like, you know, think about it like there's
a fire in your house and you only have time,
and you can pick which one. But you only have
time to take one picture of your family out of
the house. And so you will choose a picture that
will gather together all the memories and things that you
care about and all the aspects of your family that
you remember the most vividly. And that is what you
will take out of the house. You won't take some random,
out of focused picture, you know, in which some of
the members of the family are missing, or you know,
it's just a joke or whatever. You'll take, you know,
the thing that is the most symbolic in the proper
sense of what it is that you're trying to remember
and to bring with you, you know.
Speaker 2: And so this is of.
Speaker 1: Course the image, for example, of Eneas who takes his
father out of Troy. Anyways, there are plenty, plenty of examples.
You guys can think of them on your own. Try
to find examples. Actually be fun to see that in
the common section. Try to find examples of stories like
that where this process of pressure and of the survival
of the seed, the survival of the precious Thing through
the fire and through the challenge, and so I appreciate
your attention. You know, Christmas is coming very soon, and
if you're interested, there are many Christmas videos on my channel.
And I find it difficult to talk about things twice,
and so go on the channel, find the Christmas video list,
and then there are plenty of videos talk about all
the aspects of Christmas, from the Christmas Tree you know,
to Santa, to Rudolph, to like everything you know, to
the Nativity Icon. I think I pretty much talked about
every single thing that is related to Christmas. Maybe the
only thing left was this Master of the Innocent story,
which I am dealing with now. And so thanks everybody
for attention. Do not forget to sign up for the
Symbolic World and to join our community, and I'll talk
to you very soon.
Speaker 2: Bye bye,