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.

Blessed are the Poor

Martin Newell’s Home Office Vigil Reflection.

“Woe to the rich” (Luke 6:24)

Christ the Shepherd, Jaroslav, 2025

Those words are probably the least quoted words in the Gospels. They’re not popular, especially in rich countries. “Happy – or Blessed – are the poor” (Luke 6:20) is at least more popular.

But who are the rich and poor today, in the world we live in? It helps to understand our context. Despite there being a debate about whether global inequality is rising or falling, it is clearly true to say that there has never been a bigger gap between the richest and the poorest in human history. While Elon Musk is worth $400bn, and the super-mega-rich can talk of space tourism and going to live on other planets, millions of the poorest globally still die young, even in childhood, of preventable diseases, lack of clean water, and not having enough to eat. Obviously, we can see refugees desperately seeking a new life in the UK and Europe, risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel, and those who arrive here as among the poor, among those most vulnerable, suffering and in need of safety and welcome. And what happens on our borders reveals a wider truth: that the poverty and suffering of the poorest is not an accident, but the result of deliberate policy decisions designed to protect and enhance the place and wealth of the rich minority.

I think it’s also true to say that the biggest class divisions in the world are not between the working class and middle and upper classes, but between those who have access to “First World” lifestyles, passports and social security systems, and those who don’t. And it is the gulf that still exists between these worlds of Dives and Lazarus (as in Jesus’ parable in Luke’s Gospel) that is both a push and pull factor in driving global migration. But it would be good to dig a little deeper.

Catholic Workers used to talk a lot about being at the heart of Empire. We compared ourselves to the people of Rome in the time of Jesus. Jesus lived and died, was executed, on the margins, the peripheries, of Empire. But the early Christians in Rome had to work out what it meant to follow Jesus while living at the heart of that same Empire. We – Catholic Workers – saw ourselves in a similar situation. Catholic Workers in the US certainly live in the heart of a global Imperial power. And in London, we live in a similar place, where there is a concentration of economic, financial, political and military power. Such a place is crying out for communities of faith and resistance, to stand in places such as this place of power – the Home Office.

Ched Myers in his book Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians, compared our situation to that of Peter, warming his hands by the fire while Jesus was being tortured nearby: like Peter, we are warming our hands with the minor privileges of Empire, while off stage we can hear the screams of the crucified of our times being tortured.  And so Catholic Workers talked about repenting from the privileges of Empire, and resisting its violence and injustice from within.

These days, the talk on the political left is more about de-colonisation than resisting Empire. I guess it essentially means the same thing. Working for the end of Empire, or Empires. While the age of the visible European Empires is over, the spirit of colonialism lives on.

Interestingly, it seems to me that the voices calling for de-colonisation often start from the global south. Which seems very right and to the point. And to me, they often seem to be the same voices that criticise things like “white saviourism” and “Band Aid” type portrayals of Africa and Africans as all being poor, starving wretches who need westerners to come over and save them.

I mention this partly because it strikes me that these days, pretty much every country in the world has what might be called a “First World Sector” and a “Third World Sector” – and others in between, but in very different proportions in different countries. Visually, virtually every country has a city with at least a district that looks like a west European city, for example. As a result of this increased prosperity in the global south, there are articulate voices from every country demanding respect, equal voices and economic equality, and saying “we don’t want to be represented like THAT! We don’t need your charity, your help, we need you to take your foot off our necks!” Revolutions are usually started by those who have newly entered the educated aspiring middle classes, who still feel they are being kept out of true freedom, opportunity and respect. It seems to me that the same is happening around the world today.

Those who make it to our shores are not from among the poorest in the world. The poorest might be lucky if they can make it to the nearest border or refugee camp. But those who do arrive carry with them the voices of their people, as well as sending money back home out of whatever they have, whether that is little or plenty, as witnessed to by the adverts on the tube for such things as the Remitly app.

As distressing as it is when there is so much suffering along the way, the great flow of migration at this time in history also represents something positive, that more and more people have the resources, the opportunity, the drive and the energy to seek and find a better life for themselves and their families. At the same time, as Pope Francis has said, there is such a thing as “internal colonialism”, such that at least some of the voices we hear from the global south don’t represent the poor at all, but the local elites, who may identify themselves more as part of the rich world, while happening to live in exile among the “great unwashed”.

I could go on, but I’ve said enough. Let us pray for soft hearts and open ears to hear the cries of the crucified of today, wherever and whoever they are, and to hear what the Spirit is saying to the Churches.

Anniversaries, Change and Renewal

Martin Newell reflects on the past, present, and future of the London Catholic Worker.

Giuseppe Conlon House, Print, Sarah Fuller

In May we celebrated the 92nd birthday of the Catholic Worker movement, launched as it was as a radical newspaper on May Day 1933. We also celebrated some other significant anniversaries that will pass this year: 25 years of the London Catholic Worker, 20 years of the Urban Table soup kitchen, and 15 years of Giuseppe Conlon House. Trying to see Christ in the least of his sisters and brothers who we welcome, and to advocate and witness in solidarity with them and others who are also the “crucified of today,” remains the animating and challenging force among us.

It might sound like an impressive story of continuous life, work, and witness. On the other hand, since I moved back into the house here, only one other person remains. Both guests and members of the live-in community that is the foundation of our life and work come and go. Like the human body that completely renews itself with new cells every seven years, the community here is a living organism. As I write, the Catholic Workers here are myself (Martin), Thomas, Moya, Harry, and James. Naomi will have joined us by the time you read this. I will have moved out nearby, but will still be working for the community at least part-time for the time being.

The newest good news is that Thomas and Moya have said they want to commit long-term. This is a real blessing. Deo Gratias! It is a gift from them, and a real commitment, because none of us are paid a wage. We give of ourselves freely in return for little more than subsistence living, and the joy and challenges that life in

community, in a house of hospitality, brings. Some of us are planning to move on in the next few months and others are expected to join us. And that is how it goes. But we look with hope for more who are willing to make that long-term commitment—even the “lifers” who may discern that this is the vocation that God has in mind for them.

Dorothy Day once wrote, “It really is a permanent revolution, this Catholic Worker movement of ours.”

She was adapting Trotsky’s call for a permanent revolution to the personalist idea that the Kingdom of  God, or the revolution, is not so much something to be aimed at for the future, as something to be lived out each day, each moment. She saw in this movement an attempt to do that, to be a permanent ferment in society, bringing God’s love to bear on the critical issues of the day.

We are still trying to do that here. The constant changes mean that there is another way our community and our movement continue to be a permanent ferment. Life in the house here never ceases to change. Not only do people come and go, but the way we live and work and have our being here changes as well.

When we first moved to Giuseppe Conlon House in 2010, we spent a lot of time cleaning and fixing and

organising the place, and collecting what we needed from so many different places and people who gave us donations.

It did not always go straightforwardly. I remember borrowing a van to pick up two rolls of carpet we were offered. But the carpet rolls were about twice as long as the van, so we had to leave them behind. And we had perhaps our most difficult day when local councillors and governors from the school opposite came, thinking we were going to bring “disruptive elements” into the neighbourhood. And I guess we have—just not in the way they were thinking of.

We ran the basic night shelter in the hall for nearly five years. For the first three years we were also supporting our other works started a few years earlier: Dorothy Day House, Peters Community Café, and the Urban Table. The Urban Table is still going—20 years this year, now independent. After five years the community at the time had the imagination to re-organise the space here so that nearly all the 20 men staying in the shelter could have proper beds in proper bedrooms for the first time. But it was still a (more comfortable) night shelter, three and four to a room for the guests, and sometimes for short-term volunteers too.

Lots of activism came through the house too. In the early years, it was mostly Christian peace witness. Then there were women’s groups, refugee groups, and community groups. Later, pre-Covid, it was most notably Christian Climate Action, Extinction Rebellion, and Palestine Action, whose nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience all owe a debt of gratitude to the hospitality offered here, and the networking a community makes possible.

Now, we have twenty-five people staying here. Fifteen live in the communal house setting where nearly everyone has their own room—ten guests and five Catholic Workers. And since March, ten men have also been sleeping in the basic night shelter, back in the hall. The place is full and busy again. After the money spent, and the work done, on the extensive renovations of the last few years, the buildings look better and it is a better place to live.

The registration of Giuseppe Conlon House CIO as a charity gives the work of hospitality a more reliable foundation, and hopefully access to more resources. But visitors should not be fooled—it is only comfortable in comparison to how it was before. We are still dependent on community members and volunteers willing to make a personal sacrifice, work hard, and do what is needed, as well as generous donors of all kinds, for whom we also thank God, to keep body and soul together and the roof on! May we continue to allow ourselves to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, and may the Spirit too bring us not just what, but who, we need. Amen.