* Emma’s First Wound

Emma’s First Wound

At first Emma was too tired to realize the implications of the rumors she heard at the river. She had gone to scrub the boy’s dirty clothes; she and Joseph still had a few clean things after their mad flight. She shook her head, Joseph and his dream, which had frightened him so badly that he insisted on saddling the donkey and dragging her out of her warm bed in the middle of the night with the boy asleep on her back! Emma was still sore and tired from riding day and night, with just a few hours of sleep in the home of Joseph’s friend on the way.

Now as she relaxed in the warm Egyptian sun, she thought of the fragments of gossip she had heard while washing. Her neighbor on the left had been scrubbing a soiled soldier’s tunic, although the bloodstains would never come out completely. She had whispered to her friend, “my brother had to leave Jerusalem to hide after Herod’s last madness. Isn’t it enough that he kills any rivals, but now he has to slaughter little boys?”

Emma had continued scrubbing her little boy’s long robe, not wanting to interrupt the woman and draw attention to herself. “A dozen little boys killed in some Judean village just 5 days ago because Herod thought there was a baby king among them! They say the mothers are beside themselves with despair and grief.”

Later, as Emma sat in the courtyard watching her boy sleep peacefully, she realized that the baby King Herod feared was her son. They had escaped only because of Joseph’s obedience to the warning. But her friend’s sons? Susannah’s baby Samuel dead? Micah’s little blond curls smashed bloody in the dust? Petey’s chubby brown arms and legs broken as he was slammed against the walls? Emma moaned and shook as she felt the terror of her friends as evil devoured their sons. And what must they think of her, the only mother to escape with her son? How did she know to flee? Why didn’t she warn them? How could she have brought this danger to Bethlehem and then flee, leaving their sons to be slaughtered? Waves of pain and anguish washed over her as she realized that her boy, with no thoughts of kingship in his innocent sleep, had already been the cause of bloodshed. How could she rejoice in their successful escape when others had died? Suddenly she remembered the words spoken to her at his birth, “a sword will pierce your heart.” The words had not made sense to her at the time, but now, as Rachel weeping for the children of Ramah, she felt the sword’s first wounding.

Gerry Gutierrez

Oaxaca, 2002