“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi.”
Um, Merry Christmas?
Christmas only began a few days ago with a joyous night of worship, the church filled with family and friends, our children dressed as sheep and shepherds, donkeys and angels, the light of the Christ candle sharing its light to all of us, and the joy of finally wishing one another “Merry Christmas.”
And now, the first Sunday in Christmastide we are confronted with the tragedy of a tyrant king and the slaughter of the innocent.
Christmas is a practice in holding joy and grief together.
We haven’t truly left the Christmas story, this is part of Matthew’s telling. Matthew skips over the stable and the nativity with a simple line about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem before jumping into the story of the magi, whom Herod enlists to help him find the child. They are warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod and so they return home by another way. Today’s passage opens with God’s warning to Joseph in a dream, a warning Joseph obeys, saving Jesus from Herod’s horrific plans.
The Coventry Mystery plays are a cycle of medieval mystery plays from Coventry, England. First recorded was in 1392, they continued for nearly two centuries. While the cycle originally included about ten plays, only two survive today. One of them, the Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant, a nativity play portraying the events from the Annunciation through the Massacre of the Innocents. You may not know the plays themselves, the only ancient manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1879, but you may know the song that accompanied the pageant: the Coventry Carol.
“That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
While Jesus is spared, this lullaby, sung from the perspective of the mothers of those whose children are not, captures the devastating cost of Herod’s violence. If Luke’s Christmas story teaches us that there is holy power in vulnerability, then Matthew teaches us how earthly power so often responds to vulnerability – with fear, control and brutality.
Christmas does not take away what is deeply troubling, instead it faces it head on with the truth of the Incarnation. God is with us.
God is with us when joy gives way to grief, when simplicity fades away into complexity, when the precious cry of a newborn babe gives way to the anguished cries of those on the margins. As Karoline Lewis writes, “When only a [few days pass] between Jesus’ birth in a manger to save our life, and the escape to Egypt to save his, we don’t just realize this truth — we feel it.”
We hear the same in this morning’s passage from Hebrews when it tells us that Jesus did not remain distant from human pain but entered fully into it. Jesus shared our flesh and blood, learning suffering from inside, knows how to be with us in our pain because he has experienced that same pain. God didn’t save the world from a safe distance. God came close enough to know fear, loss and vulnerability firsthand.
But here is the question that truly haunts me when I read this morning’s gospel passage:
If God could rescue Jesus, why couldn’t God rescue all those other innocent children? Why doesn’t God rescue people we know right now who are suffering, especially those living beneath the weight of someone else’s fear-filled, self-protective decisions? This is that question of theodicy that so often raises its hand in stories like this one and refuses to sit back down. “If God is all loving and all powerful, then why do bad things happen to good people?”
Most of us will struggle with that question at some point on our faith journey. And as a family of faith, we have had opportunities to think about that question over our history – in the face of tragedy, in the face of violence and in the face of loss. We wrestle with it in the face of our own pain, and we wrestle with it in the face of the pain all around us. On my worst days, my answer is “God is love but perhaps God is not all powerful.” On my best days my answer is “I don’t know.”
It’s not that I don’t have the theological education to give you an answer. It’s that I don’t have the heart to speak with certainty about something for which there is no certainty.
Again, today’s lection from Hebrews offers us not an explanation but a promise: that whatever suffering is, God has chosen not to be absent from it. God stands in solidarity with the vulnerable. God’s power is revealed not through domination but through presence.
In a recent episode of what has become my favorite podcast, Wild Card with Rachel Martin, Rachel asked her guest, the author Ann Patchett, this question: “How have your feelings about God changed over time?”
Ann gave this answer:
“I still believe in God and here’s the thing, if I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong. What matters is that we do our best with the life that we have, that we show up, that we love each other, and that we try to be as aware as is humanly possible of the life and the gift that we’re given.”
I wonder if when uncertainty persists, we might hear the simple prayer of Jesus, the one we pray every Sunday, echoing in our hearts, “Your kingdom come.”
I wonder if the simple familiarity of those words can bring us comfort in the darkness, if the hope embodied in God’s kingdom can sustain us through our hardest moments, if showing up and loving each other is in fact an answer, if not to all our questions, then at least to how we live with them.
Because we see God’s kingdom in small, stubborn acts of love:
In hugs over a hospital bed,
In whispered prayers in quiet rooms,
In casseroles and shared meals after funerals,
In sitting with one another when there are no words fix what is broken,
And we see it, too, when love pushes beyond this place and these people:
In neighbors checking on neighbors,
In generosity offered quietly and without condition,
In doors being held open a little longer and tables set a little wider,
In patience practiced in a hurried world and kindness offered in an anxious one,
In ordinary people refusing to let fear have the final word.
These are not grand gestures or headline-making moments. They are faithful, often unseen choices to live as God is already at work among us, choices to notice, to show up, to act with compassion even when the world feels fractured and fragile.
Isaiah does this when he declares “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord” in this morning’s other lection. Isaiah is not denying the pain of the world but remembering God’s faithfulness in the midst of it. Isaiah is teaching a weary people to look for where God has already been present, and to let that remembrance shape how they live now.
Pope John Paul II famously said, “we are an Easter people.”
But we are also a Christmas people.
We are a people of resurrection and a people of incarnation.
We are people who believe that God does not remain distant from suffering but enters into it. We tell the story of the incarnation with our voices when we speak with mercy and love. We tell it with our bodies when we are present to those who need God’s presence most. We tell it with our lives when we commit ourselves to creating God’s kingdom here on earth.
To be a Christmas people is not to deny the darkness. It is to insist that the light still comes. It is to believe that love is worth practicing even when answers are incomplete. It is to choose tenderness over fear, presence over power, and hope over despair.
And so we keep telling the story. The good parts and the troubling parts. Not because its easy. Not because it answers every question. But because God is with us. And because even now, that is enough to hold us, that is enough to help us show up, that is enough to keep us living as a Christmas people.