O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
Christmas Eve was lovely and quiet; the star in the window shone bright against the midnight sky. Amid arctic temperatures, we huddled together in the warm sanctuary, and with wide-eyed wonder we listened and we sang, immersed in the good news of great joy: Christ is born in Bethlehem! God has come to earth as a baby! Joy to the world! We lit our candles, little flames held high to greet the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Then we watched the children tear their way through oceans of wrapping paper, we laughed and talked, ate and drank, played games with siblings and cousins, watched a couple more Christmas movies, and even the most stoic among us remember that moment when we teared up a little, echoes of the old tune playing in our hearts: The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
Here we are just one week after Christmas Day, the trees and lights in many homes are already gone, and it’s as though even Matthew wants to make sure we understand that the time of wonder really is over: ruthlessly he yanks us back into the brutal reality of the time of king Herod. Matthew tells us the story of the coming of the Son of God, but he leaves little room for sentimentality. I like a little sentimentality. My mind always wants to act like a stern grown-up, giving me this serious look about the serious state of the world and the need for unsentimental thinking, but my soul is wiser. A little sentimentality hasn’t hurt anyone, and yes, Matthew will make sure we won’t sit too long in a warm, nostalgic bath tub, pretending that Jesus was born in a cute little Christmas village of collectible Victorian houses.
A king is born, but there already is a king, and there is only room for one on the throne. It doesn’t get any more unsentimental than that. The birth of Christ truly takes place in our world, and so we get to hum O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie only until the shouts of soldiers and the cries of frightened children break the wondrous stillness. The streets of Bethlehem are dark and they are filled with the wailing and loud lamentation of horrified parents. Stanley Hauerwas writes,
Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants.[1]
Jesus is born into the real world, our world, a world of terror and tears. A world whose rulers consider a human life a small price to pay when power is at stake.
Herod the king, in his raging,
charged he has this day
his men of might, in his own sight,
all children young to slay[2].
Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and Herod is frightened, and all Jerusalem with him,[3] and brutal violence erupts, and still the world out-Herods Herod.[4]
At least 437 children are among more than 8,300 civilians who have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February, the country’s prosecutor general said on [a November] Saturday in a grim new accounting of the war’s toll.[5]
And lest we get too comfortable identifying Putin as the Herodian figure, unleashing terror to secure his position in the world—how many children died at wedding parties and birthday parties that ended with U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq? Matthew doesn’t introduce Herod this early in the narrative so we’d have somebody to point fingers at. Herod is there this early to show us how the kingdoms of the world resist the coming of the kingdom of heaven with everything we got. But even at their most violent, Matthew insists, the kingdoms of the world cannot stop the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
In the gospel reading for today, the brutal clip of king Herod and his death squads is surrounded by the quiet scenes of Joseph who has learned to listen to the angel of the Lord in his dreams. Many have anguished over the question why God did not send the angel to all the families in Bethlehem, to warn the other parents of Herod’s bloody plan. Why didn’t all the young children and their families leave that place of persecution and death that night, seeking refuge and protection in Egypt? Why didn’t the little Lord Jesus, riding on a donkey, lead them out in a parade of life? I imagine Matthew would say, “Don’t let Herod fool you; this isn’t the whole story yet.”
For many of Matthew’s readers, Herod is a familiar figure. Pharaoh, king of Egypt, was building an empire on the backs of slaves and wanted to keep it that way. Afraid that the Hebrew slaves might become too numerous to control, he told their midwives to kill all Hebrew boys at birth and let only the girls live. But Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, obeyed God rather than Pharaoh, and many boys lived, among them Moses who grew up to lead his people from the house of slavery to the land of promise. Moses had to flee, and he lived far from his people as a refugee in Midian until the Lord said to him, “Go back…, for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” Moses returned, and the liberation of God’s people began.
Jesus and his parents were refugees in Egypt, when an angel of the Lord said to Joseph, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Matthew wants us to hear these resonances between the story of Moses and God’s people and the story of Jesus. Pharaoh raises his head again and again, attempting to secure power with violence, but his reign will not last. The kingdom of heaven is come, and no matter how violently the empire of sin resists its coming, the purposes of God will prevail.
The ultimate confrontation between God’s reign and the empire of sin was the cross, erected not very far from Bethlehem. Another Herod was on the throne, yet little else had changed. Joy to the world, the Lord is come—let earth receive her king, we sing, but there are other power arrangements already in place, and the kingdoms of the world resist the coming of the kingdom of heaven with everything we got. Christmas and the cross belong together, and there is nothing sentimental about the cross. Pam Fickenscher writes about the massacre of the infants,
You could make a good argument that we should save this story for another day—Lent, maybe, or some late-night adults-only occasion. But our songs of peace and public displays of charity have not erased the headlines of child poverty, gun violence, and even genocide. This is a brutal world.[6]
This is indeed a brutal world, but because of Jesus’ coming into it, we believe that the last word doesn’t belong to the old story of injustice and violence, but to the even older story of love, and therefore to hope. There is another memory Matthew stirs up with his story of the massacre of the infants. Jeremiah comes to mind, and the days when the Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judah were sent into exile.
A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.
Rachel was the mother of Israel, one of the great matriarchs, and her tomb was on the way to Ephrat, that is, Bethlehem.[7] Rachel is weeping for her children who are being persecuted, murdered, exiled, sent to camps, and crucified, and she wails inconsolably. In the book of Jeremiah, her tears are followed by a promise of God, and Matthew knows it, but he doesn’t just quote those lines here. It’s as though he wants us to remember the words like a faint echo and carry them with us in this brutal world. According to Jeremiah, the Lord said to Rachel,
Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears … they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future; your children shall come back to their own country.[8]
Nothing less will do. Herod’s actions are brutal and painful, but they are not how it always will be in God’s world—and the reversal is under way. Emmanuel was born in Bethlehem: God is with us. Jewish mystics taught that only one place on earth would be suitable for the coronation of God’s Messiah; not a high place like Jerusalem, but that lonely place by the road, where Rachel weeps until her children return. The exile of God’s people comes to an end when the Messiah comes to lead them home.
Where shall this be? On the way to Ephrat at the crossroads, which is Rachel’s grave. To mother Rachel he will bring glad tidings. And he will comfort her. And now she will let herself be comforted. And she will rise up and kiss him.[9]
Nothing less will do, and Matthew knows it. He wrote his Christmas story long after Easter. He wrote with the bold hope that the Messiah who was crowned on Golgotha, is God with us in our suffering. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead was God’s affirmation of the kingdom he lived and proclaimed, and God’s judgment on the empire of sin. The Messiah has come to bring the whole world home. The last word doesn’t belong to the old story of injustice and violence, but to the even older story of God’s faithful love, and therefore to hope. May we carry the light of this hope in our hearts as we enter a new year.
[1] Matthew, Brazos 2006, 41.
[2] Coventry Carol
[3] See Matthew 2:3
[4] Robert Lowell, The Holy Innocents https://www.everseradio.com/the-holy-innocents-by-robert-lowell/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/world/europe/children-killed-russia-ukraine-war.html
[6] http://www.danclendenin.org/Essays/20071224JJ.shtml
[7] Genesis 35:16-19
[8] Jeremiah 31:16-17
[9] Zohar 2.7-9; see Fred Strickert, Rachel Weeping (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2007), 32.