Hello my friends,

This is being sent out on December 28th, so I hope your Christmas season has been filled with peace and encouragement. I know this can also be a difficult time for meany. Grief, hardship, and loss can make the holidays difficult to endure. I hope you receive an extra measure of peace and joy as time goes on. You are seen and loved.

I don't have any recommended resources for you today. I just want to leave you with this reflection on Matthew 2:13-23. As you read, keep the issue of theodicy in mind and I want to invite you to reflect on the nature of Matthew's gospel as a whole.

The King Who Feared a Child

Matthew 2:13-23

When they had gone, 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.Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Not A Hallmark World

Matthew does not soften this story for us. He doesn’t try to give us a Norman Rockwell filter for this text. He does not hurry us past it either. He sets the birth of Jesus not against candlelight and lullabies, but against the grinding machinery of the misuse of power. For me, this is what makes the gospel of Jesus persistently timely and powerful. While we rightly enjoy the cozy and peaceful elements of the Christmas season, scripture reminds us that Jesus’ birth is not in anyway out of touch from the hardest realities of this world. The child we call “Prince of Peace” enters history as a fugitive, carried through the night by scared parents who know that power has turned against them. Turned against them in such a brutal way that they would rather risk the possibility of bandits on their journey and the uncertainty of a foreign land.

Matthew 2:13–23 names the terror plainly. Herod is called a king but his kingship is built on fear. As I have written here before, Herod is a client king whose power is deeply fragile and contingent on Roman approval, which he is always trying to impress and secure. So, predictably, when he hears of a possible rival to his throne from the Magi, he responds not with curiosity or humility, but with fear and ruthlessness. The Greek text says he was “enraged exceedingly.” This is not a momentary lapse. It is the predictable rage of threatened power. And Rome, the empire behind him, does not intervene. It never does when its interests are secure.

I am always struck by the illogical nature of Herod’s response here. His reaction doesn’t even make logical sense. Jesus is a newborn. Infants pose no immediate threat. A newborn cannot organize followers, command loyalty, raise an army, or challenge a throne. From a rational standpoint, Herod’s massacre makes no sense. Killing little ones does not secure a kingdom, it reveals one already collapsing. Such is the absurdly illogical nature of those who worship nothing but their own power.

Were They Refugees?

Joseph is warned in a dream, as Josephs often are in Scripture. “Get up,” the angel says, using the same Greek verb Matthew will later use for resurrection. Life must rise and flee death. The holy family’s flight into Egypt must be named carefully here. Egypt, too, was under Rome’s shadow. Empires overlapped in the ancient world, borders were porous, power uneven. To say “they were all under Roman rule anyway” misses the lived reality. They crossed a boundary into another land, another jurisdiction, another social world, seeking safety from targeted political violence. That is what refugees do. Not all displacement is identical and careless modern parallels, like comparing ancient empires to modern global powers can flatten history. But refusing to see them as refugees at all is a greater distortion. Matthew wants us to see that God’s Son knows exile from the inside.

Why Not Save All The Children?

Jesus and his family are saved while so many others suffer and die. This tension should cut deeply, because it leaves us staring into the abyss of theodicy.

Why just this child and not all the others?
Why rescue one and not all?
Why warn Joseph but not silence Herod?
Why does God act here and not there?

Matthew does not answer these important yet difficult questions. In fact, he seems to refuse to tidy them up. Instead, he places Jeremiah’s ancient lament on the lips of history. Interestingly, Rachel had two sons and died before they grew up, so she never actually wept over her own children. Rather, we are to see the Rachel referred to in Jeremiah 40:1 who is weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, as a metaphorical matriarch who is inconsolable over the lost and deported children of Israel by Babylon. It is lament of protest. In Jeremiah, Rachel weeps as empire drags her children into exile. In Matthew, she weeps again as empire murders them in their beds. The same powers, different century. The same tears shed over the same senseless absurdity of valuing power and wealth over human beings.

Rachel’s tears are the tears of God.

And that may be the most honest theology we are given here I think. The gospel does not deny the horror. It records it. In doing so, Matthew preserves the memory of the victims when the powerful would rather forget them. This is Scripture as witness. Scripture as resistance.

Jesus is saved. The spared child grows into a man who will not outrun violence forever though. Rome will catch up to him. A cross will be used against him yet God will conquer death through him by the resurrection. God does not prevent evil by force, God enters it, absorbs it, exposes it, judges it, and extinguishes it of the power it desperately tries to cling to.

The Long View

This is where Matthew’s long view matters. Herod dies comfortably, never having to answer for his atrocities. History offers no reckoning. But Matthew will not allow that to be the final word. At the end of the gospel, Jesus stands as judge in Matthew 25, and the criterion is not belief, power, or success, but treatment of the least.

The hungry.
The foreigner.
The naked.
The imprisoned.

Those who the text calls “the least of these,” which certainly include those innocent children.

Herod’s atrocity does not vanish into time. It waits. And when judgment comes, it is rendered not by Rome, but by the refugee child who grew up to say, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.”

This story is painfully timely. The least still suffer first when power is afraid. Children still bear the cost of adult ambition. Violence is still justified as necessary. And God is accused of absence.

Yet the gospel insists that God is not absent. God is present in the fleeing, the grieving, the buried, and the judged. We are left with two stark tensions from Matthew’s gospel as a whole. God’s justice is not rushed, but it is real. And God’s mercy remains and is scandalously wide, daring even the Herods of every age to repent, to lay down their fear, and to stop measuring their lives by control. Oh that they would listen.

The radical hope of the gospel is not only that victims will be vindicated, but that oppressors might yet be transformed and oppression would cease. That power might kneel. That kings might learn compassion. That the least among us would be treated with the dignity and care they deserve.

Until then, Jesus calls his people to stand where he stands. With the threatened, the displaced, the small. Not because it is safe. Not because it is simple. But because that is where God is found.

Prayer

God of the grieving mothers,
God who hears Rachel’s cry,
We bring before you the questions we cannot solve
and the wounds we cannot explain.

We confess our anger when power goes unchecked,
our sorrow when children suffer,
our weariness when justice feels delayed.

Teach us to trust not in the illusion of control
but in your faithfulness that outlasts every empire.

Make us people who see the least and do not turn away,
who protect where we can,
who speak where silence would betray love,
who resist violence without becoming violent.

And we pray, even trembling as we do,
for those who wield power without compassion.
Turn their hearts.
Interrupt their rage.
Teach them mercy before judgment comes.

Until your kingdom is fully revealed,
keep us faithful,
keep us tender,
and keep us courageous.

Amen.