Bible Text: Matthew 2:13-23 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Christmas 2021 | What happened on Christmas makes it very clear how God wants to deal with us. He comes as a humble little child, the angels speak peace, goodwill from God to men. The angels come as an army, that’s what a host is, and a heavenly host is an army of angels, but they come not to make war with us but to preach peace between God and us. And that peace is found in the humility of that babe, who is away in a manger, with no crib for a bed. This is how God insists on saving us. He won’t do it with armies and with force, He can’t force our love and He won’t have us as slaves, so He comes to join our human race, be our Brother, bear our sins, and win us by His love.
It’s with this in mind that we have to approach our Gospel for this morning. King Herod ordered the slaughter of the little boys in Bethlehem and its region. Probably twelve or more innocent little boys murdered by a paranoid king. And meanwhile God saved only one Boy, the little Christ-child, by warning Joseph to take Him and His mother down to Egypt. Why didn’t God save them all? Why didn’t He stop Herod? Isn’t He almighty? Yes, and He could have stopped Herod, could have struck him dead before he gave the order, but what then? Another king, his son, Archelaus, would come after him. And God could force him too, and on and on, until God is doing nothing but forcing everyone to do good, and we are right back to this insoluble problem. Our problem, by the way, and not God’s. It’s God’s great grace that He makes our problem, our sin and our death and our misery His problem, and it’s this grace that solves the insoluble and shows God’s control in the face of things we don’t understand.
God did take care of Herod. Herod died a miserable death just weeks after his slaughter of the innocents. And God will give some justice on this earth, right some wrongs, bring evil people to an evil end. But He won’t right them all in our lifetime, and when we start thinking that He should we need to stop and realize what that would entail – strict justice is not what we want from God, because strict justice would entail the angels coming not with tidings of great joy which will be to all people, but with wrath and punishment on all who have broken the Creator’s commands. And that would include us. So we have to content ourselves, and learn to be truly and happily content, divinely content, with how God does answer evil, does answer sin, which is its only answer, and that is by this Christ-child, by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.
And this we learn by meditation on the holy innocents, and especially the fulfillment of that horribly haunting saying of Jeremiah, “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation. Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” This teaches us three things. First, that evil men have, throughout all human history, hurt innocent people. Second, how we should react to this evil. And third, how God deals with it.
First, evil men hurt innocent people. This is a fact of history. From Cain to the end of the world, this will be a constant. In fact that’s exactly what Matthew is teaching us when he quotes the prophecy of Rachel weeping for her children. There are three basic types of prophecy fulfilled by the life of Jesus. The first is the most obvious one, where something is prophesied in the past, and it refers directly to Jesus, and Jesus fulfils it to the letter. So Isaiah’s prophecy, “The virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.” Mary is literally the only virgin who has conceived and borne a son and called his name Immanuel. She is the virgin and Jesus the child Isaiah foretold. This is usually what the Bible means when it talks about a prophecy. You have the same thing with the prophecy of a King being born in Bethlehem to shepherd God’s people – that’s Micah’s prophecy of one thing and one thing only, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Or Malachi – And I will send you Elijah the prophet before that great and awesome day of the Lord. That’s referring to John the Baptist. And so on and so forth.
But then there are some prophecies that refer both to Jesus and something that has already happened in the past. We call these types, or pictures. We have one of these in our Gospel for today, when we hear the words of Hosea, “Out of Egypt I have called my Son,” which refers to God taking Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus 1600 years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem and bringing them safely to the promised land. But this prophecy “Out of Egypt I have called my Son,” applies much better to Jesus, who is the reason for Israel’s existence, the reason God called Israel His son, the reason He called them out of Egypt, the reason He brought them to the promised land, in order to give Jesus to the world through the line of Israel. And while Israel was God’s son by adoption and did not behave like God’s son, but rebelled, and did everything imperfectly, Jesus is God’s Son by nature, and He acted like it, and He did everything perfectly, and when God called Him out of Egypt, He brought not just some temporal peace or worldly promised land, but an eternal peace and a world without end. So the second type of prophecy.
Then finally, there are those prophecies in the Old Testament that get fulfilled by Jesus simply because what happens in Jesus’ time has also happened in the past. In the past, Rachel cried over her children, because unbelieving kings from the East came and slaughtered them in the days of Assyria and Babylon. And now history repeats itself. An evil king once again rises up and does evil things, slaughters the innocent for his own base political power. And again Rachel weeps. So this evil world goes.
So this is a lesson of history, of life, one Jesus drills constantly – in the world you will have trouble he says; the poor you will have with you always, He says. There will be no lack of sorrow in this world because of evil people. This is exactly what St. Peter preaches in his epistle today too – don’t be surprised at the fiery trial that is coming upon you. Of course evil people will do evil things to you and those you love. The question is not if but when. And the bigger question is what your response to it will be and what God’s remedy for it is. And your response cannot be to blame God – God is the one being sinned against – but to do what Rachel does.
What does Rachel do? She weeps. Hers isn’t a cold assessment of statistics, like the constant Covid counter of deaths on our TVs. No, hers is an anguished suffering of the soul, lamentation – odyrmos, a word that in Greek means something between pain and weeping. We are centuries removed from those holy innocents. We won’t be able to weep with Rachel over them. But we aren’t far away from the slaughter of innocents in our time. History does repeat itself. Over a million a year in our own country, innocent children, created in the image of God, slaughtered in the womb. (And that won’t change when the Supreme Court overturns Roe.) And the problem with our country is that she has forgotten how to weep over their slaughter. Rachel wept. And God blessed her through her weeping. But our society and our media and too many of our schools and politicians have taught women not to weep, to be proud of their abortions, to speak of slaughter as a choice, of murder as a right; they have taught fathers not to be accountable to their own flesh and blood, but to leave child-rearing up to the women, whom God never meant to do it alone; they’ve told us to follow wealth and pleasure and so hardened the hearts of many. As chilling as the sound of Rachel’s weeping is, it is at least the sound of compassion and love. To hear no sound is far worse. And to hear cheering instead and claims of righteousness and shouts of “My body, my choice,” this is diabolical.
So do not forget how to weep. Do not forget how to care. Weeping and caring entail suffering. This is what the secularists would have you avoid. It’s taken as a given that our highest goal is our own material comfort. Nonsense. Even an jock knows that without pain there’s no gain. So it is with our life as Christians. To not care, to not weep over the sin in our own life, over the evil in our world, the slaughter of the innocents, the destruction of the family, this is to be subhuman, it is to have a heart of stone. It is to become like Herod, whose only thought was for himself and so lost his conscience and his soul. Jesus wept. Jesus got angry at sin. Because Jesus cared. And it caused him to act. So with us. We care. We act. And even more important than voting for the right pro-life, pro-family candidates, more important than our words saying we believe in life created by God, more important than our vain tears that only God sees and only God rewards, more important even than money donated to save the unborn and to care for women in need, is the way we live our life, actually caring for the children among us, actually valuing them as God’s gifts, raising them with love and discipline – which is hard, I know, the discipline part: we had a hard night with a certain little girl last night and lost a lot of sleep, but she’ll be better off for the discipline and she still knows we love her and we’ll catch up on sleep later – action includes bringing our little ones to Jesus, they belong to Him and we rob them of their value unless we know this and care about it and so act on it, and bring them to Jesus at church, at Sunday school, at home especially, at school. And action includes also valuing motherhood among us, God was born of a woman on Christmas, motherhood is the greatest of vocations, and that means husbands building up their wives and sacrificing for them, and all of us making our homes Christian homes filled with God’s Word and Christ’s love.
Rachel weeps, but Jesus flees to Egypt. This is not simply to escape death at the hands of Herod, but to face down death for us. He flees to Egypt to grow up a man in Nazareth. The Father calls His Son out of Egypt not to a promised land, but to win that promised land for us. He shall be called a Nazarene – and so He was. This was the great insult against Jesus, the mockery of Him on the cross – Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, as if anyone from Nazareth could amount to anything. Jesus went from the humility of the manger, to exile in a foreign land, to the degraded state of a Nazarene in a worthless town. As Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth.” Come and see. Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Here is the God who does not come with force, but with love. Here is the God who did save those few children in Bethlehem, not for a little time on this earth, but forever, and not only them, but all children and all people, by bearing their punishment and living the perfect life in our place as our Brother, to be received by faith. This is God’s answer to evil. Not to weep in despair, not simply to punish it, but to love us so much that He removes this evil from us and puts it on Himself.
And this teaches us not to weep or suffer without hope. No, we must join Rachel in her weeping, but we must also join Jesus in His sufferings. He died for all. Even for Herod. Even for those who have callously deprived their own children of life. Even for deadbeat fathers and slimy politicians. Jesus’ answer to evil was love. And that’s the Christian response. Love doesn’t approve of evil ever. It points out the evil. But it does pray for repentance and it does forgive those who have sinned against us and it does sincerely hope that they come to find their joy in Christ, who will forgive all their sin and give them a new life and wants all to be saved.
It takes a lifetime as a Christian to get used to this reality, but it is a reality. Jesus conquered all evil by His humility, by His love, by His suffering. And this is the greatest force in all the world. It is, as St. Paul says, the power of God for salvation to all who believe. And it is by our humility under God’s Word and our love of people and our willingness to suffer for the sake of Christ that we too will conquer evil. We have no reason to weep in despair. St. Paul says it, ‘We do not mourn as those who have no hope.’ No, it is the task of the Christian not to ignore evil, but to answer it with that which has overcome it forever. And our Lord Jesus has. He is the only answer to it. He has answered it in your life, has forgiven you your sins, has paid for them with His precious blood, has lived an innocent life for you, calls you to love as He loved and to look forward to the day when free from sinning you will look Him in the face in righteousness and holiness forever. And He has answered evil for all the world. The little babe of Bethlehem, who developed fingerprints and beating heart and human eyes and face in the womb of the blessed virgin, the God-man who visited His creation with love, who beckons all to Him for forgiveness and life with God, He is the answer. And so we cling to Him, confess Him, love Him, bless Him, and praise Him forever, who ends our weeping and shines through the darkness to an everlasting day. Amen.