Matthew 2:13-18

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.”

Matthew 2:13-18

As we enter the Advent Season, I wanted to reflect briefly on this passage from the Advent story. In this time of year, it is common for us to focus on the happiness and joy of Christ’s coming. I certainly do not want to diminish the joy we have over Christ’s coming, but I want to provide some perspective to further increase our joy from His arrival on Earth.

While it was a joyous occasion when Christ humbled Himself and joined our human condition on this earth, it was not without great pain and difficulty. When we read the above passage, we see God’s hand in protecting Christ from the earliest days. It is mind boggling to think about the fact that just as we were once helpless babies in need of complete care from our parents, so too was Jesus! He embraced our humanity and our lack even in the form of being a young child, unable to provide for or protect Himself.

Beyond that though, we see that the powers at be were fearful of the threat Jesus’ kingship might mean for them. Herod felt threatened that there would be someone else under his dominion that would be called a king. That fear and need to protect his own power lead to the slaughtering of countless infants, a massacre unthinkable by most of us. 

So why do I bring this up? Well, why did Matthew decide to record this? This isn’t the happy cheerful Christmas story we all look forward to hearing come Christmas Eve, is it?

I would argue that we cannot have the joy from Christ’s coming without the grief of the slaughtered children. While we rejoice over Christ’s coming, and the miracle that His birth was, that joy is quite shallow when we remove it from its context. The reality was that Christ was born into a world of suffering, pain, and death. And this suffering was not removed when He joined us, in fact, He came to join our suffering. He came to experience the human condition in all its fullness. And it is from that suffering that we can find true joy amidst the broken world we find ourselves in. 

While we cannot fully understand why God allowed such an atrocity to happen, just like we cannot fully understand why anything bad happens, we can recognize that God does not watch these tragedies happen unmoved. No, He joins us in the midst of our pain and carries it with us. He was so moved by the pain we feel that He took on our flesh and all the pain associated with it, just so that we might be united with Him and find true healing of our pain. 

Elie Wiesel shares of an experience in a concentration camp during the Holocaust of seeing a boy being hung. As he and many others are forced to sit and watch, he writes: “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’”¹

This  story reminds me of the hope we share during the Advent season. While the world we live in today is marred by brokenness and pain, we are not without hope. While we live among suffering, we are not without hope. Not a shallow, wishy-washy kind of hope, but a hope that understands the depths of our pain and suffering, yet, continues to give hope of a future where all if made right.

As we approach Advent this year, may we be filled with the hope of restoration in Christ. A hope that knows the depths of our pain, the depths of our sinfulness, and still promises a day where all will be made right and we can rejoice in God’s presence.

¹Elie Wiesel, Night (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006), 65.