ONLY: GOD WHO GRIEVES
This sermon draws on Matthew 2:13-18, Zephaniah 3:1-18, and Psalm 2:1-11
He was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.
There is a common phrase across commentaries, articles, study bible blurbs attached to this dreadful passage when the writer reached the section. There is a common phrase when we bury ourselves in the moment that Herod sends soldiers to terrify families and slaughter children. The writer states some variant of how small the village was, how only a few boys might have died.
Only.
Only.
A word attached to the tiny town of Bethlehem everywhere and anywhere we look. Variants of only that I do not think were spoken in malice, but statements that nonetheless try to communicate that in the grand scheme of the massacres in history, this one was rather small and inconsequential. Only Bethlehem. Only a few. Commentators, teachers, preachers, scholars of these holy Scriptures help their, our, listeners and readers take a deep dive into Scripture. Not just the mechanics of the language, the syntax, the cultural and canonical context, but to guide us in immersing ourselves in the world of Scripture in such a way that the world in Scripture envelopes our world so that the two are inseparable until it is almost as though our very bodies are present in these pages. Our knowledge of Scripture must be connected to our embodiment of Scripture. Knowledge without embodiment brings us to a book of facts, theories, doctrines, and theologies untethered to the real and present persons who invite the real and present Christ to dwell with us. Then again, there is beauty in learning and knowing how these Scriptures guide and teach us. They are a means by which we know the Christ that embodies us.
Yet, these commentators and writers prevent us from seeing the real and present persons in these pages. They halt our immersion when we get to the sentence “he killed all the children.” I do not think it is a malicious rejection, but a resistance to an immersion that is painful. That is what only means. Only is uncomfortable with pain. It tries to make anger not so deserved, trauma not so debilitating, grief not so sad, injustice not so wrong, tired not so exhausting, tears not so overwhelming. If it is only a little or a few then maybe it isn’t so bad.
How does it feel to you, I wonder, when you are bereft, broken, shocked, crumbled to hear that someone, somewhere, has it worse? Is that helpful? Does it make you feel better?
Only is what you say when you are not comfortable with someone else’s pain. Only is what you say when you are resisting the depth of your own pain. Today, Bethlehem sons were murdered in front of their parents. Let these parents grieve. Let us grieve with them. Let them be in pain and let us go there with them. We will not tell these precious, weeping, wounded people that in the history of massacres and dead little children, they lost only a few.
Today, we are grieving, you are grieving. Our world is in chaos of fear, loneliness, sickness, and death. We will not say that most have survived. We will not say that only some are dying. We will not tell the poor, the hourly employees, the nonessentials or the essentials, broke entrepreneurs, the lonely, the isolated that at least they have their health, their life. No person is only anything. They, you, are each everything. If we can see and enter the pain of Matthew 2, then I hope that we can learn to see our own and one another’s. Perhaps if we can have compassion for the depth of their pain, we can have compassion for ours. We can give each other the grace to be in pain without saying that someone, somewhere, has it worse.
Herod behaved with cunning and prepared to eliminate the threat to his rule one way or the other. The wise men were manipulated tools for Herod’s plan. They told him about the star movement, what it predicted, and the approximate time frame. Herod believes the future usurper is a boy around two years old or under. He does what powerful men often do – he wrecks lives of people whose names he will never know with faces he will never see.
It is the most powerless feeling a person can experience, the inability to protect our loved ones from everything. A split second, a sinking feeling, a flash of unending terror separates the peaceful, ordinary moment from the moment that changes everything. We are a world living in fear that this moment is for us all. We are world living in the grief that it already has. Some grief will always ache. There is a scar ripped across the lifetimes of an entire town now traumatized and broken. They have been violated, and not one of them can do a thing about it. They were not heard, they were not seen – not by Herod, his government, or his soldiers.
On the worst night of these parents’ lives, Mary and Joseph were rushing for the Egyptian border 90 miles west. It is outside of Herod’s jurisdiction. They will be safe from his threat there. There is a Jewish population there (1). They may find some friendly faces and helping hands. Although I doubt they could breathe a word of who Jesus was, and all the great and terrible things that had happened since Gabriel first spoke to Mary.
A good commentator will tell you that Matthew structures every section of his Gospel around an Old Testament passage up until Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount (2). He does this because he wants us to know that Jesus is the fulfillment of all prophetic anticipation and hindsight. He is the true and faithful Son of God. He is the greater Adam, the descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and David, the greater Moses. He goes down to Egypt, like the patriarch Jacob and his descendants. He survives attempted genocide by the courage of his mother, just like the shepherd Moses (3). He is called out of Egypt like ancient Israel just like the prophet Hosea anticipated (4).
Matthew teaches us about Jesus’ identity as Son and King, but just as importantly, perhaps even more importantly, Matthew shows us that Jesus identifies with broken and grieving people. We call Jeremiah “the weeping prophet” because he prophesied during a period of massive loss. We often preach out of our scars, and Jeremiah preached from his own broken heart into broken hearts. When children were taken from their screaming mothers, the prophet Jeremiah used the figure of Rachel to embody the inconsolable mothers who would never see their children again. “A voice was heard… wailing and loud lamentation. She refuses to be consoled because they are no more.” Jeremiah wrote a hard word of a grief that will not abate, and now Matthew writes the same.
Matthew uses Jeremiah’s words to describe the suffering of a wound that will always ache, but do not let these words teach you that God wanted or intended this to happen. Pain is the result of the death that runs rampant in our world, growing our weeds, making us sick, breaking our bodies, turning us against one another. God did not want this to happen, God did not intend this to happen, God is not and never will be pleased that they, us, or you ever ache and weep. Because God is gracious, he will carry and help you. Perhaps one day we will learn, as Joseph once did, that because of his great grace and love, God can take evil and still show us, you, that there is good (5). But God’s intention is not evil or cruel. God intended an everlasting sanctuary in which he would live and walk with us face to face. God intended harmony and beauty and peace. Because God is gracious and good, he will not release us from that purpose even though we defiled it with evil and are continuously defiled and wounded by that evil.
We will not reject or minimize pain with only because God did not. God sees death and all its domination in the fullness that it is. God spoke only a single time – “For God so loved the world he sent his only begotten Son” (6). The only begotten Son, the true Son, who is able to rescue us when we cannot rescue ourselves. He divested himself of power and authority to identify with inconsolable pain. He is the good that emerges from evil, and, having defeated evil, will reign forever the true Son of God.
We must sit with pain because it is real, we cannot help or heal if we deny its potency. We see true evil because if we deny its depths then we deny the depth of grace and sacrifice required to overcome it.
Christ who called let the children come to me, holds the overlooked and the vulnerable close for he molded our bodies and made eternal our souls. Christ who calls come to me all who are weary and burdened, I will give you rest, comforts all who will be held by him. It is not always fitting to speak this into the inconsolable pain before we are ready to hear it. It is not helpful to leap to comfort before we sit with pain. We cannot undo evil right now as though it never were. True justice is returning exactly what was lost – but we cannot wake our dead, we cannot heal with a word, we cannot absolve all wounds, we cannot undo sickness that ravages. Even so, one day, all will be made right. Those who will hear the call will be lifted up in bodies that have not been harmed or sick or broken. The garden will grow, and we will meet again with God.
For today, right now, there is no such thing as only pain just as there is no such thing as only love.
Always and forever, God’s love is deeper than our pain is great.
(1) Craig Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary, (Downer’s Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1993), 50.
(2) Matthew 1:1
(3) Exodus 1:15-20
(4) Hosea 11:1
(5) Genesis 50:20
(6) John 3:16
