Like many families, in our home we want everything to be beautiful and joyful and satisfying on Christmas. We want everyone to feel comfortable and loved and content. And we do a pretty good job of it, it seems. Yet the real truth of Christmas has the power to come through any shiny veneer we might put on it.
In Matthew’s gospel, we hear about the angel who came to Joseph and told him not to be afraid; the one who is responsible for Joseph being there when Mary’s child was born. And we hear about the Magi who followed the star all the way to Bethlehem where they knelt before the child and offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Both are beautiful pieces of the story we cherish and retell each year.
But no sooner have the Magi left when we hear that an angel has once again visited Joseph in a dream and warned him to escape from the wrath of King Herod. The infant’s life is in danger. So Joseph flees with the mother and child, all of them becoming refugees in Egypt.
It is not hard to understand the danger they were in. Herod had been alerted that there was a newborn boy who was destined to be king. And clearly Herod is the kind of ruler who suffers no challenge to his authority. He is brutal, ruthless.
Herod is so enraged when he learns he was outfoxed by the Magi, he orders a massacre of the infants throughout Bethlehem. An astonishing display of evil. Mary’s child is safe, thankfully. Yet there is communal grief at the loss of so much life. A slaughter of the innocents.
As Matthew tells this story I am sure that he is thinking how everything about Jesus the Messiah is rooted in Israel’s history, and he is surely thinking about the long memory of loss for the people of Israel. Specifically, he is thinking about the exile in Babylon that Israel endured hundreds of years before Jesus was born. It was the end of the kingdom of Israel, as it had been for centuries. The Babylonian army conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, and the people were taken into exile at the mercy of their captors.
When the people were deported they passed through Ramah, the place where Rachel had been buried, centuries before. Rachel was the beloved wife of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham. Jacob loved Rachel at first sight, and so he asked her father, Laban, for her hand in marriage.
Jacob was sly, but Laban even more so. Laban negotiated seven years of labor from Jacob for the reward of Rachel, which Jacob happily agreed to. But on the day of his wedding, he was tricked by Laban into marrying Rachel’s older sister, Leah, whom Jacob did not love. Jacob then worked another seven years to earn Rachel as his second wife. Jacob the Trickster met his match in Laban.
Even though Leah was the first wife of Jacob, she was always in Rachel’s shadow, because she was not the desired one. This must have been so very hard for Leah, but Rachel suffered deeply as well. Rachel watched her sister, Leah, give birth to one son after another, while she, Rachel, remained childless.
Finally, after many years, Rachel was blessed with a son – Joseph, who became Jacob’s favorite child. And then she conceived again and bore a second son. But Rachel did not live to enjoy this blessing. She died in childbirth.
As she was dying, the story goes, Rachel named her newborn son, Ben-Oni, which means “Child of my sorrow.”
This all happened near Ramah, while the family of Jacob was journeying toward Bethlehem. They buried Rachel in the place where she died, then journeyed on. The legend holds that Rachel could always be heard weeping for her children, by those who passed by her grave. And the memory of Rachel weeping stays with Israel through the centuries, through the suffering – from exile to oppression, from pogroms to holocaust – Rachel weeps for all the children.
The story Matthew tells does not let us forget the world. All our efforts to make it sparkle and shine and ring with joy do not erase or cover over the truth. We live in a world where, as one preacher said, “children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants.”
Matthew does not let us forget the harsh realities of this world. Nor does he try to pretend that the birth of Christ eradicated them. Even while it mars the holiday gloss, this is not an unwelcome message. Matthew’s honesty is an affirmation of what we know in the deepest corners of our heart. Every one of us knows suffering. Every one of us has experienced having our hearts broken. Every one of us has, at one time or another, felt the acute pain of knowing the inordinate number of ways humans cause harm to one another. We haven’t yet figured out how to escape such realities – although perhaps we should not want to escape.
One of the Christmas traditions in our home is to read Mary’s Magnificat together. After we have opened all the gifts and when we sit down together at a table laden with an abundance of good food. Before we begin to eat, I read Mary’s song from Luke, and every year I am reading it through my tears.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant…
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.”
We hear these words Mary sings as an already accomplished but not yet seen truth. Mary proclaims the power of God to restore shalom to the world, and her song affirms her faith that this divine power is on the move, in our midst.
I feel that it brings some sense of balance to our celebration, something we must acknowledge. Because if the world had been rid of all evil, if everything were roses and sunshine and happiness all the time, we would have no need for a Savior. And, we know, it is not like that. The world we live in shows us evidence every single day of how much we need this incarnate God.
Because everything we see in Jesus the Christ shows us that it is actually possible to embody peace. To restore shalom to the world God created and called good. Jesus shows us the way of peace.
And so we weep with Rachel for all the suffering and loss in the world. We lament that innocents still are made to suffer at the hands of tyrants, that hungry children still wait to be filled with good things. Troubles did not disappear because Jesus was born. The birth of Christ did not change this in one fell swoop. But the incarnation of God has the power to change the hearts of every one of us. As Jesus embodied God, we may follow him and become the embodiment of peace.
May we know this at Christmas, and always.
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