What About the Mothers of Bethlehem's Massacred Babies?

1824 (oil on canvas), Cogniet, Leon (1794-1880)
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France /
Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

I still remember when I first saw The Ten Commandments in grade school. The brief clip of the Egyptian massacre of infant and toddler Hebrews (that Moses escaped) brought my young soul to tears. Ever since, I've only seen portrayals of that story, and the Christmas story when King Herod orders a similar massacre, where such elements are much more downplayed, if not excluded. I've sometimes wondered how to help teach my kids (and anyone) about the tragic and unjust part of the Christmas story, and how it does have a happy ending. I came across this really powerful article: 

A disastrous event that took place in Bethlehem related to Jesus’ birth that is also part of the picture of Christmas. Herod ordered the slaughter of all the boys two years old and under. Yet we tend to allow sleigh bells, evergreens, and shopping trips to push it out of view. It is nevertheless, in all its brutality, what Christmas is about: a Savior’s “invasion” (to borrow from C. S. Lewis) and confrontation with the forces of evil.

Matthew’s narrative of Christ’s birth juxtaposes noble and wretched characters in stark contrasts: stars and swords; majestic kingly visitations and twisted kingly agitation; Mary rejoicing, Rachel weeping; children who die and the child who gets away. How do we reconcile this glorious birth with the bloody death of those boys?

Jesus had to escape Herod’s decree in order to face the day when the angels would not intervene and when Joseph would not whisk him to Egypt; the day when Mary, not Rachel, would weep and could not be comforted.

When Jesus delivered us from evil, he went, like the mothers I read about, to crime-ridden sewers to bring back his loved ones from slavery. He went, Wright writes, “solo and unaided into the whirlpool [of evil], so that it may exhaust its force on him and let the rest of the world go free.” Jesus, in the end, was the one “who was not delivered from evil.”

In the verse that follows Rachel’s lament, Jeremiah writes: “Do not weep any longer, for I will reward you. Your children will come back to you.” God’s portrait of grief—the weeping mother—is overruled by the picture of children returning.

HT: Wendy Murray