BreakPoint WorldView » January 2009

A few years ago, I celebrated Epiphany with my dad, my brother, his wife, and my four little tumbling nieces and nephews. My brother read the story of the Magi. Meanwhile the royal figurines made their epic journey across the living room, guided by the hands of my nieces and nephews who brought them to a halt at the feet of a sweet little porcelain Jesus in his sweet little porcelain manger.

It’s easy to like this portion of the story with its mysterious star and gift-bearing kings. The story of Epiphany is a story of hope—of light to the Gentiles, of fulfillment of prophecy in Isaiah where God says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth" (49:6). How could you not like a God who widens the curtains of His tent and remembers us, the outsiders?

But it is the next part that I can’t bear to hear. It is the next part that reminds me that the Christmas story is not a Hallmark Special movie. Perhaps that is why the Christmas story usually grinds to a halt here. If somehow we have been able to domesticate and sterilize the dung of a stable, the greed of the oppressive high-taxing regime, and the scandal of an unwed mother, we can’t find anything tame or saccharine in what unfolds after the Magi depart.

Herod, whom the historian Josephus tells us murdered two of his own sons and his wife Mariamne because they threatened his power, turns his sadistic eye to the male infants of Bethlehem. Peter Paul Rubens, that famous baroque painter, did the job of imagining what I’d rather shut out: a soldier dashing a child against a Roman column, another lancing a mother who tries to hide her babe, a third jerking back a woman in her flight as he grasps a fist of her hair, an old woman biting a soldier’s hand, another clawing, and one with bowed head weeping over the tender body that she had nursed at her breast. It is a portrait which bears far too much of the reality of the human condition: inexpressible horror, raw violence, desperate love, and inconsolable grief.

Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents

And if the images were not enough, we hear a single voice rise above the cacophony of this hellish symphony. This is agony’s solo. It is the voice of a mother weeping, mourning, and refusing to be comforted. Matthew tells us it is the voice of Rachel heard in Ramah.

Those who heard Matthew’s Gospel would have known that this is the vicinity where Rachel in the throws of childbirth died as a still-on-the-way pilgrim to a promised land. They would also have recalled Ramah as the staging area where, generations before during the time of exile, Israel’s children were ripped from their mother’s arms and carried off by the Babylonians during the deportation of the Jews. That evocative solo would have called forth the agony, the despair, and the tortured why, of a people waiting in great darkness, of a people not yet home, of a people longing for rescue.

This is the backdrop of our Messiah. This is the reason he came: to deliver us from evil. And yet in the seeming darkest of hours, as Rachel’s voice wails the ancient solo of all our hearts, our hero is whisked away. He is not there.

How often this is how we experience Jesus. We cannot find the deliverer when we think the time is ripe for deliverance. Where is he? It is a question that pierces our hearts

Were the story to end here, we would indeed be a people to be pitied most of all for our misplaced hopes. But the story does not end here. A hero is preserved by the cloak of night. He grows in wisdom and in stature, in favor with God and with men. Our destiny is wrapped up in Mary’s arms and scurried off to Egypt. Our destiny is wrapped up in this spared child—this spared child whom God will not spare when he grows to be a man.

And yet still there is aching in Ramah, in your heart, in mine because the story is not over yet. There is this aching interim before our Messiah’s coronation day, where our hero once again seems far away from our pain. Where is he in our wailing? I won’t venture to say I fully understand, but I do know our hero will return. I know in his time he will wipe the tears from Rachel’s eyes, from yours, and from mine.

Catherine Larson is a senior writer and editor for BreakPoint. She is the editor of BreakPoint WorldView and The Point radio. Her first book, As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda will hit shelves in February.