Christmas Lament

Once I got past my outrage and shock at the news of the murder of the four Lakewood police, a lament from the Christmas story has played over and over in my mind: (Lakewood is on the south edge of our parish.)

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.

A voice is heard . . . weeping and great mourning . . . weeping for children . . . because they are no more. Not the lines usually featured in Christmas pageants. Still they are there, integral to my favorite part of the story, the camel-riding wise men.



Two thousand years ago, an angel visited a young woman in the town of Nazareth to announce she was going to have a baby. In fact, the angel declared, her baby was the person Jewish prophecy had been talking about for 2000 years, the Messiah.

This was fantastic news was complicated by one small wrinkle: Mary, the young woman, was not married, and she wasn’t sleeping with her fiancé. How could she have a baby?


The angel explained her pregnancy would be the result of supernatural intervention by the Holy Spirit.

Wow! Fantastic!

Except for the complications. Her fiancé made plans to dump her. The people in town were scandalized by her pregnancy. She was alienated from her family. Fortunately, the angel visited her fiancé and persuaded him the baby really was a supernatural creation by God, not the result of treachery on Mary’s part.

About nine months later Joseph and Mary traveled south from Nazareth to the town of Bethlehem to register for a head tax imposed by the Romans. Every hotel room in town was taken. Joseph finally found them a place in an inn-keeper’s barn. And that’s where Mary gave birth. After cleaning him up and loving on him, she wrapped him in Jewish baby clothes and laid her baby, the promised Messiah, the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, in a feed box. Not exactly the crib you’d expect for the Savior of the World.

Later that night shepherds showed up at the barn with a story that almost made up for the disgrace of the barn delivery. The shepherds had been outside town tending their sheep. Suddenly from out of nowhere, an angel appeared in dazzling light. He said he had come to announce the birth of the Messiah. Prophecy was now fulfilled. The promised one was on the ground. The waiting was over. The key to identifying the divine baby was this: He would be wrapped in a Jewish baby blanket and lying in a feed box. Then the herald angel was joined by a massive choir singing, “Glory to God in the highest and to those on earth, peace and good will.”

It was a fantastic story. And the story didn’t stop there.

Forty days later Joseph and Mary took their baby to the temple in Jerusalem for a special service required for all first born males. As they walked into the temple they were met by an old priest who performed the required ritual, then went on to pray an astonishing prayer about their baby. Lifting his face toward heaven, he said, “Now Lord, you can let me die in peace because I have now seen the Savior you promised, the one who will be a light to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”

Wow! That must have thrilled Mary’s heart. But there was more.

Handing the baby back to Mary, the old man, Simeon, had a personal message for Mary, a caution. Yes, her baby was the promised king. And no, it would not be easy sailing, Simeon warned her. “Many people will violently oppose him,” Simeon said. “And a sword will pierce your own soul also.”

The Christmas story reminds us there is a complicated plot behind our faith. Yes, we know goodness wins. Love and mercy, justice and truth are the eternal, inexorable forces. Pain and evil are transitory, their triumphs ephemeral. Still in the Christmas story and in our own lives, the complications of plot are large and daunting. Sometimes staggeringly brutal. Even for citizens of the kingdom of God, a sword sometimes pierces our own souls also.

When this happens, it is no proof we have stepped outside God’s plot. Our wounding is no evidence we have been inattentive to our Master. According to the prophecy of Simeon, the life of greatest hero in God’s story was going to rouse fierce opposition and eventually drive a sword through his own mother’s heart. That was not the end of the story. It was, however, an inescapable part of the story. You can’t be part of God’s story and avoid all pain.

This much is clear in the Christmas story, and we haven’t yet come to those haunting words: A voice is heard in Ramah . . . weeping and great mourning for children . . . because they are no more.

The lament comes in the next chapter--in the Wise Men story.

Jesus was still an infant, probably about a year old, when his parents were startled by mysterious visitors–the three wise men. (They’re the guys you see on camels in Christmas scenes in church yards.) They were wealthy men, maybe even nobility, from ancient Persia or Babylon–modern day Iran or Iraq. They had observed the sudden appearance of a new star. Modern scholars have speculated it might have been a supernova or comet. More traditionally (and more believably) it has been interpreted as supernatural light created by angels. In any case, these Wise Men understood this celestial phenomenon to be an omen announcing the fulfillment of ancient prophecies about the birth of the Messiah. They had traveled all the way to Jerusalem to worship the new born divine king.

When they arrived in Jerusalem after months of travel, to their astonishment no one in the Holy City knew anything about the birth of this divine king. Finally, some old priests suggested they check out the town of Bethlehem a few miles south of Jerusalem. An ancient prophecy had named Bethlehem as the birth place of the Great King.

In Bethlehem, the Wise Men located the Holy Family, paid their respects and gave Joseph and Mary some very impressive, expensive gifts. Then they headed home strategically avoiding Jerusalem.

Can you imagine the sweet pleasure Joseph and Mary experienced in this visit? These impressive men had traveled a thousand, maybe two thousand miles, to pay obeisance to their son! Proud parents, they must have drifted off to sleep that night filled with pleasant dreams of a sweet future. Only to have their sleep interrupted by an angel with bad news.

The Wise Men’s traipsing about Jerusalem asking everybody if they had any information about a new king had not escaped the notice of the current king of Jerusalem--King Herod. He had interviewed the Wise Men and asked them to be sure and let him know when they found the baby so he, too, could pay his respects. Completely unsuspecting they would have returned to Jerusalem after visiting the Holy Family if an angel hadn't warned them not to.

The angel that woke Joseph said Herod was going to kill every baby in Bethlehem. They had to get out now!

Herod probably would have killed the Wise Men if they hadn't gotten beyond his reach before he realized they had left the area. He sent his soldiers to Bethlehem. Joseph and Mary escaped with Jesus. That's the good news. But what about the dozens? scores? hundreds of families that received no warning and did not escape?

The town was filled with an awful dirge, the heart-shattering wail of mothers bereft of their babies.

Matthew, says it fulfilled an ancient prophecy.

A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
inconsolable because they are no more.

According to Matthew, this monstrous holocaust had been foreseen. The Christmas story included not only the escape of Jesus and his family to Egypt, it also included the non-escape and execution of the babies of Bethlehem.

When you read the ancient prophecy, there is no mention of King Herod and the slaughter of babies in Bethlehem. The connection between these words and the mothers of Bethlehem is the universal reality of grief and the notice God takes of it. Through Matthew these eloquent words are recast to sweep the grief of mothers everywhere and make their grief part of the Christmas story.

Which brings us back to the horrific story of this week's murders.

What do we make of four policemen being killed while planning a day’s work over coffee? No warning. No provocation. They were just doing their job, working for the well being of the community when a gunman killed them. In cold blood. Is this also part of the good story God is writing? Is there any way their deaths can be included in the final writing of the triumph of God and goodness?

We know there are dark powers afoot in the world. Is this chapter of the human story utterly under their control? Is God simply absent?

If the Christmas story offers any guidance at all, it offers us hope that all events, even those which evoke inconsolable grief, will be woven back into the final version of history that traces the triumph of God and goodness.

This truth is hinted in a phrase that appears at the end of this chapter in Jesus’ life. His parents escaped from the holocaust in Bethlehem by fleeing to Egypt. After several years as refugees there, King Herod, died and they decided to go back home to Palestine. In connection with their sojourn in Egypt, hiding from the butchery of Herod, Matthew comments cites another ancient scripture, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” As with the words about the weeping of Rachel, so with these: there is nothing explicit in the text about the Messiah. Still Matthew hears in these words a spiritual truth that transcends textual precision. God takes every part of our story–even the parts that seem at first glance to have been written by the powers of darkness–and turns them into essential elements of plot in the good story he is writing.

I do not pretend to be able to sketch a rational defense of my assertion that all of our story is ultimately reclaimed by God as essential elements in his glorious master narrative. It is a non-rational, non-historical, non-scientific assertion. It is a truth best expressed best through art. It lies behind the hope and sense of meaning we voice in our fairy tales, novels, movies, paintings and songs. It is congruent with love and our hunger for justice and mercy. It is a wonderfully satisfying foundation for fully humane existence.

The central message of the Bible is “God Wins.” Goodness, love, justice, truth, affection, beauty win. Evil and pain are temporary. Still, when we say God wins, we are acknowledging there is a struggle. God wins in the face of wickedness and chaos. God triumphs over entropy. God conquers random tragedy and purposeful evil. There is a battle. There are casualties. Close and personal, bitter and apparently senseless. There is weeping and crying.

And God wins. And because we are his people, we win.

The Christmas story includes the anguished wail of the mothers of Bethlehem. It includes the sadistic cruelty of King Herod. It features the heart-crushing threat by Joseph to break off his relationship with Mary because of her irregular pregnancy. It includes arriving in a strange town to discover there is no room in the inn and barely room in the barn with the cows. It includes the sword through Mary’s heart.

In these details, the Christmas story connects with our stories. It is as though in writing the story of the triumph of goodness and love, God writes slowly enough to sweep into his narrative all of our lives, the dark secrets, the crushing injustices, the insufferable disappointments, inexplicable accidents. He omits no detail of our stories in pulling together the master narrative that gives meaning to the grand sweep of history.

Having gathered all of our stories–the stories of all of us and the entirety of each of our stories–God moves the story toward its climax. The Christmas story does not end with the sword through the heart. It does not end with Herod still on the throne. It does not end with the wail of Bethlehem’s mothers.

The Christmas story ends–if it is even proper to use the word, “end,”–with the grand triumph of God and goodness and love. Jesus is on the throne. His people, too, are on the throne. There is no need for policing or violence. The entire cosmos pulses with glad harmony. Pain and tears have become so fuzzy in memory as to scarcely exist. Humans, all of us, are swept up in a gleaming wave of glorious life and happiness. Every being sings, “Yes! Glory, Hallelujah!”