The Cry in Ramah

Not every part of the Christmas story is gentle. There is a part we often skip, because it hurts. Today we will not skip it. We will walk into it slowly, and we will not walk out alone.

In his palace in Jerusalem, King Herod has been waiting. The travellers from the east promised to come back and tell him where the newborn king could be found. Days pass. They do not come. Herod understands that they have gone home another way. And Herod, who had spent his whole reign guarding his throne, does what frightened tyrants do. Bethlehem lies only a few miles south. It is a small town of shepherds and farmers. Somewhere in it, Joseph, Mary and the child are already gone, on the road to Egypt. Herod does not know that.

Matthew tells it plainly. Herod was exceedingly angry. He sent soldiers to Bethlehem and the countryside around it, and ordered that every boy two years old and under be killed. He chose that age from what the wise men had told him about the time the star appeared. We will not describe what happened. Matthew does not either. He tells us only the order, and then the sound that followed. Because when soldiers leave a small town like that, what is left behind is a sound.

It is the sound of mothers crying. Matthew hears in it something very old. Six hundred years before, the prophet Jeremiah had written: “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; she wouldn't be comforted, because they are no more.” Rachel was one of Israel's first mothers, Jacob's beloved wife, who died giving birth near Bethlehem and was buried by the road. Jeremiah pictured her weeping over her children, the people of Israel, as they were marched away into exile. Now, Matthew says, Rachel is weeping again.

Notice what Matthew does not say. He does not say the grief was small, or that it was good, or that it all made sense. He lets the mothers refuse to be comforted. The Bible does not hurry past pain. And yet the words Matthew quotes come from a chapter in Jeremiah full of hope. Straight after Rachel's weeping, God says: refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; there is hope for your future. The child Herod was hunting is alive. He will grow up. One day he will take the world's sorrow onto himself.

This event is told only in Matthew. But it fits what we know of Herod from the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote near the end of the first century. Josephus records that Herod had his own wife Mariamne and three of his own sons put to death because he suspected them of plotting against him. A king who would do that to his own family would not hesitate over a village.

The Cry in Ramah. You'll find it in Matthew chapter two, verses sixteen to eighteen. It reminds us that Jesus was born into a real world, with real cruelty and real grief, and that God does not look away from it. So here is a question to carry with you. Where do you see people weeping today, and how might you sit with them in their sorrow?