Sunday, December 28, 2025, The Holy Innocents
“Love Even When It Hurts”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 54; Jeremiah 31:15-17; 1 John 2:1-12; Matthew 2:13-23
Service Order: Service of Prayer and Preaching, p. 260
Hymns: “The King Shall Come” #348
“Where Shepherds Lately Knelt” #369
“The Star Proclaims the King is Here” #399
“From Heaven Above to Earth I Come” #358, v. 13, 14, and 15
“Lord, Bid Your Servant Go In Peace” #937
“God Loves Me Dearly” #392
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Christmas has passed. In the Christmas story, all the beauty, all the tenderness, all the holy silence -- the beauty of the stable and the manger, the angels and the shepherds, the holy Child, all wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger --
soon turns into an account of hatred and evil and a terrible crime. What a shame!
Jesus was born into a world full of murderous, unholy, unrighteous sin. That is, in fact, why He came here. King Herod murdered innocent children out of his own self-interest, and out of a selfish desire to preserve himself; and the world is no different today. The “nobody matters but me” attitude lives on. I was told once, years ago, when I was young, “Son, get whatever you can from whoever you can get it from.” (What awful advice that was!) But many would still agree that “looking out for number one” is just the way of the world, and the only way to get by.
We Christians are called to love God, love one another, and love our neighbors -- for which most of the world thinks we’re out of our minds. The thing about love is that it comes with a price. The ones we reach out to love aren’t always going to love us back; “unrequited love” is what we call that -- and God knows how it feels. Loving someone is always a risk. “Love hurts,” the old love songs say. If you put yourself out to love someone, you might just get your heart broken.
God reaches out in love to all His children, knowing some of us will love Him, while so many others will be ornery, cranky, mean, and cruel, and turn Him away. Jesus was born into a world where people can be downright ugly to each other. That innocent little baby in Bethlehem’s manger, whose birth we celebrated on Christmas Eve, grew up to be nailed to a cross. Jesus paid a high price for loving us; what price can we expect to pay for loving Him?
The contrast in the Christmas story, the division that’s easy to see, is between goodness and evil, righteousness and selfishness, darkness and light. The wise men, the Magi, came to Jerusalem looking for light, and they found Him -- the Savior, the Messiah, the Light of the World -- living with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. It may have been anywhere from six months to two years from the time they saw the star in the east, and set out on their journey to find Him, until the day they at last laid their eyes on Him.
But they did find Him, and they brought Him their gifts, and they worshiped Him. And they left again with His faith-giving light inside them, and with the greatest Good News in the history of the world to tell when they got back home. The Magi, along with the shepherds, were the good guys in the Christmas story. That’s the happy part of the tale, the joy and light and peace on earth part, the part we all love so much and love to hear about.
And then there’s King Herod, who’s part of the Christmas story, too, even though we may wish he wasn’t. Herod is a shining example (or maybe not so shining) of what can happen if someone with a selfish, sinful soul manages to get a little power in this world.
Power is and always has been a path to temptation and a corrupting thing. Herod was an arrogant man, to the point where he was sure he could get away with anything, and no one would ever call him to account. Herod only cared about Herod. He cared little for the people he ruled over; what were they to him, anyway? And why should he care about a few peasant children, or if a few of them had to die for him to get what he wanted? “Collateral damage,” we’d call that today.
Herod had only heard, from the wise men and from the Hebrew scholars, that there just might have been born in Bethlehem a child, who might one day claim to be a king. And that, in his jealous and selfish and paranoid little heart, was enough to set him off. (Clearly a case of “my will be done” over “Thy will be done,” one that still happens all over the world). When Herod realized that the Magi had gone home by another route, and that they weren’t coming back to tell him where little usurper was, he was furious; the Greek says he was “intensely enraged.” Among his other character flaws, Herod seems to have had an anger management problem.
The Magi had told him when they’d first seen the star in the east. Maybe a full two years had passed, or maybe it was only sixth months or a year, but Herod was extending the time frame, just to make sure. But what a monstrous thing to do -- a terrible abuse of power, done just because he could. “Kill all the boys in Bethlehem two years and under,” he said. And not just in Bethlehem, but “in the vicinity of Bethlehem” too, depending on how far Herod decided to extent his reach. Again, it seems like he was covering all his bases, just to make sure.
Maybe I’m reading too much into the story, as far as the mind of King Herod goes, speculating a bit about his motives, his personality, or his state of mind -- but look what he did! This was certainly the work of Satan, who was working through Herod to “try to destroy the child as soon as he was born.” But who in the world would kill innocent baby boys for their own selfish ends? What kind of twisted soul would do such a thing? (There have been over 900,000 babies aborted in our country this year, by the way, an average of 1600 per day, mostly for the sake of convenience; make of that what you will).
Now, to the contrasts again in the Christmas story: While the darkness and unholy plotting and evil things were going on, God was still working, still keeping the light alive. Thanks be to Him forever, that’s just what He does. Father Joseph had another dream, another angel sent to speak into his soul while he was sleeping. (It might have been Gabriel again; the Gospel doesn’t say). But Joseph has already shown in this story that if a messenger from God should come to speak to you, it’s best to listen and obey.
The angel warned Joseph to take the child and His mother -- right now, Joseph! -- and escape to Egypt, because Herod’s soldiers would begin their search and destroy mission at first light, so there was no time to lose. Joseph did as he was told and saved his family; and he and his family stayed there in Egypt, until the angel came to him again to tell him Herod was dead, and it was safe to go home.
There are several different points in this Gospel account, three prophecies, that we need to be aware of, that show us that Satan was never in control of things, and Herod wasn’t nearly so big and powerful as he liked to think, and God wasn’t ever going to put a Savior in the world and let His light go out before He’d done what He came here to do. The point is that the evil, the sin, and the darkness can’t win, no matter how bad things seem to be getting when we look around our world.
The first prophecy in our Gospel is from Hosea chapter 11: “Out of Egypt I have called my Son.” God knew all along what Herod was going to, and He planned all along for His Son to have a safe place to stay. And He certainly planned all along to bring Him back to Israel, and to back to Jerusalem, to die on a cross for the sake of our sin. Nothing was going to stand in the way of that happening. There was a Christmas, so there could be a cross, so there could be an Easter morning, so you and I could live. Planned from the beginning, before the world was ever made.
The second prophecy is from Jeremiah 11, which is all about the price of love, and what is cost God to love us: "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." God knew all along what Herod would do, and how far the devil would go to keep Jesus from the cross. Prophet Jeremiah was shown a place ahead in time, a town called Ramah. Ramah and Bethlehem were about 11 miles apart. That gives us some idea about the scope of “in the vicinity of Bethlehem” in Herod’s awful order. From Ramah, all the way to Bethlehem, Jeremiah could hear the mothers of Israel, the “Rachels”, wailing for their murdered children.
I do not know why God allowed Herod to go ahead with his wicked plan, or why God still allows evils thing to happen in this world, for that matter. I do know that love is hard, and it sometimes come at a high price. And I do know that God has promised to restore what we’ve lost at the end of all things. The “why” of things is beyond me; I guess we’ll have to ask when we get there.
And the third prophecy in our Gospel says, “He went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: ‘He will be called a Nazarene.’” Curiously enough, none of the Old Testament prophets mention our Savior being called a Nazarene. This is one of those passages biblical scholars and theology geeks like to sit around and argue about. The best explanation I’ve seen is that the name Nazareth is derived from the Hebrew word netzar, which means “branch.” So, “He will be one who comes from the little town called “Branch.” That ties in nicely with other prophecies that call Jesus, “the Righteous Branch,” the One who will spring up from the holy Root of God. “I will raise up from David a Righteous Branch,” the Scripture says. Point again being, God knew from the beginning not only where the Holy Child would be born, but where He would live and grow into a man. There are no accidents here.
We can take some comfort in knowing that King Herod, sooner rather than later, died. Archelaus, the son who succeeded him, from everything I’ve read about him was a chip off the old block, just as evil as his father. Bad people do have a habit of rising up to power in this world (maybe because good people don’t really want the awful job). But one thing all those tyrants and despots and awful kings do have in common is that sooner or later they die. Evil doesn’t last, darkness doesn’t win, and God’s promises go on. And all of us who believe and keep the faith will be standing in the light when everything is said and done. And again, Joseph was warned in a dream, and brought his family home to live in Nazareth in Galilee, and the story of our salvation played out just exactly as God intended it to.
“There is hope for your future,” God says in Jeremiah. Elsewhere in Jeremiah, He says, “I know the plans I have for you, plans to help you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” And good St. John says in our reading from 1 John 2: “The darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.” And St. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5 that you and I aren’t “children of the darkness, but children of the light.”
With the old year passing, and another new one on the way, may we all make it our aim and our purpose and our everlasting joy to be children of light in this place. Someone has to shine the light of hope into all that darkness; Dear Lord, may that someone be us. In Jesus’ name; Amen.