Rachel Weeping, God Doesn't Look Away

Feast of the Holy Innocents

Jeremiah 31:15–17 | Psalm 124 | Revelation 21:1–7 | Matthew 2:13–18

Christmas is not finished—but today the church makes us pause.
The Feast of the Holy Innocents interrupts the warmth of the season with grief. It will not let us keep the Christ child safely in the manger. The child is still in danger. Families are still fleeing. Power is still afraid of what love might become.
Matthew tells the story plainly. Herod, threatened by the rumor of a child-king, responds with violence. When power feels insecure, it lashes out at the most vulnerable. The children of Bethlehem are killed not because of who they are, but because of who they might become.
This is not ancient history. It is a pattern we still recognize.
The prophet Jeremiah gives us words for this moment:
“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children, and she refuses to be comforted.”
Scripture does not rush Rachel past her sorrow. God does not silence her grief or explain it away. Her tears are allowed to remain. Lament is not a failure of faith—it is one of faith’s deepest expressions.
Rachel’s weeping does not belong only to Bethlehem.
Her cry echoes wherever children are treated as expendable—whenever fear, convenience, profit, or power decide that some lives are easier to erase than to protect. To remember the Holy Innocents is to confess that life is sacred not when it is useful or convenient, but when it is vulnerable and costly.
Rachel weeps for children lost before they ever draw breath. She weeps for women and families facing impossible choices, and for societies that offer judgment instead of support. A truly pro-life faith does not rely on slogans. It builds care, shelter, and presence.
She weeps for children trafficked and exploited—treated as objects rather than persons, hidden because their suffering benefits someone else.
She weeps for children buried by war—caught between empires not their own, sacrificed by modern Herods in the name of power, security, or ideology.
She weeps for children who die of hunger—from famine, poverty, and neglect. The slow violence of empty bowls and forgotten neighborhoods.
And she weeps for those made into strangers.
In today’s gospel, the Holy Family themselves become refugees. They cross borders under cover of night. They depend on the mercy of others. Jesus begins his life not as a protected citizen, but as a displaced child fleeing state violence.
That matters.
It means how we treat the stranger, the immigrant, and the refugee is not a side issue. It is a direct response to the gospel. When we reduce human beings to legal problems, threats, or statistics, we repeat Herod’s logic. When we deny dignity to the poor, the imprisoned, and the rejected, we deny it to Christ himself.
Psalm 124 gives voice to those who survive:
“If it had not been the Lord who was on our side…”
This is not triumphalism. It is testimony. The danger was real. The escape was not guaranteed. Faith here is not denial—it is survival with memory intact.
Still, the hard question remains: what about those who did not escape? What about the Holy Innocents themselves?
The gospel does not explain their deaths. There is no divine excuse, no moral calculation that makes their suffering acceptable. Scripture refuses to justify their loss.
Instead, it promises that they are remembered.
Revelation lifts our eyes beyond Herod’s reign:
“See, the home of God is among mortals…
He will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
God does not erase history. God heals it. Suffering is not forgotten, but it is not final.
The church has long called the Holy Innocents the first martyrs—not because they chose death for Christ, but because Christ chose to be born into a world where innocents die, strangers flee, prisoners are forgotten, and the poor are ignored.
Jesus escapes Herod’s sword only to face another empire, another execution, another act of state violence—and to break death’s final claim from the inside.
So what does this feast ask of us?
It asks us to refuse amnesia. To remember children lost to abortion, trafficking, war, and hunger. To see pro-life not as a single issue, but as a way of seeing every human being—born and unborn, citizen and stranger, free and imprisoned—as bearing the image of God.
It asks us to become people who make room: who welcome the refugee, feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, stand with the rejected, and resist any system that treats human lives as disposable.
Until the day when every tear is wiped away, the church is called to stand watch—to protect life in policy and in practice, in public witness and quiet faithfulness.
Herod’s violence is real.
Rachel’s tears are real.
But so is God’s promise.
And until that promise is fulfilled, we light candles—not because the darkness is gone, but because it has not won.
Amen.

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