Mary Rejoicing, Rachel Weeping

How do we reconcile this glorious birth of a savior with the bloody death of innocent boys?

The disastrous event that took place in Bethlehem when Herod ordered the slaughter of all the boys two years old and under is part of the picture of Christmas, though we tend to allow sleigh bells, evergreens, and shopping frenzies to push it out of view. Yet it is, in all its brutality, what Christmas is about: the Savior’s “invasion” (to borrow from C. S. Lewis) and his confrontation with the forces of evil.

Matthew’s narrative of Christ’s birth juxtaposes noble and wretched characters in stark contrasts: stars and swords; majestic kingly visitations and twisted kingly agitation; Mary rejoicing, Rachel weeping; the children who die, and the Child who gets away. How do we reconcile the glorious birth of our Savior with the bloody death of those boys?

There is no extrabiblical documentation of Herod’s heinous act. But Bethlehem was truly a “little town” (with a population of between 300 and 1,000, according to some commentators), so it is within the bounds of possibility that the deaths of a few children were overshadowed by the many other atrocities Herod committed during his turbulent, twisted reign.

The Magi were not kings and may not have been three, but were, in any case, wise. Skilled astronomers and members of a priestly caste who may have been Zoroastrian, they were industrious, courageous, and truth-seeking pagans from present-day Iran or thereabouts.

One biblical historian suggests that they left Persia late in 3 B.C., after Jesus was born, and arrived in late 2 B.C., when Jesus was a toddler. By the time they found the child, his family was ensconced in a “house” (Matt. 2:10) and Herod calculated that the child could have been born up to two years earlier.

Herod, in the meantime, suffered from “distemper,” which the historian Josephus said “greatly increased upon him after a severe manner.” This topped off his well-attested paranoiac ravings, which had already driven him to command that his wife (whom he dearly loved), along with his two promising sons, be executed. This man “of great barbarity towards all men equally” had been confirmed “King of the Jews” in 40 B.C. by the Roman senate. Little wonder, then, that at this late stage of his…