Advent | A Family ReflectionVoorbeeld

Blood in Bethlehem
by William H. Willimon

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted . . . he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.

Matthew 2:16

King Herod the Great—threatened by talk of a new king of the Jews that might threaten his political alliance made between the Jewish authorities and the Romans—decided to stand up and act like a king. He massacred all the boy babies around Bethlehem. And how that story contrasts with our cherished views of Christmas. “Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.” That's a lie. Oh, little town of Bethlehem made miserable by the birth of Jesus. Streets running red with blood while mothers wail for their lost children—that’s the way the Bible does Bethlehem.

Matthew’s Christmas pageant ends not with tinsel-covered angels proclaiming goodwill but with Rachel weeping for her slaughtered babies. Herod was no fool. He’d been in power long enough to be able to tell a political rival when he saw one. Thus, Herod joins other political leaders—Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao—those who didn’t mind a little murder, particularly of children, in order to advance political ideals. 

We don’t like this Christmas story. But the Bible, thank God, always tells the truth, and it calls it Bethlehem.

At the end of the story of the Nativity, after the angels go back to wherever they came from and after the shepherds go home and the wise men and the baby Jesus and his family head for Egypt as refugees, we hear the screams of mothers weeping for Jewish babies. Our nose gets rubbed in the politics of it all, and the blood and pain and sorrow, before the Bible will let us leave Bethlehem. And even though this is not the Christmas story we want, it may be the Christmas story we need, because any God who is unwilling to come to Bethlehem won’t do us much good. If any God is going to save us, God will have to come down, down to where we are, because we can never get up to God.

At Bethlehem we see a prelude to events that take place later at a place just up the road called Calvary. The one called King of the Jews goes head to head with our kings and our kingdoms, our politics and our power; and there is pain and violence, and there is weeping and blood. And Matthew says all of this was for us and our salvation. All in the name of love, all for us. And it began in Bethlehem.

Read Matthew 2:13–18. Why is the Slaughter of the Innocents an important part of the Nativity story? What might we lose if we skip or ignore it?

William H. Willimon is professor of the practice of Christian ministry at Duke Divinity School.