Called to Remember (Matthew 2:13-23)
Called to Remember
December 28, 2025
Matthew 2:13-23
By: Pastor Mike Conner
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According to the liturgical calendar that is used to organize worship and discipleship in many Christian traditions, Christmas is not simply a day but a twelve-day season, running from December 25th, the Feast of the Nativity, to January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany. For twelve days the Church’s calendar invites us to meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation, and reflect on how this gift of God coming to be with us in the Christ Child ought to shape our lives. In Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican tradition, the fourth day of the Christmas season, December 28th, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It is a day set apart for remembering the little boys of Bethlehem, two years old and younger, whom King Herod had killed in a sweeping effort to extinguish the Christ.
The Eastern Magi, astrologers sometimes called Wise Men or the Three Kings, had tricked Herod. In faraway lands, they had observed the rising of the Christmas star, had understood it to be a sign that in the land of Israel a King had been born for the Jewish people. The Magi came to Herod’s court in Jerusalem, asking him where the newborn king was to be found. Herod had no idea; he had missed the sign. Afraid of a challenge to his own power over the Jews, Herod asked the Magi to continue their search for the child, and to return to him after finding it, so that he also could go and worship him. This, of course, was a lie. He planned to kill the child. The Magi left Herod’s palace and continued to follow the star, which rested over a humble home in Bethlehem. Entering that home, they bowed before Jesus and blessed him with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. That night, God warned them in a dream not to return to Herod, so they left the land of Israel by another road.
Herod, pacing around his palace and waiting for their return, slowly realized that they weren’t coming back, that he’d been lied to—and he was furious. There is hardly a breath between the eruption of his anger and its devastating consequences. “He became greatly enraged,” Matthew writes, “and he sent to kill all the little boys in Bethlehem in all its surrounding territory two years old and under” (Matt 2:16, my translation).
On Christmas Eve, I preached about Caesar Augustus’ census and the ways that the powers in our world are always trying to reduce our rich, singular lives to data, to names and numbers. The same impulse shows up here in Matthew’s Christmas story. Enraged by his lack of control over the situation, Herod gives an order: ‘Boys two and under in and around Bethlehem. Round them up, and get rid of them.’ But each of these was a singular child with a name, with a family. For Herod, an easy, impersonal order brings about the most painful, personal of griefs—and many times over. And it doesn’t even work. Little Jesus, carried through the darkness of that night by Joseph, slips through Herod’s fingers.
Joseph was warned by an angel in a dream to flee Israel, taking Mary and Jesus to Egypt before Herod’s soldiers arrived. The Holy Family became refugees, forced by the envious violence of their local ruler to leave behind their home and make do on the road, to live for a time as strangers in a strange land. They remained in Egypt until Herod’s death, at which time Joseph was again instructed in a dream by an angel; it was time to return to their homeland. But this was no triumphant return. They came back to live in silence and obscurity in the backwater town of Nazareth in Galilee. And yet, if one listened closely enough, there was still this: “A sound of weeping and wailing is heard in Ramah. Rachel is shedding tears for her children. No one can bring her peace, because her children have been taken from the land of the living” (2:17-18, First Nations Version).
You know, as a pastor I feel a lot of pressure to bring some razzle-dazzle to the Christmas season every year, to use language and ritual to try and help us all connect with the joy and hope and mystery of it. And this story makes me deeply uncomfortable. The massacre of the Holy Innocents is a terrible moment in the Gospels, and it feels so at odds with the spirit of the season. I resisted committing to this text when I saw that December 28th fell on a Sunday this year. But Matthew found it important to include this story in his Gospel, to bring it inside the good news of Jesus. And down through the ages the Church has seen fit to honor these children with a feast day, so that they would not be forgotten. I felt convicted. Maybe I should take the time to really remember them, too.
If Jesus came to bring salvation to our world, if he came to redeem the cosmos, then we need to be honest about the condition of the world. Perhaps we are bummed – or more, wrecked – by this story, and want to keep it at arm’s length, not really even look at it directly, because of all the Christmas stories in the Gospels it is actually the most relatable one, the one that hits closest to home, and we think Christmas ought to bring us some reprieve from the sharp edges of reality. And yet, in 2025 Nigerian children are kidnapped. Gazan children are bombed and starved. American children are hungry and sick with Measles. And the list of avoidable atrocities goes on.
And in every one of these situations there are people playing the role of Herod behind the violence, trying to control the narrative, seeking to stifle our remembering. But the mothers and fathers remember. The community remembers. The soil remembers. God remembers. Should not the Church also remember? And, by its remembering, be liberated from the propaganda and feel-good illusions thrown at us? By its remembering be pressed toward the least of these?
The Incarnation is a profound act of divine remembering. In Christ, God has said to us, “I have not forgotten you. I will never forget you. I will come to be with you, as you are, and bind our destinies together.” And that act of solidarity becomes an example for us to live by in the power of the Spirit.
The Holy Innocents. They were killed by an angry, fearful King. They were killed as a consequence of the Magi listening to divine direction. They were killed to bring to fulfillment a Hebrew word spoken by Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. Matthew effectively gives us all three explanations, and not a single one of them would relieve the heart of a mother or father of Bethlehem. So we keep remembering—and we let that remembering do its work in us and in the world. Remembering is a political act, by which I mean it has to do with power and how we relate to one another. And remembering is a spiritual act, something Jesus tells us to do every time we gather in his name. Do this in remembrance of me. Remembering the hard things is important, too. Keeping the channel open, the energy of grief has somewhere to go, and it can make us more committed to love.
So we remember. We remember that those little boys in Bethlehem are members of the cosmos that Jesus has redeemed, and will be vindicated in the last days and raised to resurrected life. We remember that Jesus himself shared the fate of his playmates, sentenced to death on a cross by a sickening collusion of political and religious powers. We remember Mary was there at the cross, crying her tears. Jesus did not, in the end, escape the suffering of the Holy Innocents. To remember them is to remember him, and vice versa. To remember them is to remember all those whose worldly fate he came to share.
A 16th-century painter from the Netherlands named Pieter Bruegel the Elder once painted the Holy Innocents scene. He painted a scene of soldiers raiding a small town and putting its little children to death. Yet Bruegel translated the scene to a 16th-century Dutch village, where the villagers were attacked by Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries. The soldiers in Bruegel’s painting carry the imperial symbols of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who ruled in Bruegel’s lifetime. Bruegel did what all good biblical interpretation does: it bridges the gap between the world of scripture and the world of the present moment. It says, Look, we are still living inside these stories today!
Emperor Rudolph disliked the painting so much that he purchased it in Prague around 1600. After purchasing it, he had the children in the graphic scene painted over with food items and animals, “so that it became a scene of plunder not a massacre of babies.” You can look at this online. In the center of the painting there is a group of ironclad soldiers all stabbing downward at…a group of chickens! We know that these were not Pieter Bruegel’s original details because his son, Pieter Breugel the Younger, made a copy of his father’s painting before it was whitewashed by the Emperor. The son’s copy, discovered in Vienna, “shows the original details of the massacre.” In our own moment, I’m sure we can think of times when those in high places have reshaped the narratives of war and poverty and human suffering to make them seem less devastating, more palatable or reasonable. The Gospel writer asks us to remember. The Church asks us to remember. The artists ask us to remember. The Herods and Holy Emperors and political pundits ask us to forget.
Christmas doesn’t mean that we escape the world. It means that we are met by a God who enters into complete fellowship with us in the world to bring about a reign of peace from the inside out. So, this Christmas I think God would have each of us remember a person, a family, an other-than human species, or a community that is at risk of being forgotten, that has suffered at the hands of power, but that Jesus came to hold in eternal love and remembrance.
This Christmas, remember someone who has not escaped the world’s sharp edges, who is grieving, who is hurt by the intolerance and violence of the world. Weep for them. Pray for them. Tell about them.
And may the hope of our faith be true for us all. As the Apostle Paul says, We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Cor 4:8-11 NIV).
And elsewhere: What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? …Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:31-39 NIV).
Amen.