In the Days of Herod the King
By Jack Franicevich, Candidate for Master’s in Sacred Theology (STM), Nashotah House
The second chapter of Matthew has a lot of Christmas stuff in it. That’s why we read this text on the Second Sunday of the Christmas season. The three wise men come. Joseph and Mary are on the run. No shepherds (they’re only found in Luke). But the wise men are not the main characters in the chapter, and neither are Joseph, Mary, or Jesus.
Matthew begins the second chapter, “In the days of Herod the king.” Herod drives the story through the rest of the chapter: Herod is troubled by the wise men’s report; he assembles the chief priests; he summons the wise men; and ultimately, he kills the children.
After Herod died, then the angel of Lord instructed Joseph to rise from Egypt and bring the child and his mother to Israel. On January 1, we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. That Jesus was circumcised and given his name eight days after he was born would have been customary. The name Jesus means that “the Lord will save his people.” It was the same name given to Joshua, Moses’ successor, who led Israel into the Promised Land. Jesus is a new Joshua, and he will lead all of God’s people into God’s kingdom, where we will live with him forever. Jesus receives his name in the last verse of Matthew 1. But after the first verse of Chapter 2, Jesus’ name disappears. Matthew simply calls him “the child”.
On the other hand, Herod - or Herod the King, or Herod the Great - is named eight times. When we read Matthew’s Gospel, he would have us remember not only the precious birth of Jesus, who is Immanuel, God with us, but also the days of King Herod.
Herod Responds to the Gospel
First, Herod hears news. The news is that among Israel a king has been born. Matthew writes that Herod was “troubled” in his spirit. Throughout Scripture, that word “troubled” describes what happens to people who have been confronted with disturbing news.
Herod schemes to snuff out the truth so that he doesn’t have to face it. You know the story. He sends the wise men out to find Jesus. Herod, like the Serpent in the garden, becomes a deceiver. Herod will not seek first the kingdom of heaven, and he will not seek heaven’s righteousness. Rather, he seeks to subject the Lord Jesus to his own rule. Jesus is the true light of the world, the only one in whom is life, and in whose broken body alone the warring world will be reconciled. But Herod prefers darkness to light.
The next two stages are told to us right next to each other in verse 16: Third, after trying to deceive the wise men, Herod realizes that he himself has been deceived.
Fourth, at the failure of his plans, Herod becomes furious. Matthew does not spell out how his “troubledness” evolves into “fury,” but he tells us that they do.
Fifth, and finally, like the Pharaoh of Egypt, Herod kills all the children under two years of age. To use St. James’ formula, Herod is lured and enticed by his own desire. His desire conceived, gives birth to sin; and his sin brings forth the death of the Innocents.
Finally, in verse 19, Matthew unceremoniously records Herod’s death: “But when Herod died. . .” Herod’s death explains the next scene in the story. Herod was a wicked man, and part of Matthew’s narrative is the good news of his death. Matthew’s narrative is not just about Jesus, the King of Kings; it is also about Herod the King. Jesus is born, and Herod dies.
The truth of the Incarnation points to Herod’s days being numbered, and so are the days of all who resist the Truth of the Gospel to the point of committing violence. The Lord casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly. The Lord cast down Herod from his throne and led his Son home from his exile in Egypt.
But to end our reflections here would be to neglect that Herod has taken with him to the grave the infant lives of the Bethlehemite children.
Comfort for Rachel?
The way Matthew would have us remember the gospel of Jesus Christ requires that we attend to the grief of the Bethlehemite women:
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
A voice was heard in Ramah:
Weeping and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be comforted because they are no more.
The Bethlehemite women grieve, and Matthew says that their grief literally fulfills Jeremiah’s prophecy. What does he mean by this?
Rachel was Jacob’s wife. She died during childbirth, and she died far from home. Abraham had purchased a burial plot in a field called Machpelah, where he was buried with his wife, Sarah; and their son Isaac was buried with his wife, Rebekah; and their son, Jacob, was buried with one of his wives, Leah. Six of our fathers and mothers were buried together in Machpelah; Rachel was buried alone. Her tomb, off the side of a road in Bethlehem, is actually very near the place where the Israelites were taken into exile by the Babylonians. And that’s how the Scriptures remember her. Because this is where she is buried, apart from her family, in a place associated with the exile, Rachel is remembered as a mother who suffers with and weeps for her exiled children. What Mary is to Christians, Rachel was to Israel.
And so the grief of all Israelite mothers over exiled children was typified by Rachel’s grief:
A voice was heard in Ramah:
Weeping and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be comforted because they are no more.
Matthew wants the church both to remember the grief of these Bethlehemite women and also to understand their grief as a fulfillment of Rachel’s grief. These four lines from Jeremiah fulfilled in the grief of the Bethlehemite women tell us at least three things about grief and the gospel.
For one, the grief of these Bethlehemite women is Rachel’s grief. These women whose children have been murdered aren’t crying their own tears, and they are not crying alone. Rachel, buried near them in Bethlehem, weeps and prays with them. And all mothers after them whose children have died, are held in the heart of Rachel, whose life is hidden in Christ.
For another, their grief is inconsolable because their children “are no more.” The children Herod killed are really gone. They’re dead. And there is no way of consoling their mothers. Mothers whose children have died know this.
The grief of the Bethlehemite women is paradigmatic of all grief. All grief is a variation on a mother’s grief over her child who is no more. No grief among us is quite like a mother’s losing her child, yet every grief among us is something like it. Herod's massacre is typical of all violent rejections of the truth of the gospel, and Rachel’s grief is typical of all loss brought about by such violence.
A voice was heard in Ramah:
Weeping and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be comforted because they are no more.
What can we say to these Bethlehemite women whose children were murdered by Herod’s men? What can we say to Rachel when she refuses to be comforted? What can we say to anyone this year whose beloved died and is “no more”?
Matthew takes his words from Jeremiah 31:15. For our first lesson this morning, we read verses 7-14, but I would like to read verse 15 as well, and then the two verses following. This is the word of the Lord to Rachel:
Thus says the Lord:
A voice was heard in Ramah:
Weeping and loud lamentation.
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be comforted because they are no more.
But thus says the Lord:
Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears,
For there is a reward for your work, declares the Lord.
That is, there is a reward for your carrying these children into the world and raising them for the two years that you did.
And they shall come back from the land of the enemy
That is, they shall come back from the City of the Dead.
There is hope for your future, declares the Lord,
And your children shall come back to their own country.
And just above those verses:
Again I will build you, and you shall be built,
O virgin Israel!
Again you shall adorn yourself with tambourines
and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.
Again you shall plant vineyards
on the mountains of Samaria;
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy;
I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow.
Your children, though they have died, will come home. He who cast down Herod from his throne has even more forcefully cast down Death from his throne. And He has lifted up the lowly.
The angels’ proclamation—”peace on earth”—is true, but it is a difficult peace. As long as the gospel is preached, the children of Herod will murder in their fury. Matthew tells us nothing of the deeds of Archelaus, Herod’s son, but his patrimony alone is enough to scare Joseph into bringing Mary and the child home. And as long as Herod and Archelaus murder in their fury, Rachel and her daughters will weep and wail and cry out in lamentation because their children are no more.
Remember the havoc wreaked by Herod who refused to accept Jesus’ kingship. We must bow our heads and surrender our own dominions—however small they are—to Christ, lest we allow our lusts to conceive, and our sin to bring forth death.
Also remember the Grief of the Bethlehemite women, and everyone who grieves because of their loss—either by non-moral forces like wildfires and COVID, and by those persons who refuse to surrender their dominions to Jesus’ kingship.
And, most of all, remember that the God Who cast Herod from this throne has cast down Death itself; that He has raised his Son out of Egypt to tambourines; and that the children who were lost on that day are not dead but sleeping.
Jack Franicevich is preparing for ordination in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Jack graduated from Biola University, LaMirada, California, and the Torrey Honors College with a bachelor of science (B.S.) in business in 2015; Denver Seminary (M.Div.,'20); and the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, with an Advanced Certificate in Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies ('20). He is finishing the Master of Sacred Theology (STM) degree at Nashotah House, where he is researching liturgical and political theology in Exodus and Leviticus. In Jack’s free time, he tries to pursue his interests in harmonic theory, American thought, liturgy and worship in Scripture, and friendship.