Introduction: An Awkward Christmas Text
The First Sunday of Christmas often catches both pastors and congregations off guard. The candles are still lit, the carols still echo, and many people arrive expecting the story to stay warm and familiar. Instead, the lectionary places before us a text of flight, fear, and violence. We move abruptly from angels and stars to dreams of escape and the slaughter of children.
It can feel like a jarring interruption, an unwelcome turn away from celebration. We may be tempted to soften the text, explain it away, or skip quickly to something more palatable. Yet Matthew insists that this story belongs here. The Church does not stumble into tragedy by mistake on this Sunday; it tells the truth about what it means for God to be born into the world.
Matthew’s Gospel refuses to separate Christmas from the realities of power, fear, and human suffering. The incarnation is not God entering a neutral or peaceful landscape, but God arriving in a world where rulers protect themselves at any cost and the most vulnerable pay the price. If Christmas proclaims that God is with us, then this passage names where God chooses to be. Not above violence, but amid it.
This is an uncomfortable way to celebrate Christmas, but it is an honest one. Without this story, Jesus risks becoming a sentimental symbol rather than a threatened child, a refugee, a real human being, and a challenge to the powers of the world. The First Sunday of Christmas, then, is not a departure from the nativity, it is its continuation. God’s promise does not end at the manger, it immediately collides with a fearful world.
Narrative Context
Matthew’s Christmas story does not linger long in sentimentality. Unlike Luke’s shepherds and angels, Matthew moves quickly from star-guided wonder to political terror. The child has barely been born before he becomes a threat.
This passage assumes what the lectionary skips: the visit of the wise men. Their journey begins not in Bethlehem but in Jerusalem, at the palace of King Herod. That detail matters. News of a newborn “king of the Jews” reaches a ruler whose authority depends entirely on Roman approval. Herod is a client king, tolerated as long as he maintains order. A rival king, especially one perceived as divinely appointed, threatens everything.
Matthew tells us that Herod is frightened and that all Jerusalem is frightened with him. The people do not share Herod’s fear of losing power. They fear the predictable violence of a tyrant whose power feels threatened. Matthew’s Gospel is already teaching us how oppressive systems work: when rulers panic, the vulnerable suffer.
It is into that fear that God sends dreams: warnings, detours, and escape routes. Joseph flees by night. Jesus becomes a refugee before he can walk. And Herod responds with atrocity.
Startling Violence or Known Threat?
What often startles or offends us is Matthew’s inclusion of what we call the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, a story absent from the other Gospels and unconfirmed by external historical records. That absence can tempt us preachers to either to explain it away or to soften it.
But Matthew does not want it dismissed. He is not making a journalistic or historical claim. But he is making a theological one.
This scene deliberately echoes Exodus. Like Pharaoh before him, Herod orders the death of children in an attempt to eliminate a perceived threat. Like Moses, Jesus is preserved through flight, exile, and divine intervention. Egypt, once the place of oppression, becomes a place of refuge. Matthew is crafting a narrative that declares: the old story is happening again, but God is still faithful.
The Jeremiah quotation seals the connection. Rachel weeps, not as a distant biblical figure, but as the embodiment of communal grief of mothers and parents who experience political tragedy. Matthew refuses to rush past the pain. Salvation history does not bypass suffering; it unfolds within it.
But Matthew’s is remarkably restrained. There is no dramatic rescue scene, no showdown between Herod and God. Herod’s power is simply… limited. Jesus is never truly within his grasp. God’s purposes move forward quietly, persistently, and beyond the reach of human violence. Even from the power of a “king.”
Centering on the Theology not the Historicity of the Text
This text confronts us with a recurring biblical truth: when God’s reign draws near, earthly powers often respond with fear and violence. The problem is not merely individualized evil, but systems organized around control, scarcity, and self-preservation.
Matthew insists that such power is ultimately illusory. Herod acts brutally, but he does not get the final word. God’s kingdom advances not through force but through faithfulness. Through dreams, obedience, and unlikely routes to safety.
This is not a sentimental Christmas text. It is a reminder that the incarnation places God squarely in the middle of the world’s brutality and refuses to concede the future to it.
Preaching Possibility
Leaning In Without Flattening the Text
This is a hard text to preach, and many of us won’t. Some congregations will be doing Lessons and Carols. Others will understandably want to stay close to the warmth of Christmas rather than step into a story this violent. That instinct makes sense.
And still, if you are preaching this Sunday, this text matters. Matthew includes it because it belongs to the Christmas story, not because it disrupts it. Without this passage, Jesus’ birth risks becoming sentimental. Here, we are reminded that God is born into a world where power is afraid, rulers lash out, and the vulnerable suffer.
But there is also a real temptation with this text to go pretty hard. To draw a straight line to current events. Is this about the treatment of refugees and immigrants in the United States today? Is it about Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, or another place where children are paying the price for the fear of those in power? You may choose to name one or more of these, but it’s worth being careful.
A one-to-one comparison can actually flatten the text. Matthew is not pointing us to a single modern situation. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents likely didn’t happen as a specific historical event. But atrocities committed by those in power against those with no power absolutely have happened, again and again. And Matthew knows this pattern doesn’t end here. It shows up again with another ruler, with religious leaders who still hold real influence, when Jesus himself is convicted in a sham trial and executed by the state. This is the larger truth Matthew is naming. Not one moment of violence, but the recurring way fear-driven power responds when God’s reign draws near.
This is an opportunity to point to a pattern that repeats throughout history: when power feels threatened, it turns violent. From there, people can make their own connections (perhaps with a little help from us) to the world we know and the griefs we carry, without the sermon needing to name every possible example.
This passage doesn’t ask us to identify today’s Herod. It asks us to recognize how fear-driven power works. And to trust that even then, God is still at work, making a way where human power cannot.
Lean into that, and this awkward Christmas text will proclaim good news.
Micah Krey 
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