Second Sunday of Christmas - 1.4.2026

Second Sunday of Christmas

Matthew 2:13-23

The Rev’d Charles Everson

Church of the Atonement

January 4, 2026

We are barely a week-and-a-half from Christmas Day. The crèche is still up. The trees are still lit. We are still singing carols that insist on joy and light and peace on earth. And then the Church gives us this gospel.  This is not the reading most of us would have chosen for this day. The Church, as it turns out, has a higher tolerance for discomfort than we do.

No angels singing. No shepherds. No wise men.

Instead, we hear of a furious king, terrified of losing power, ordering the slaughter of innocent children. And we hear St. Matthew quote the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

It can feel like a cruel turn in the story, as though the church has made a mistake with these lectionary readings. But she hasn’t. The Church insists that this story belongs to Christmas.  Because Christmas is not about escaping the world as it is, but about God choosing to enter it as it truly is.        

St. Matthew refuses to look away from the cost of God’s coming into the world.

Rachel’s cry is not explained away. It is not softened. St. Matthew does not rush us toward resurrection language or tidy conclusions. He allows grief to speak, and he lets it remain unresolved. “She refused to be consoled.”

Not because consolation is bad, but because sometimes consolation comes too quickly. Sometimes words meant to help only deepen the wound. And Scripture knows this. The Bible gives grief a voice and refuses to silence it.

Rachel, of course, is not literally present in Bethlehem. She is the matriarch of Israel, long dead, summoned poetically to weep for her children. Her cry echoes across generations. It names a grief that is communal, ancestral, and ongoing.

In our parish right now, there is a great deal of suffering that most people would never notice. Some of our fellow parishioners here at Atonement are in hospital rooms this very day. Some have recently experienced the death of an immediate family member. Some are in nursing care facilities, with little hope of returning home. Some are recovering from surgery, weak, exhausted, and frightened. Some are living with chronic illness, pain, or decline that medicine cannot fix.

Most of this suffering is hidden. Quiet. Private. And what often hurts most is not the illness itself, but the loneliness that comes with it – the sense of being forgotten as the rest of life goes on.

Rachel’s refusal to be consoled names that experience. There are moments when grief does not need an explanation. It needs acknowledgment. It needs to be seen.

God does not rebuke Rachel for her tears. God does not correct her theology. God does not tell her to be grateful or to look on the bright side. God preserves her cry in Scripture.

Here the text reveals something about God’s character.

God is not the author of the violence in this story. God is not the one who commands the slaughter. Herod acts out of fear – fear of losing control, fear of a child who threatens his fragile power. God does not will that kind of suffering.

But God does not abandon the world to it, either.

God warns Joseph in a dream. God protects the child. God remembers the tears of the mothers. God’s saving work does not erase grief; it carries it forward.

This is one of the hardest truths of Christmas, and one we are asked not to rush past. Christmas does not promise that human suffering will suddenly make sense. It does not promise that grief will disappear if we just believe hard enough. Christmas promises something both humbler and deeper: that God has chosen to dwell with us inside our vulnerability.

The child who escapes King Herod will one day be executed by the Roman Empire.  The child who survives will one day lie in a tomb.

God knows bodily weakness from the inside. God knows fear. God knows pain. God knows what it is to enter fully into the limits and vulnerability of human life.

So if you are weary today – physically, psychologically, spiritually – your faith is not defective. If you are grieving, or frightened, or tired of being strong, your tears do not disqualify you from Christmas joy. They belong here.

This is why the Church places this gospel before us now. Because Christmas faith is not about forced cheerfulness. It is about honest presence. It is about refusing to pretend that everything is fine when it is not.

And it is about trust – not that things will quickly improve, but that God is here even when they do not.

In a few moments, we will come to this altar where Christ meets us. Not as a triumphant king enthroned in power. Not as the kind of ruler Herod feared. But as broken bread, given for the life of the world.

At this altar, the Church remembers Rachel’s children. Here, the sick are not forgotten. Here, those who cannot be present here at Atonement are held in prayer and love.

At this altar, we do not deny suffering. We place it in the hands of the One who has entered into it fully.

The Church does not rush Rachel to stop weeping. The Church keeps vigil with her.

And perhaps that is our calling, too – to notice and tend to the suffering others do not see, to pray for the sick not as an afterthought but as a central act of faith, and to trust that even here, even now, God is with us.

At Christmas, the Church does not promise that there will be no more tears today.  She promises that God remains with us as we weep.  And she gives us hope that while that weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.[2]       

[2] Psalm 30:5 – KJV.