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HAVING A HEART FOR INNOCENTS

Matthew 2:13-18 
The Holy Innocents, Martyrs 
Analysis by Jonas Ellison            

13Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt 15and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” 
16When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. 17Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: 
18“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.”  

“Jesus goes all the way down into the hell we’ve made – the paranoia, the violence, the death – and he takes it all on himself.”

DIAGNOSIS: Heart rot 

Step 1:  Initial Diagnosis (External Problem) – Dead babies 
Let’s not dance around it… Herod kills babies. Not metaphorically or theoretically. He sends soldiers door to door in Bethlehem to run swords through toddlers. Mothers screaming. Rachel weeping and refusing every comfort anyone tries to offer, because what comfort is there? Her children are gone. This is the outside symptom: we live in a world where power kills the innocent and calls it security. 

Step 2:  Advanced Diagnosis (Internal Problem) – The rot in Herod’s chest 
So what’s eating Herod? Simple. He heard about another king, and it terrified him. His whole identity, his whole reason for getting up in the morning, is that throne. He’s built his entire sense of self on being the Big Man, the one in charge, the decider of who lives and who dies.  And now some star-following foreigners show up talking about a baby who’s the real king? 

Herod’s heart is a clenched fist. He can’t let go. He’d rather kill a hundred babies than admit he’s not the center of the universe. This is a heightened glimpse of what we look like on the inside when we make ourselves into gods: paranoid, vicious, so terrified of losing control that we’ll do anything to keep the illusion going. Herod loves his power, fears losing it, and trusts nothing but his ability to eliminate threats. That’s the rotting sickness in the heart.  

Step 3:  Final Diagnosis (Ultimate Problem) – The futile endeavor of playing God 
Herod’s massacre is what happens when human beings think they’re cutting themselves off from God and try to run the show themselves. When we’ve shoved God out to make room for ourselves, there’s no reason not to take things to the most violent extremes. There’s no value higher than my survival, my throne, my empire, my agenda. Life becomes cheap. People (yes, even babies) become disposable. The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. And don’t think God doesn’t notice. 

This is the God-disconnect at full throttle: we were made to live in God, to be held by Love, to find our meaning in the One who is meaning. But fear turns us inward and we think the solution is to be our own gods, our own centers, our own saviors. And when we grab for that, we don’t become divine; we become monsters. We become Herod, wading through rivers of blood to secure a kingdom that’s already rotting from the inside. We become dealers of death in a world we’ve emptied of Life itself. 

PROGNOSIS: The Healing Heart 

Step 4:  Initial Prognosis (Ultimate Solution) – God becomes Herod’s victim – and his savior 
That baby escaping to Egypt in the middle of the night isn’t just running away from death. He’s headed straight for it. Jesus doesn’t dodge Herod’s sword forever. He just postpones it until he can take the full force of it on a cross outside Jerusalem. 

God looks at Herod’s world – at our world, this blood-soaked disaster we’ve made – and instead of torching the place and starting over, God steps into it. As a baby. As a refugee. As the most vulnerable thing imaginable. And then he grows up and lets us kill him. 

This is the gospel: God doesn’t fix the God-disconnect by explaining it or condemning it from a safe distance. God descends into it. Jesus goes all the way down into the hell we’ve made – the paranoia, the violence, the death – and he takes it all on himself. He dies for the Bethlehem babies. He dies for their mothers. And here’s real stunner: He dies for Herod too. 

On the cross, Jesus absorbs every bit of our God-playing, our violence, our desperate clawing for control. He takes the hit. And then… God raises him from the dead.  He is alive! He walks out of the tomb. And in that walking, he drags the whole world with him, back into the Life we were made for. Death and judgment is finished. Hell is emptied. The game is over, and Love wins. 

Step 5:  Advanced Prognosis (Internal Solution) – Hearts that can finally unclench 
Because Jesus died and rose, we don’t have to be Herod (to any degree) anymore. We don’t have to secure ourselves. We don’t have to clench our fists around what we’ve got and kill anyone who threatens it. 

Our hearts can rest. We can breathe. The worst thing that could happen – death – has already happened to Jesus, and he came through it like a freight train through wet cardboard. So what are we afraid of? What do we have to prove? What do we have to protect? 

Now we’re free to love the God who became a hunted baby for us, to trust that nothing – not  Herod, not death, not hell itself – can separate us from this Love. Our hearts stop being clenched fists and become open hands. The fear that drove Herod – the terror of losing control, of being displaced, of death – no longer runs the show. We’re held by something bigger, something Herod’s swords can’t touch. We’re in by faith. Not because we’ve achieved anything, but because Jesus went down into death and brought us back up with him. 

Step 6:  Final Prognosis (External Solution) – Lives that look like resurrection 
So what does this look like when we walk out the church door? We become people who live as those for whom death is beaten… because it has been. We’re free to protect kids instead of sacrificing them. We stand with the powerless instead of climbing over them. We become ungovernable by fear and unimpressed by worldly power and dominance. 

In a world still full of Herods (yes, there are plenty) we become communities of stubborn, ridiculous grace. We sit with Rachel while she weeps instead of telling her to get over it. We work to make sure no more mothers’ arms get emptied for some tyrant’s ego. We become joyful party crashers, spirit-filled troublemakers, and people who refuse to let the undertakers have the last word. 

Not because we’re naive. We know Herod is still out there. Violence is real and death still comes. But we know the throughline: the baby who fled to Egypt grew up to be the King who kicked down the gates of hell and walked out whistling. Death tried to swallow him and choked. And now we live with the promise and hope in that victory.