Christmas Is for the Sorrowful (Matthew 2:16–18)

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”

Except when it’s not.

Most of us hold cherished memories of the holidays. Nostalgia infuses the season with thrill. Decorations and traditions inject a sense of enchantment. We indulge in merriment with friends and treasure time with family. Not least of which, we revel in the excitement of the children in our midst.

Christmas has a way of magnifying life’s joys. We take stock of them and set aside time to enjoy them. Like a magnifying glass, Christmas time not only spotlights what’s already present but enlarges our perception of it.

This includes life’s joys—but also life’s sorrows.

For many, Christmas can be one of the most painful times of the year. With the holiday’s focus on friends and family, we may be reminded of beloved family members who are no longer with us, whose presence we are no longer able to enjoy. Maybe we are forced to reckon with estrangement or unhealed wounds. Maybe the change of pace forces us to take stock of our lives and reckon with the fact that things haven’t turned out as we wished.

Whatever the case, our already existing pain is resurfaced, and oftentimes further amplified by its contrast with the joy that seems to envelop us. The merriment of the season can strike as a cruel reminder of our grief and sorrow.

Herod slaughters the innocents

Matthew 1:18–25 introduces Jesus as “Immanuel,” meaning, “God with us.” But this is not merely an affirmation of his physical proximity to us, becoming a human being and living among us in bodily form. He also entered “with us” in our suffering, to meet us in our suffering, to make it his own, and to redeem us from it.

Despite pristine portraits of a “Silent Night,” where “all is calm, all is bright,” Jesus enters a world wreaked with the painful effects of sin. And he is not unaffected by it. He is not distant from us in our suffering. Christmas signals his entrance into a world characterized by it. Exhibit A, Herod’s so-called “slaughter of the innocents.”

Having heard of one “born king of the Jews,” Herod’s paranoia to protect his throne rises to fever pitch (Matt 2:1–8). When he realizes the magi (or “wise men”) would not become his unwitting accomplices in locating the child (Matt 2:16; cf. 2:12), he resorts to drastic, murderous measures. He dispatches his forces to Bethlehem—including all the surrounding villages and territories—to kill every male child two years old and younger to ensure the newborn king does not escape (Matt 2:16). Yet Joseph, warned in a dream, flees with Mary and the child to Egypt (Matt 2:13–15).

The one whose birth signals “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” is born into a world soaked in blood, where tyrants cling to their power through violence and mothers cling to their children in vain.

So here we observe the original Christmas: The one whose birth signals “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” (Luke 2:14) is born into a world soaked in blood, where tyrants cling to their power through violence and mothers cling to their children in vain.

Rachel refuses to be comforted

Matthew’s Gospel opens with a series of vignettes, each demonstrating how Jesus’s arrival accomplishes the prophetic Scriptures.

• The virgin birth (1:18–25)
• The magi’s visit (2:1–12)
• The flight to Egypt (2:13–15)
• The return to Nazareth (2:19–23)
• John’s ministry (3:1–12)

Notice how each scene highlights the fulfillment of Old Testament Scripture (e.g., “This was to fulfill …”).¹ Likewise, Matthew’s opening genealogy, recalling God’s incipient promises to Abraham, the reign of David, and the unfinished story of exile (1:1–17), identifies Jesus as the culmination of Israel’s history—and so too her hopes.

Matthew 2:16–18 participates in this sequence.

Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31:15, a passage expressing the sorrows of exile. Rachel, a matriarch of Israel (see Gen 35:23–26), is personified weeping over her descendants, the Jewish people, as they are carried off into exile on account of their sin (cf. Jer 25:1–11). As the literal mothers of Bethlehem and the surrounding area wept inconsolably over murdered sons, so “Mother Rachel” weeps over her children who “are no more” (Jer 31:15; cf. Matt 2:18).

But if we know the rest of Jeremiah 31, we know the oracle does not end in despair. Immediately following Rachel’s weeping, God speaks words of hope: The exiles will return; he will make a new covenant with them (Jer 31:16–38). The lamentation over exile, though real and deep, is not the final word. Restoration is promised. And, as many biblical scholars argue, “If Matthew again intends his readers to draw on the whole story, he is pointing to the fact that God will restore after this sorrow, even as he restored Israel after the exile.”²

So Matthew hears in Bethlehem’s wails an echo of Jeremiah 31’s. Israel still finds herself in a world marked by the immense sorrow caused by sin.

Yet as Matthew’s use of Jeremiah assures us, even in this darkest of moments, deliverance is already in motion. The tears that soak this sin-wrecked world will eventually be wiped away (Isa 25:8; cf. Rev 21:4).

Jeremiah 31:15 occurs in a setting of hope. Despite the tears, God says, the exiles will return; and now Matthew, referring to Jeremiah 31:15, likewise says that, despite the tears of the Bethlehem mothers, there is hope. … The tears of the Exile are now being “fulfilled”—i.e., the tears begun in Jeremiah’s day are climaxed and ended by the tears of the mothers of Bethlehem. The heir to David’s throne has come, the Exile is over, the true Son of God has arrived, and he will introduce the new covenant (26:28) promised by Jeremiah.³

Jesus meets us in our sorrow

Christmas with its insistence on festive cheer feels like it precludes our sadness. Its emphasis on merriment seems to say, “Your sorrow is unwelcome here.”

Yet the first Christmas reminds us that Christmas is actually for the sorrowful, for the inconsolable.

As Israel’s sin led to the pain of exile, so too we live in a world infected with and affected by sin, bringing sorrow in its wake. Yet God is not distant from our sorrow. He entered into our human experience (Heb 4:15), including its sorrow. Like us, he is “acquainted with grief” (Isa 53:3–4). Even at his birth, he didn’t arrive in comfort while the world was in misery. He entered directly into a world marked by violence, death, and grief.

The true account of Christmas does not shove our sorrows aside, as if unwelcomed. It meets them.

This is how Israel’s redeemer was to appear; this is how God would set about liberating his people, and bringing justice to the whole world. No point in arriving in comfort, when the world is in misery; no point having an easy life, when the world suffers violence and injustice! If he is to be Emmanuel, God-with-us, he must be with us where the pain is.⁴

And, of course, this incarnational participation in our suffering climaxes at the cross (Phil 2:5–8), where Christ bears the burdens for those he came to save.

As Matthew 2:16–18’s use of Jeremiah 31 shows, Jesus’s arrival signals our eventual restoration, our rescue from this world’s sorrows. As God promises there, “I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish” (Jer 31:25 ).

Are you weary? Does your soul languish? God says to you, I will replenish you.

Maybe you can relate to Rachel whose grief was so deep it proved inconsolable (Matt 2:18: “she refused to be comforted”). Your sorrow is so profound that no words can penetrate it. As the mothers of Bethlehem, “they refused to hear any thing that might be suggested to them for their relief.”⁵ People may try to comfort you, but nothing offered can erase or heal the pain. (It’s quite possible that nothing in this world will.) 

If that’s you, Matthew 2:16–18 would fix your hope on Jesus, who will bring about a world where, as J. R. R. Tolkien writes, “everything sad will become untrue.”⁶ And, as deep as the present pain is, we are told it’s not even worth comparing to the weight of glory that awaits us when Christ comes again (Rom 8:18; 2 Cor 4:17–18).

Advent resources for further contemplation

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1. Observe that “fulfillment” language is particularly significant across Matthew’s Gospel.
2. Daniel M. Doriani, “Matthew,” in Matthew–Luke, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, ESV Expository Commentary 8 (Crossway, 2021), 64.
3. D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 8 (Zondervan, 1984), 95.
4. Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1–15 (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 14–15.
5. John Gill, An Exposition of the New Testament, The Baptist Commentary Series 1 (Mathews and Leigh, 1809), 17.
6. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, vol 3: The Return of the King (Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 230.