12/31/2025
This is a hard Sunday.
It comes too close to Christmas. The lights are still glowing. The cookies are still soft. Some of us are still holding a fragile joy, still humming carols without thinking.
And then the church says: Today we remember murdered children.
Matthew will not let us look away. Right there in the middle of the Christmas story. Right between angels and dreams and gifts and stars - there is state-sanctioned violence. There are parents screaming. There are cribs left empty.
The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
We want Christmas to be gentle. Quiet. Safe. And Lord knows that after the past year, thats the kind of Christmas I am desperate for. But the gospel insists on telling the truth: Jesus is born into trauma.
And that matters.
We are trained to think of trauma as public and political …wars, bombs, soldiers, borders, empires. And that trauma is real. It scars bodies and fractures communities. But there is another kind of trauma that is just as pervasive and far more hidden. Trauma that unfolds in kitchens and bedrooms. Trauma carried in the bodies of women and children. Trauma that happens behind closed doors.
King Herod is remembered for mass murder. For ordering the killing of baby boys two years old and under. But according to the historian Josephus, Herod was also a domestic abuser. He beat his wife, Mariamne. He later had her killed. He brutalized his own household long before he brutalized an entire people.
The same logic that justifies violence in the home becomes the logic that justifies violence in the state. The same belief that says I am entitled to your body becomes I am entitled to your land, your labor, your future. The same need for dominance. The same fear of losing control. The same rage at vulnerability.
Private violence and public violence are not separate systems. They are the same sin operating at different scales.
So when Jesus is born under Herod’s rule, God is not making a random appearance in history.
God is taking sides.
God is standing with those whose bodies are violated; by partners, by policies, by armies, by borders.
Matthew makes this unmistakable by telling the story the way he does. The killing of the children echoes a story Israel already knows. In Exodus, Pharaoh fears the growing population of the Hebrews and orders all baby boys to be killed.
One child - Moses - is hidden. Saved by the courage and ingenuity of women. Placed in a basket. Sent into danger. Drawn out of the water. And that child grows up to confront Pharaoh, to lead his people out of enslavement, to proclaim God’s freedom in the face of empire.
Matthew wants us to hear the resonance.
Another ruler clinging to power.
Another order to kill children.
Another child who survives.
Another liberator.
This is not coincidence.
Jesus is born into a world where children are targeted because they represent futures tyrants cannot control. Jesus is born into generational trauma. Jesus is born into a system that believes violence is a legitimate way to secure power.
And the church must name this clearly.
This is genocide.
Genocide is not only mass killing. It is the intention to erase a people-their story, their culture, their memory, their future. It is the systematic destruction of life and meaning.
And there are so many genocides-past and present-that it can feel overwhelming to even speak their names. The Holocaust remains one of the most infamous and devastating examples, and remembering it is a sacred obligation, especially as antisemitic violence rises again across the globe, including the Bondi shooting in Australia. Memory is resistance.
And genocide is not confined to history books.
Around the world today, governments, international bodies, and human rights organizations warn of ongoing or imminent genocides. Sudan, where ethnically targeted violence, mass killings, and sexual violence devastate communities in Darfur. Myanmar, where the Rohingya people have been subjected to mass displacement, murder, and r**e, forced to flee simply to stay alive.
A formal legal determination of genocide is made by international courts like the ICC or the ICJ. But the church can also recognize patterns of destruction, to grieve the dead, to stand with the endangered.
And we must speak about Gaza.
Not because other suffering does not matter- but because this is the land where God took on flesh. And because our tax dollars are funding this violence.
Multiple human rights organizations and genocide scholars have described the situation in Gaza as a genocide emergency. Mass civilian deaths. The destruction of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure necessary for life. The deliberate creation of conditions-like starvation-that make survival impossible. Language that strips people of their humanity.
What is unfolding in Gaza is devastating in scale.
Here is where the echo with Scripture becomes almost unbearable.
In Exodus, baby boys under two.
In Matthew, baby boys under two.
But in Gaza, the numbers are so vast that we must narrow our focus just to comprehend them.
Babies.
Of all genders.
Under the age of one.
Infants who never reached their first birthday.
Babies who were zero years old.
As of late 2025, at least 1,000 babies under the age of one have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. If you wrote down just their names—not all children, not toddlers, not teenagers—just those infants age zero—it would fill pages and pages.
Holy Innocents.
And it is tempting, especially for those of us in the United States, to point outward to other countries and other violence and say, “How barbaric. How violent. How uncivilized.”
But the truth is harder.
The modern architecture of genocide has familiar roots.
The United States refined these systems: through the genocide of Indigenous peoples, through chattel slavery, through Jim Crow, through eugenics laws that Hi**er studied closely. Gregory Stanton’s ten stages of genocide are not theoretical. They describe patterns we know.
Classification.
Symbolization.
Discrimination.
Dehumanization.
Organization.
Polarization.
Preparation.
Persecution.
Extermination.
Denial.
And we can see these stages unfolding among us, even today.
Immigrants divided into “legal” and “illegal.”
Then into “deserving” and “criminal.”
Then into brown and white.
People forced to carry papers.
Dehumanized as criminals and threats.
Blamed for economic instability they did not cause.
Rounded up.
Detained in ICE facilities under inhumane conditions.
Disappeared to places like El Salvador.
Or vanished entirely.
This is how it always begins.
Which is why the Feast of the Holy Innocents matters so deeply.
Because Christmas is not about escaping the world’s pain. Christmas is about God entering it.
Jesus is not born into safety.
Jesus is born under threat.
Jesus becomes a refugee.
Jesus flees state violence.
Jesus grows up under occupation.
Jesus knows what it is to live with trauma; personal and political braided together.
Which means this: God is with those who experience harm in private spaces and those harmed by public systems alike.
God is with survivors of domestic violence.
God is with abused children.
God is with women whose bodies are controlled and violated.
God is with q***r and trans people whose existence is politicized and endangered.
God is with refugees.
God is with those targeted for erasure.
God is with the slaughtered.
This is Emmanuel. God is with us.
But Emmanuel is not one-directional.
We have waited all Advent for God to be with us. And God is.
But the harder question is this: Are we with God?
Because God is not only found in sanctuaries and songs.
God is crying in detention cells. God is waiting in hospital corridors without medicine. God is hiding bruises under long sleeves. God is standing in food lines. God is buried beneath rubble.
And sometimes, God is waiting for us to show up.
If we want to be with God this Christmas, the gospel tells us where to look. Not toward comfort. But toward solidarity. Not toward nostalgia. But toward courage.
The Feast of the Holy Innocents does not ask us to despair. It asks us to be faithful.
To speak names.
To interrupt the patterns.
To stand where God stands.
To refuse denial.
To believe that violence does not get the final word.
Because Herod dies.
Pharaoh falls.
Empires collapse.
And liberation…slow, costly, stubborn liberation …keeps breaking through.
This is not the end of the Christmas story.
But it tells us exactly what kind of story Christmas really is.
Thanks be to God.
(Photo credit Jason Leung on Unsplash)
