The Question of Suffering - First Sunday of Christmas
Author: Pastor Scott Schul
December 28, 2025
Since at least the year
485, the Christian Church has set aside the 28th day of December to
remember and commemorate the children Herod slaughtered in Bethlehem as he
reacted with paranoid madness to the news from the Magi that a rival king had
been born. It was just the kind of evil,
violent response one would expect from Herod. After all, this was the man who drowned his teenage brother-in-law, and killed
his uncle, aunt, and mother-in-law, several members of his brother-in-law’s
family, his own two sons, and some three hundred officials he accused of siding
with his sons.1 This was
truly a wicked, awful man.
Ancient liturgies in
the Eastern and Middle Eastern Christian traditions compiled lists of the
infant martyrs of Bethlehem which numbered as many as 144,000 children. But given how small Bethlehem was (no more
than 1,000 people), it’s statistically and demographically far more likely that
Herod’s victims totaled between 6 and 20 children. That does not in any way moderate the evil of
what Herod did or the horror we should feel as we consider what happened that
day to innocent children whose only crime was being born at the same general
time as Jesus.
As we sit here in the
joyful afterglow of the Christmas holiday, it’s jarring to be confronted with
such a story, and it’s tempting to skip past all this. But those first generations of Christians
knew that suffering and injustice remained part of everyday life, even after
Christ’s birth, death, and glorious resurrection. I think we know that too, but we struggle to
publicly acknowledge the imperfection of our lives or of life in
general, because we live in a world now where our images and experiences
are carefully curated to present lives devoid of struggles and failures.
But if we cannot talk
about suffering and injustice here within Christ’s Church, where can we
possibly address these topics in a faithful and meaningful way? Even the most pious and faithful among us
suffer. Even Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
experienced deprivation and suffering, through no fault of their own. In today’s Gospel, we see that to escape
Herod’s murderous rampage they had to flee as refugees across the desert and
into Egypt. When it was finally safe to
return, they experienced more detours in order to evade the murderous dictator
who replaced Herod. Suffering was a part
of Jesus’s story from the very beginning, and intense, violent suffering
would mark the end of Jesus’s mortality as well.
And yet we see in our
lessons today that God does sometimes intervene in the sinful saga of
human existence in order to prevent suffering. It was a divinely inspired dream that alerted Joseph to the need to take
his family to Egypt, and more holy revelations in dreams that guided Joseph and
his family back to their home in Nazareth. I bet each of us could write down a few times when we felt that God had
personally intervened in our lives and circumstances to extract us from a
potentially perilous situation, or to prevent something calamitous from
happening to us. I can certainly think
of a few such incidents in my life. Can
you?
But I bet we can also
think of times when bad things happened to us or to people we love, and despite
praying and striving as hard as we were able, we couldn’t bring an end to those
bad things. God didn’t suddenly
intervene, erupt into our world, and solve our problem. That certainly was the case for those mothers
in Bethlehem who lost their children to Herod’s murderous rampage. And mothers and fathers in countless other
places over the last 2,000 years have wailed and lamented their losses
too. All of us here today have
experienced some degree of suffering in this life. As one of your pastors I see what so many of
you go through and it breaks my heart that I cannot magically pray it all away
for you.
It raises a perpetual
and deeply troubling theological question: why does God intervene in some
cases, but not all of them? For
instance, why did God spare infant Jesus from Herod, and yet allow adult Jesus to be crucified just a few decades later? And why does God permit suffering to occur in this world generally, and
in our lives specifically?
Theologians have
struggled for 2,000 years to answer that question, so please don’t expect that
I will suddenly untangle this riddle in our remaining minutes together
today. But I will offer a few thoughts I
hope will help as you continue to grapple with this question.
Let’s start with the
First Commandment. It’s first not only
in numerical order but also importance. You
shall have no other gods. All human
sin has a link to violation of this commandment.2 We want to replace God, or at least act as
equals to God. Just like Adam and Eve in
the Garden, and every human being since then, whenever we try to be God, the
results are disastrous. God’s vision,
wisdom, and knowledge are so far beyond our own that we can’t begin to conceive
it. Yet we never fully learn our lesson.
Remember the 2003 movie
Bruce Almighty? The title character,
played by Jim Carey, tries to fill in for God and the results are predictably
catastrophic. Bruce discovers that being
God isn’t so easy. On a more serious and
Biblical note, Job discovered the same thing.3 Even in our own lives we usually don’t know
what we really want, let alone really need. When I was a child, I thought socks were the worse
gift one could ever receive. But
now? There’s nothing better than a new
pair of warm socks!
And yet despite our
lack of vision, wisdom, and knowledge compared to God, we are so quick to blame
God when things don’t go the way we want. But in a world full of suffering, do we humans not bear some
responsibility? How ready we are to
criticize God for not fulfilling our expectations! And yet how eager we are to make excuses for
ourselves when we so regularly fail to meet God’s expectations.
Could God intervene and
solve all the world’s problems? Of
course. Nothing is beyond God’s
capabilities. But doing so would reduce
us to mere robots with no will and no capacity to choose to love God or one
another. What an empty existence that
would be for us and, I believe, for God. If you’ve raised children, you’ve experienced this. If you hover over them, do everything for
them, and spare them from every mistake and misstep, you do not equip them for
life. They don’t grow. They don’t thrive. The same is true for us. At some point we must realize that we don’t
pray “thy will be done” just out of obedience, but because it’s in our best
interest.
Look, it is good and
right that we should pray for God to intervene in the world’s suffering. Pray often for God’s help! But be prepared that God’s response might be,
“Yes, you’ve named a big problem. That’s
why I’ve equipped you to do something about it.” If you want an example of that, consider our
feeding ministries here at Grace. We are
praying for an end to hunger in our community. But while we pray, we are also buying and gathering food, packing it,
and sharing it with our neighbors. By
God’s grace, twice a month at least, we are an answer to prayer. What else is God calling us to do to
alleviate our neighbor’s suffering? That’s a good question for us to ponder as we prepare to enter a new
year.
And so on this First
Sunday of Christmas, let us lament the suffering of those children in Bethlehem
two millennia ago, and the suffering that continues to plague our world
today. But in that Bethlehem manger,
hope was born. May Jesus continue to
move and inspire us to take that hope everywhere we go and be examples of God’s
mercy in action. Amen.
© 2025 Rev. Scott E. Schul, all rights reserved
Citations:
1 Gail Ramshaw, More Days of Praise, p. 296; Philip Pfatteicher, New Book of Festivals and Commemorations, p. 632.
2 Luther’s Large Catechism, explanation to the First Commandment, last paragraph.
3 See chapters 40 and 41 of the Book of the Prophet Job.
Gospel: Matthew 2:13-23
13 Now after [the magi] 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.” 14 Then Joseph got up,
took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt 15 and
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.”
16 When 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. 17 Then 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.”
19 When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in
a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, 20 “Get up, take the child
and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the
child’s life are dead.” 21 Then Joseph got up, took the child
and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he
heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was
afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the
district of Galilee. 23 There he made his home in a town called
Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled,
“He will be called a Nazarene.”
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