I hope everyone had a good holiday, filled with fun and family and relaxation. I hope it’s not over yet for you, and by that I don’t mean just the relaxation and visits and enjoyment. I’m talking about the celebration of the festival of our Savior’s birth. You’ve heard of the twelve days of Christmas. We’re so secular nowadays, that even we Christians let the stores and sales brochures and other such nonsense dictate to us how and when we should celebrate. Chances are when you think of the twelve days of Christmas, even then you’re thinking of drummers drumming and partridges in pear trees. And how many realize that those twelve days start on Christmas Day and end on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6^th? So while everyone else is throwing away the Christmas tree—hold on! Wait just a bit! We’ve only begun the Christian Feast Days surrounding our Lord’s birth.

A truly great feast has a mixture of sweet and sour. All candy and no meat doesn’t work well when it comes to eating, and it doesn’t work very for a Christian Feast either. And so the twelve days of Christmas bring us a well-rounded mixture of truth—happy and sad. Yesterday was the feast day of St. Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church, where we are reminded that we have entered into a deadly serious commitment to our Lord. We’ve vowed to suffer all, even death, rather than turn away from our Savior and a true and pure confession of His Name and His Truth. For doing just that, St. Stephen, a deacon of the church in Jerusalem, was dragged outside the city by an enraged mob and stoned until dead. The members of the Sanhedrin knew what they were doing. Many in the mob, including the man who would become St. Paul, did not. And as he died, Stephen prayed with the very words of Jesus "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And those who later repented, like St. Paul, were forgiven.

On January 28^th, the Church Calendar reminds us of some other martyrs, whose death we are commemorating today, namely the infant martyrs of Bethlehem, known to the church as the "Holy Innocents." The color red on our altar and lectern and pulpit today remind us of the martyr blood that was shed on that gruesome day. Let us today, then, Remember The First Martyrs of Christ."

St. Matthew loves to point out how the Old Testament finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. In our text it’s no different. After describing the horrible, gruesome order of Herod, he writes Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ¹⁸ "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

This wasn’t the first time the mothers of Israel were heard weeping and mourning for their children and it wouldn’t be the last. They wept in Jerusalem as their children were killed or carried into exile at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. They wept at Calvary, as Jesus hung dying on a cross. They wept for their martyred sons and daughters, for Stephen and James, for Peter and Paul, for their leaders who were killed in the first centuries of the church, Ignatius and Polycarp—all of whom suffered because they confessed Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Savior. Mothers weep today for the many modern martyrs throughout the world, whose names only they know—in China, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa. They suffer and die because of all the modern king Herods who want Christ to die all over again and his church with him.

In Herod we see what happens when men want to be their own lord. King Herod was a man who would stop at nothing to protect his power and position. He murdered his own wife, his three sons, his mother-in-law, his brothers-in-law, his uncle and anyone else whom he suspected might have had designs on his throne. He arranged for the murder of one of his sons while he, Herod, was lying on his deathbed. And in his will Herod left instructions that all the leading men of the Jewish nation should be rounded up and executed publicly at the time of his death, in order to ensure there would be proper mourning on the occasion of his funeral. Cæsar Augustus once sneered that it would be safer to be a pig in Herod’s pen than a son in Herod’s house.

We live in much nobler times, so we think. Until we look at the newspaper and see a two year old child, covered with blood, dead in the forest of Kosovo, still tightly grasping her broken doll. "Surely not here!" we piously hope, until we hear our president defend the gruesome attack on innocent children in the womb, pulled out backwards, a scissors drilled into the back of their heads, and their brains sucked out a vacuum cleaner—all for the terrible crime of interfering with their parents’ ability to control their own destiny and be the lords of their own lives!

But most shocking of all, we see in Herod what is also at work in ourselves. We may not be baby killers, but there’s a dark side in each and every one of us that wants to be lord of our life—no matter what the cost, no matter what commandment must be broken, no matter what good deed must be left undone.

Do you see why Jesus had to come on Christmas? Because of the murdering hatred and self indulgent, self-destroying egoism of sinful man. We see it all around us, and if we’re honest we see it in ourselves too. Thank God for Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem for our sins! He alone can rescue us from this wretchedly sinful existence and free us from this world! And he has, praise God!

What did those little Baby boys in Bethlehem do to be killed? Nothing short of being born at that time in that place. They were killed for no other reason than that they resembled Jesus, they were boys and they were young—and one of them just might have been the one who was born king of the Jews, whom the wise men from the East had come to honor and to worship. For that they became "martyrs." And it’s proper to call them that, because they were blood-witnesses of Jesus. That’s what the word "martyr" means. The blood of these infants bore witness to the blood Jesus came to shed for our wretched sins.

Are we martyrs for Christ? Are we willing to suffer all, even death, rather than fall from faith, as we vowed at our confirmations? Do our lives bear witness to his cross? Jesus would later state, "Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple," (Lk 14:27). These infants resembled Christ in his death. For us to do the same means to take up our crosses, to lose our lives for the sake of Jesus and his Gospel. By our baptism, we’ve been put in the exact same position as the holy innocents of Bethlehem, that is, if we don’t hide our resemblance to Christ under a bushel. If we dare to let our light shine before others in lives of holiness and words of faithful witness, we too will know the meaning of that daring sentence of St. Paul who said, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the church" (Col. 1:24). Or St. Peter, who wrote, "Rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed" (1 Pe 4:13).

We rightly call them "holy innocents," not because they were without the stain of sin. We know from the Scriptures that we all are conceived and born in the condition of being sinful. Even the tiniest unborn child is in need of the grace of forgiveness. But these little Jewish boys, were sons of the covenant. They were circumcised, they were "baptized" in the Old Testament way. And so they died under the grace and forgiveness of God.

They have not been forgotten. Their lives were pressed early into the Lord’s service, just as ours, and they were faithful to the end, even though that end for them came very early. And now they are numbered with the saints above, just as we will be if we remain faithful to our end.

This whole episode makes no sense apart from Jesus. Apart from Jesus, this is simply another example of man’s cruelty to man, a tyrant king’s pursuit of power on the backs of his people, the senseless slaughter of innocent children. But Matthew tells us it all took place to fulfill the Word of the Lord spoken by the prophets. Twice in our text Matthew reminds us how God fulfilled his Old Testament word. The flight to Egypt: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son," and the death of the babies: "Rachel weeping for her children."

Nothing in this world takes place by accident. God is in control, his hand is at work. Hidden behind the tragedy on earth is the triumph of eternal victory: The victory of these young saints who are now in glory, and the escape and final victory of the Savior, who made their redemption possible by shedding his own blood for them and for us.

"It’s not fair" people often protest. But it’s all fair. Yes Jesus escaped while they were cut down, but only so that he might later, willingly lay down his life for the world of his own accord, after living a perfect life for us, after fulfilling all the Scriptures, after proclaiming the Gospel and founding his eternal kingdom. Yes the infants of Bethlehem died—unfairly according to human reasoning—but fairly nevertheless. Like all of us, they deserved nothing. Yet God graciously gave them the privilege to die for him, and now he’s given them the victor’s crown of life.

Neither I, nor St. Matthew have the desire to put a damper on your Christmas joy. But we need to remember what Christmas is all about. Jesus came into the world to be an innocent victim, a bloody sacrifice because of the King Herod in all of us—our selfish, sinful motives and actions. He came to be cruelly killed, so that you and I might live forever with him in heaven.

"Rachel weeping for her children." We weep too at the loss of life of innocent children in our own day and even in our own land. But save the biggest tears for those who die eternally, unbaptized and without faith—whether children or adults. We weep at the thought of this sweet baby Jesus growing up and being hated and finally suffering and dying on the cross. But Jesus told the women of Jerusalem on the day of his crucifixion: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children." Lk 23:28 Weep for those who reject the real Jesus of Bethlehem—the Son of God who was born to be a bloody sacrifice. How central that shed blood is Jesus wanted us never to forget. It is for this reason, in obedience to his command, that we feast at his table these holy days, and partake of his body and blood.

May our Christmas love and affection always be for the "man of sorrows, familiar with suffering," who was born to die. And may our faith in him remain steadfast, no matter what, so that whether in life or in death, we may bear testimony to him and the cross, and join the faithful martyr throng in heaven. Amen.