TL;DR
The Massacre of the Innocents is not an awkward add-on to the Christmas story—it’s the first sign that the incarnation threatens violent power. Matthew 2 reveals a God who is found with the vulnerable, the fleeing, and the grieving—not with those enforcing order at the cost of innocent lives. When Scripture is reduced to a book of principles or political props, we miss its central witness: God’s unmerited grace saving action. If our reading of the Bible leaves us comfortable with state violence against migrants, we are not misreading Scripture—we are telling a different story altogether.
Reading Matthew 2 After Christmas
Having just seen the 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s CECOT prison pulled by CBS News shortly before airing, I have no qualms saying this: our current administration would rip the baby Jesus from his mother’s arms, send Joseph to be tortured in another nation, and leave Mary weeping and alone in a detention center.
Author’s Note:
This post is more pointed than much of my writing. A trusted friend who read an early draft named that clearly—and they were right. I may be wrong in some of my judgments here, but I’m not unsure. This is a conviction I hold with humility, and one I feel compelled to name plainly.
That may sound extreme. But it is also precisely the story Christians tell at Christmas—if we bother to keep reading.
It’s often called the Massacre of the Innocents, the story recounted in Matthew 2:13–23, where, fearing the Magi’s words that a king has been born, Herod “sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Earlier in the story, Joseph is instructed by an angel:
“Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt… for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”
As things go, this text is appointed in the Lectionary for the Sunday after Christmas1 in most Protestant churches. It lands at an awkward and emotionally complicated moment. Many pastors—having just run the gauntlet of Advent, Christmas Eve, and often a Longest Night service—take that Sunday off. So do many congregants, exhausted from travel, family, and worship packed into a few short days.
What often happens instead is that an associate pastor, a seminarian, or even a volunteer is tasked with preaching what amounts to one of the most difficult Lectionary texts there is: the slaughter of children.2
13 Now 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…”
16 Then Herod sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem…
18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children…”
While it’s understandable that so many miss this Sunday, it’s also a shame—especially this year—as we are witnessing, in real time, this text being lived out before our very eyes.
What the Bible Is—and Is Not
In Unpacking Scripture in Youth Ministry, Andrew Root explores how Scripture is meant to shape ministry and faithfully form those entrusted to it. Root begins by clarifying what the Bible is not.
It is not a divine reference book.
It is not primarily a history textbook.
And it is not, at its core, a book of principles.
Instead, Root insists:
“The Bible is primarily a story—the story of God’s action. It doesn’t primarily reveal a set of principles, but an agent” (65).
Scripture witnesses to who God is and how God acts. And in reading it, we are invited to discern how God is acting now.
This is why Root pushes back against a purely academic approach to Scripture—important as historical and cultural context may be.3
“Reading the Bible,” he writes, “should direct us not into the world behind the text, but into our world where God acts” (102).
The central question becomes: What does this story tell us about who God is and where God is found?
When I Read Matthew 2:13–18
When I read Matthew 2:13–18, I cannot escape the conclusion that God is found with the innocent—among the fleeing family, the grieving mothers, the terrified children.
God is not neutral here.
God is not abstract.
God is not standing above the violence, weighing principles.
God is present in the suffering, and judgment is reserved for those who would sacrifice innocent life to preserve power.
The Bible’s authors intentionally included this story to say as much.
Nativity Scenes and Moral Incoherence
In recent weeks, some churches have drawn criticism for displaying incomplete Nativity scenes—Jesus or the Holy Family absent, replaced with signs suggesting they are in hiding due to threatened deportation by ICE.
These displays are often dismissed as “political.” I would argue they are something more precise: they are theological. They are attempts—however imperfect—to take Matthew 2 seriously.
If Scripture tells us who God is and where God is found, then we should be very clear: God is not found with ICE or with the government officials ordering these actions.
And this is why I continue to appreciate Root’s insistence on taking Scripture seriously without reducing it to slogans. There are many Mainline and Progressive Christians who rightly protest the mistreatment of migrants while simultaneously weakening Scripture’s authority elsewhere. That inconsistency matters.4
At the same time, I am utterly confounded by the number of Christian pastors and influencers who claim biblical justification for our current immigration policies. This is where Root’s warning about treating the Bible as a book of principles becomes painfully relevant. If Scripture is reduced to rules, one can cherry-pick Romans 13 and conclude that migrants deserve whatever consequences come their way for violating the law.5
A Yard in My Neighborhood
This disconnect feels especially close to home for me.
In my own neighborhood, there’s a house with a Trump 2024 sign still prominently displayed—and, in the very same yard, a Nativity scene.
I don’t say this flippantly or even angrily; I say it with a kind of stunned sadness. What strikes me is not hypocrisy so much as moral incoherence. The two symbols sit side by side without any apparent awareness of the tension between them.
And I wonder if that’s because Scripture has been reduced, in many contexts, to a political prop—a book of principles selectively taught and interpreted so as to align neatly with one party’s talking points.
When the Bible is flattened this way, it no longer confronts us; it confirms us. And once that happens, even the image of a refugee child fleeing state violence can be rendered invisible—standing quietly beneath plastic shepherds and a glowing manger.
Principles or Presence?
Root reminds us:
“In real life—and the Bible is only concerned with real life—principles must be violated on occasion, sometimes even out of obedience to God” (66).
Jesus himself says the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.
So when “Bible-believing Christians”—and notice again that for Root the Bible is not something we believe in so much as a witness to who God is—argue that innocent migrants should be rounded up, detained, and deported in the name of law and order, they reveal what they believe Scripture ultimately is:
a book of principles to be enforced, not a story of God’s saving action among the vulnerable.
Grace, Not Return on Investment
I was listening recently to an episode of my good friend and colleague Dennis Sanders’s podcast Church and Main, where he hosted a conversation with Todd Brewer, a PhD and New Testament scholar. At one point in the conversation, Brewer made an observation that stopped me cold. What made early Christianity so radically different from its surrounding Roman culture was the sheer recklessness6—my word, not his—with which Christians gave to the poor.
Brewer contrasted this with the Roman philosopher Seneca, who understood gift-giving as a kind of strategic investment. You gave gifts to those who could return the favor, or at least benefit you down the road. Giving to the poor made little sense in that framework. There was no real return on investment. It was inefficient. Foolish, even.
And yet, this is precisely where early Christianity broke ranks with its culture.
Brewer also noted that in the New Testament, the word for gift is deeply connected to the word for grace—charis. Early Christians understood their generosity not as calculated benevolence, but as overflow. They gave because they believed they themselves had received an overwhelming, undeserved abundance of grace in Christ. Their generosity wasn’t strategic; it was a testimony.
Which makes me wonder this.
As I sit here editing this post yet again on Christmas Eve, with a $25 gift card next to me that I’ll send off to a local teen moms ministry, I can’t help but ask: have I—have we—really experienced grace?
I’m thinking here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his insistence that grace is costly. And I wonder whether American Christians—myself included—have developed such a cheap understanding of grace that it no longer disrupts us. Maybe that’s because we’ve flattened God into this immanent frame. Or maybe it’s because of our quiet pride and hubris—the assumption that we’re, all things considered, pretty good people. Deserving people. Worthy recipients.
And if that’s the case, then like Seneca, we can afford to be careful. Measured. Prescribed in our generosity. We can give, yes—but only within limits that preserve our sense of control.
Which brings me back, again, to Root’s central point.
If the Bible is merely a book of principles—rather than the story of God’s overwhelming grace and mercy toward humankind—then it makes perfect sense that Christians would treat it as a collection of precepts we can selectively apply. We remain in control of the narrative. We decide where grace stops.
But if Scripture is truly the witness to God’s unmerited favor and reckless generosity, then the only faithful response is to live out of overflow. Out of abundance. Especially toward those who have been named as “vermin,” “garbage,” “human refuse,” or “the worst of the worst.”7
I realize I’m belaboring the point. But this is precisely where theology matters.
If we are already pretty good on our own, and grace is merely God’s stamp of approval, then our restraint makes sense.
But what if the biblical story is right?
What if we were all, as Scripture says, “aliens and strangers… having no hope, and without God in the world”?8
Well—
that changes everything.
In Closing
The Massacre of the Innocents is not an embarrassing footnote to the Christmas story. It is the first sign that the incarnation is a threat to the powers of this world.
And if the story we are telling at Christmas leaves us comfortable with state violence against the vulnerable, then the problem is not that the gospel is unclear—it’s that we’ve stopped listening to it.
The Revised Common Lectionary is a lectionary of readings or pericopes from the Bible for use in Christian worship, making provision for the liturgical year with its pattern of observances of festivals and seasons.
Or often, it is understandably skipped altogether — which is sort of a tragedy in itself.
The more I think about it, I’m thinking that the uber-specialization of New Testament texts Brewer describes in the podcast is the liberal/progressive inverse of the often conservative version of “biblical principles.”
To be clear, I’m speaking here about the tendency within liberal or progressive Christian scholarship to write off Paul or “psudo-Pauline” texts as irrelevant or that suggest the birth narratives of Jesus are “happy fiction” as Elaine Pagels suggests in her Miracles and Wonders book.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing for “open borders” or some caricature of progressive policy. I understand that different Christians can have different ideas about how matters of our faith should be enacted within public policy. What I am trying to say is that I believe any public policy promoted by Christians must be grounded in a dignity and respect for human beings. As I wrote to by GOP Congressman recently, who himself professes the Christian faith, we should be able to agree on this— all people were created in the image of God (Gen 1:27), God loves all people (John 3:16), and Christ died for all (2 Cor 5:15).
I swear I have not listened to that Cory Asbury song recently but it keeps coming to mind.
It’s a reasonable argument to say that the Biden administration allowed too many immigrants and that the large groups of people overwhelmed the social-services sectors in certain communities. One could argue the Denver-metro experienced such a scenario. But, it’s an entirely different argument to say, “we want to be able to care well for our current neighbors and for the migrants who will be arriving.” There are real economic limits that should be accounted for.
Ephesians 2:12