December 28, 2025
One Herod After Another
Matthew 2: 13-23 (with Exodus 1:8-10, 15-22)
Rev. David Germer
Our second passage is from Matthew 2. At this point in his gospel, Matthew has provided a genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham; he’s recounted the birth of Jesus, and the visit of the magi, who’d asked around in Jerusalem to be led to the one born “king of the Jews.”
The acting king of Judea at the time, Herod, noted this, with fear and displeasure, and did some digging, and put into place a devious plan. He said that he wanted to worship this new king, “so… let me know when you find him.” They followed the star to Bethlehem, bringing their gifts. (Now liturgically, this is a bit awkward, because Epiphany, when we tell this part of the story, is in a week and half. So we’re jumping ahead.)
After their visit, the magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, so they headed home, by another road. And that is where the story picks up in our passage.
Listen for God’s Word:
“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, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt 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.”
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. Then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
“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.”
When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “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.”
Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 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.
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.”
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
This story is often known as the slaughtering of the innocents.
Those couple of lines in the middle of the passage really swallow up everything around it. It’s hard to focus on or care about these somewhat obscure and confusing references to fulfilled prophesies, or even the unusually high frequency of dream guidance being offered and taken, in this passage, when we have this image of a king killing babies, on account of Jesus. That alone is enough to sit with, and attempt to process, for a long time. It raises so many questions.
One would be: How many innocents were slaughtered? It’s dramatic to say thousands, when likely the town was 1000 people. Between 6 and 20 is a realistic estimate… though scale is certainly not a 1 to 1 measure of horror, in this case.
We might validly wonder: did Jesus grow up hearing this story (for surely this is the kind of thing that, for a time, defines any community, especially one as small as Bethlehem)… and what must that have been like, for Jesus, to live with that? I don’t know.
Another question: how many uprisings did Herod quelch, or did the Roman Empire stamp out, before they even began? The history books cannot tell us, but surely this willingness to do anything and everything, to hold power, points to a pattern.
We might also wonder about the prophecy from Jeremiah that Matthew says this tragedy fulfills – does that mean God made this happen? I’m more confident answering this one: no. God doesn’t summon evil to accomplish things. Instead, this shows that even the most catastrophic and merciless evil cannot destroy God’s ability to save.
Still. Jeremiah’s depiction of a weeping, inconsolable mother, is sobering.
We’ve being exploring this large theme of “making room” this year, in our sermons, with each week inviting us to make room in a specific way – or in a particular area of life. Making room for children, making room to be yourself, for hard seasons, for small mercies, for hope. Originally, today’s focus was “making room for lament.” And certainly, as this slaughtering of the innocents story and the weekly and daily news remind us all too often, we need to do that, even during the Christmas season.
But the passage is not just a headline-catching sad story that leads us to lament. At its heart, it’s a call to action rooted in perspective and hope.
That’s what we’re doing today: making room for perspective.
To get there, I want to talk about another story.
I learned recently, in a text thread with my closest friends from high school, that not everyone listens to multiple movie podcasts and reads several pieces of film-criticism per week, not everyone follows box office numbers or breathlessly devours dozens of movie critics year-end 10 best lists every December. Is that true? That’s strange to me, but I accept it.
If you do any of those things, you’re aware that while there often isn’t a consensus pick for movie of the year, this year, there unquestionably is. It’s at the top of virtually every critics list and has practically almost already been given all the awards that won’t actually be voted on for another few months. The movie of 2025, by any and every measure, has been, and is One Battle After Another. And my guess is not nearly enough of you have seen it.
Who has seen it? (You don’t have to love it for me to like you… but I haven’t loved a movie this much in a long, long time).
I’m not going to spoil the movie for you, but I need to talk about it this morning, because when I read and reread this passage, I found that the movie had given me a new way in to wrestling with this disturbing story.
The movie is about a bomb-specialist member of a revolutionary group – the French 75 – that’s devoted to “free borders, free bodies, free choice, free from fear.”
Through an unusual set of circumstances that involve some very non-kid-friendly scenes (that are upsetting and bizarre and hard to watch, for anyone… so please hear that I am not necessarily recommending this movie to even all adults, and caution that the first 30 minutes in particular would lead some to give up on the movie)… but in the story the bomb-specialist revolutionary (played by Leo Dicaprio) finds that he has to flee for his life, with his infant daughter, because a man named Colonel Lockjaw – a near caricature of a macho man standing in for the US military industrial complex – is hunting down the members of the French 75, perhaps especially the bomb-maker and his daughter, for personal reasons. And so, father and newborn relocate and go into hiding.
16 years later, not much in the world has changed, but the dad, now a burnt out former revolutionary going by the name Bob, and his teenage daughter, Willa, learn (though not through a dream) that Lockjaw has, after all this time, tracked them down, and their lives are again in danger. Their home is ransacked, a high school dance is raided and every student questioned and threatened, other surviving members of the French 75 are kidnapped… It’s not exactly Pharoah or Herod killing every child, but there is severe collateral damage in this crazed pursuit.
You’ll have to watch the movie to fully understand why Lockjaw so desperately needs to find Bob and Willa. If I attempted to explain it now, you’d think I’m making it up. But I will say that it has to do with power, and with insecurity, and one characters’ quest to get a little of one out of a deep sense of the other.
I won’t spoil his motive – why he is doing it. But I’ll tell you how, because this is what I find so insightful and instructive and relevant, this morning.
Now Pharoah and Herod had absolute power. They could simply order babies to be killed, without fear of any consequences. They did this because of fear… but their fear was rooted in what would happen if they didn’t do it; they had nothing to worry about if they succeeded, even if everyone knew their evil plans.
This, fortunately, is not the world we live in. People can’t get away with doing something like this, now, without at least an attempt at a justification… sadly often rooted in others’ fears.
In One Battle After Another, Lockjaw orders a group of military service underlings: make me a reason to deploy in the town where we’ve learned that this father and daughter are hiding. “Make me a reason.” It’s a sanctuary city full of what they derogatively call “wet bodies” (and worse), and troops are sent in to raid multiple businesses with large numbers of immigrant workers, claiming that they are each fronts for a large drug operation. They call this strategy for descending upon this unsuspecting town, “drugs and tacos.” Nobody questions it; this link is pulled out of thin air.
The businesses are raided. Arrests are made. Ultimately, there are casualties. The curtain is pulled back further on the powerful men behind these horrific acts of deception and frightening disinterest in all the lives disrupted or ruined for one man’s self-interest.
It’s chilling because it all looks so familiar.
But through it all, we also see another community, led by a character named Sensei Sergio, who is neither surprised nor particularly alarmed by any of this. Sensei is well connected in this community, and he’s able to calmly mobilize seemingly the entire city in order to protect the most vulnerable and commit small but mighty acts of civil disobedience. His entire life has been given to preparing for the inevitable aggression of the powerful, responding with meticulous ingenuity, embodying zen-like peace by taking everything that comes at him as “ocean waves.”
He has no power in the world, but has the supreme authority and power granted to him by those who know and depend on him, because he is a person of purposeful action. He leads others to freedom, while noting that true freedom is the absence of fear.
There’s so much more going on in One Battle After Another, and I hope a group of us will talk about it later this spring in a faith formation class.
We could spend days dissecting it’s wisdom, but central to the movie, and to its relevance this morning, is the contrast between powerful men, motivated by fear to get, demonstrate, or cling to power… and those on the outside of worldly power who stand against injustice and oppression.
Lockjaws, Pharoahs, Herods, dictators, presidents – they rise, and they fall. There have been many deceptive, self-absorbed, powerful, fearful “leaders,” and there will be many more.
And we must stand up to them.
But we cannot give them more space in our minds than they deserve; we cannot elevate their place in the story that God is telling above the characters that matter most to the narrative.
Who are those characters?
First: well it’s Christmas in a church, so I hope you’re thinking of one answer:
Jesus. Matthew told his story the way he did on purpose so that we couldn’t miss it, so let’s make sure we don’t:
Just as God called the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, now God calls Jesus, through the desert and the wilderness, out of Egypt. Everything that God called Israel to be, Jesus is. He’s the true and better Moses, following the same path, leading his people, in the end, not just out of slavery from an oppressor but into eternal liberation from sin and death.
He’s also the perfect contrast to the Herods and Pharoahs.
Their power is rooted and finds expression in violence and death; their power is motivated by fear: fear of insignificance, of weakness, of personal insecurities being laid bare and realized by others, in front of others and especially fear of death itself, which one commentator describes as “the tyrant that rules all other tyrants.” Jesus’ power and rule is about gathering, inclusion, restoration, and liberation.
Herod the prop-king kills Israel’s innocent children. Jesus the king of the cosmos will lift up children as those to whom his kingdom belongs.
Jesus is the central character in that passage, and in the story of the world that God is telling. But he’s not the only character.
The other significant characters are not Herod, not Pharoah, not any person in power who, out of fear, becomes a tyrant capable of dehumanization or murder.
The other important characters are the magi, who acted in faith, with creativity, and Mary and Joseph, who listened and acted with agency to protect. It’s Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, and their courageous act of civil disobedience. It’s Sensei Sergio, calling for courage himself; it’s Willa and her dad Bob, who barely accomplishes anything in the movie One Battle After Another… but never gives up on fighting the forces that are in pursuit of his vulnerable daughter. If you watch, notice that even children have a role to play in the fight.
Do you see? You are the other important character. They are [gesturing to the children]. I am. It’s us, together.
We are called to step into the fight. With no assurance that things will be better… in fact, almost guaranteed that there will be one battle after another, one Herod after another… but called, therefore, to do what is right, assured that God will be with us, in the fight. We know the ultimate outcome… but in the meantime, all seems and feels up for grabs.
There will be losses. Injustice and oppression and marginalization are not new, and we are not on the verge of eradicating them. Things may, for a time, get worse.
It is appropriate to lament. And so we do. And we will do so in song in just a moment. And then, we will proclaim the faith that puts the wicked schemes of powerful, insecure people into perspective.
I’ll close with a reminder, and a poem.
Remember that the good news of our children’s moment finger play… is no less true or universe-altering, regardless of the actions of Herod, in the years that followed; regardless of any actions of our modern Herods, tomorrow or in the weeks and months ahead.
“Joy is an act of rebellion:” a poem by David Gate.
Joy is an act of rebellion
Against established order
Which is why the angels
Brought their glad tidings
To the nightshift serfs
Rather than the boardroom suits
Because the joy of heaven
Heralded to us
Cannot be commoditized
Privatized or monetized
Though the system takes all it can
From our tired bodies
And stacks its weight
Upon aching backs
It will never, not ever,
Ransack our hallelujahs
Hallelujah. Amen.
Benediction:
The Herod’s of every time will rise and do their worst.
And we will stand up to them and proclaim boldly:
God rules the cosmos. Christ is King. Jesus is Lord. Hallelujah. Amen.