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In Honduras, where I used to live, people celebrate el dia de los inocentes ("Day of the Innocents") on December 28, "commemorating" the children who were slaughtered in Bethlehem after Jesus was born. It is much like our April Fools' day; people play practical jokes, and those who fall for them are los inocentes, which struck me as a strange way to remember this tragedy. But, intended or not, there is a shrewd logic beneath this contradiction.

The disastrous event that took place in Bethlehem when Herod ordered the slaughter of all the boys two years old and under is part of the picture of Christmas, too. But we tend to allow sleigh bells, evergreens, and shopping frenzies to push it out of view. Yet it is, in fact, in all its brutality, what Christmas is about: the Savior's "invasion" (to borrow from C. S. Lewis) and his confrontation with the forces of evil. To subsume this aspect in wafts of potpourri and roasting chestnuts misses the essence of Christmas and sets us up—like the Hondurans who fall for the practical jokes—as the innocent fools.

Matthew's narrative of Christ's birth juxtaposes noble and wretched characters in stark contrasts: stars and swords; majestic kingly visitations and twisted kingly agitation; Mary rejoicing, Rachel weeping; the children who die, and the Child who gets away. How do we reconcile the glorious birth of our Savior with the bloody death of those boys?

There is no extrabiblical documentation of Herod's heinous act. But Bethlehem was truly a "little town" (with a population of between 300 and 1,000, according to some commentators). So it is within the bounds of possibility that the deaths of a few children ("perhaps a dozen or so," according to D. A. Carson) were overshadowed by the many other atrocities Herod committed during his turbulent, twisted reign.

The Magi were not kings and may not have been three, but were, in any case, wise. Skilled astronomers and members of a priestly caste who may have been Zoroastrian, they were industrious, courageous, and truth-seeking pagans from present-day Iran or thereabouts.

One biblical historian suggests that they left Persia late in 3 B.C., after Jesus was born, and arrived in late 2 B.C., when Jesus was a toddler. By the time they found the child, his family was ensconced in a "house" (Matt. 2:10), and Herod calculated that the child could have been born up to two years earlier.

Herod, in the meantime, suffered from "distemper," which the historian Josephus said "greatly increased upon him after a severe manner." "His bowels were also ulcerated" and he had "a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath." All this topped off his well-attested paranoiac ravings, which had already driven him to command that his wife (whom he dearly loved), along with his two promising sons, be executed. This man "of great barbarity towards all men equally" had been confirmed "King of the Jews" in 40 B.C. by the Roman senate. Little wonder, then, that at this decrepit stage of life he was in no mood to hear word of one "born king of the Jews."

Were it not for a faith rooted in things unseen, we are tempted to conclude that during this savage episode in God's saving activity his "controlling hand" must have been temporarily stayed. What does one say to the mothers of those boys? Their deaths made no sense: What did they have to do with earthly thrones and messianic expectations?

Matthew calls on the ghost of Rachel, as portrayed by the prophet Jeremiah in his lament for the deported descendants of Israel, to express the grief of these mothers:

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14