The Cost of Christmas

It’s Christmas Day.  Betty and I are enjoying our time with our family in Franklin, Tennessee.  We’re visiting with Betty’s stepmother, Nita, Betty’s sister, Margie, and her brother Jim and his family.  By the time anyone reads this we’ll have opened our presents this morning and enjoyed a late breakfast of Tennessee country ham, biscuits and cheese grits –a family tradition with a definite Southern flavor.

We hope you and yours are enjoying this day as well and we hope we all remember the real reason for the season, the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus.

But, I also believe we need to occasionally remind ourselves that our Savior’s life that ended with him paying the cost for our sins, started with others paying the cost for his birth – the Holy Innocents.

Matthew 2:1–18 tells this story: Herod was “greatly troubled” when astrologers from the east came asking the whereabouts of “the newborn king of the Jews,” whose star they had seen. They were told that the Jewish Scriptures named Bethlehem as the place where the Messiah would be born. Herod cunningly told them to report back to him so that he could also “do him homage.” They found Jesus, offered him their gifts and, warned by an angel, avoided Herod on their way home. Jesus escaped to Egypt.
Herod became furious and “ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under.” Since Bethlehem was a small town, the number of babies killed was perhaps 20 or 25. The horror of the massacre and the devastation of the mothers and fathers led Matthew to quote Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah,/sobbing and loud lamentation;/Rachel weeping for her children...” (Matthew 2:18)

Our Lord’s life ended in his blood for others, but as we celebrate this Christmas day may we remember that his life began and was marked by the blood of others.  The Christmas story is one of sacrifice from beginning to end.

Have a blessed Christmas.