Rachel Weeps
"A voice in Ramah was heard.
Anguish and loud wails.Rachel weeping for her children.
And she would not be comforted,
because they are no more." - Matthew 2:16-18
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This blog post isn't for everyone. It may offend you and probably should. It's about horrible things that should make us angry and sad. We have been indifferent to them, and it will take a shock to the system for us to change. If you have eyes to read, please read. I believe these principles are true for all people, but I intend to shake Christians in particular.
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The quote above is Advent's saddest story. The infant Jesus and his family escaped the clutches of a bloodthirsty tyrant, but not without collateral damage. As Mary and Joseph fled, Herod's soldiers entered Bethlehem with orders to kill every male baby. A scene of bloodshed concludes Matthew's Christmas story. It doesn't end with wise men or shepherds or angels or even the escape to Egypt. It ends with the massacre of the innocents.
The greatest historians of the day paid no attention. You won't read about the Bethlehem slaughter through Josephus or Tacitus or any other work outside of the Christian Bible, and there's a perfectly logical reason for that: this sort of thing happened all the time, and it made no difference to the world. Rulers regularly ordered genocide to consolidate their power, and dispatching a couple dozen infants in a small Jewish town was small potatoes for Herod, who had already executed three of his sons.
It was a blip on the radar.
For that reason Rachel in Matthew's quote is a solitary figure. She weeps alone. Dismissed, ignored, abandoned.
The quote originally comes from Jeremiah 31, which describes the exile of Judah. After siege and slaughter, the Babylonians gathered Hebrew prisoners of war in the city of Ramah before marching them off to captivity in the East.
Rachel symbolizes a grieving people whom the world has forgotten. Her unceasing tears timelessly represent the person – the people – whom the cycle of human violence crushes. The Hebrew exile encompasses all the hallmark cruelties of war; men killed; women raped; children stolen. This is the reality of our world, of our history. The human race enjoys moments of peace and prosperity, but all the while a weeping Rachel lurks around a secluded corner.
We don't hear her wails even now. America has for all of its history minimized the pain of its marginalized. Although I expect power-hungry politicians to tread over society's most vulnerable members for gain, it pains me to know that Christians – indeed, Christian leaders – are some of the loudest dismissers.
"A poor person never gave anyone a job," says the president of a large Christian college in America, with respect to poverty. "A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume."
"There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world," writes a prominent member of the Gospel Coalition with respect to American chattel slavery.
But however much we deny her story, Rachel is still there. In the group homes, in the prisons, in the lynching fields. She's there alone, and she's weeping. We can plug our ears and say "la-la-la," but Rachel and her pain remain.
We understand how you feel. We didn’t want to know about sexual abuse either. pic.twitter.com/HljXUmFREr— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) February 10, 2019
I could harp on the specific travesties, but that's not the point. We are all guilty of minimizing our neighbor's pain. We rarely lie when doing so. In most cases we simply don't know about suffering that occurs outside of us and don't want to know. We have our own sadness to handle. The more a tragedy affects us, the more it grieves us.
This is part of human nature. I don't mean to shame, but rather to demonstrate the challenge. Ignorance and self-protection dictate our baseline posture and behavior, the "animal urges" described by the Bible. Humans are by nature a self-preserving lot. If violence doesn't directly hurt me, the next closest victim I care about is a member of my tribe suffering.
But awakening to a stranger's sadness admittedly feels superfluous – an unnecessary burden in an already sorrowful world. Unnecessary, impractical, detrimental, and maybe even masochistic.
So then, what do we do?
Don't despair over my heavy-handed, idealistic blog post. No one requires us to save the world or turn our consciousness into some echo chamber of innumerable wails. The calling is actually very simple, practical and unconventional.
You needn't scour the globe to find human sorrow and need (but of course, don't let me stop you if you'd like to do that). Unseen human sorrow is close to you. In your apartment complex. On the street corner. In your pew. We must recognize these sufferers as neighbors – our neighbors – before we can proceed.
And how do we help them?
You may not like the answer, because the Christian faith first and foremost calls for mourning. Many of us would rather fix than mourn. After all, we grew up learning that it was wrong to cry over tragedies we can't reverse, let alone spilt milk.
A well-intentioned blog applies Matthew 2:16-18 in a natural fashion.
"One barometer we should use in making our decisions is 'Will what I am doing make ‘Rachel’ smile or cry?' Let us all make an effort to dry her tears."Well-intentioned and kind. That should be our end goal for those who suffer. We'll get there. But it's not the start.
Rachel does not ask for you to make her smile. She does not ask for you to dry her tears. Her request is painfully simple in this moment: that we recognize her pain and join her.
She refuses to be comforted. Jeremiah's version of the quote ends with the promise of restoration, but Matthew leaves it noticeably unresolved. Do you think the sound of weeping ever faded from Jesus' ears? No. He carried the sorrows of Bethlehem's mothers with him when he marched toward Jersualem.
My pastor in Michigan often described this mindset as a mixture of two postures: realism and hope.
Karl Marx called religion an "opium" because it used hope of an afterlife to ease the proletariat's misery and quiet their disenchantment with the status quo. Faith made them comfortable enough to never change the world. Marx might have properly described most of the American church, but he didn't describe the faith of Rachel. She acknowledges the true state of the world and refuses to shrink from its harshness.
But realism does not preclude the unwavering belief that love will have the last say in our world. And if love will have the last say, we aim to love others in the present. We can address the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of our world as clear-eyed yet inflexibly joyful people.
I believe, however, that this process must begin with mourning. Those who follow Jesus must rediscover the spiritual discipline of mourning and join Rachel in her pain.
God invites us to join her and share her pain in our own small part. We may not sit in the first row at the funeral, but we will attend even if in standing room. To do so is to express the deepest longings and exorcise the deepest fears of the human heart.
People can share your pain in the simplest of ways. They changed my life in 2015 just by listening to me and acknowledging me. Depression had sunk me into despair and shame. Despairing because I didn't know how to get better. Ashamed because I didn't feel that I could express how I felt, lest I be rebuked for a lack of piety. But the people who listened to me changed my mind. None of them parachuted into my life to tell me what I should do to fix things. But they did the simplest thing: acknowledging that my pain was real. However silent my pain felt.
Those friends forever impacted me. I could name ten people right now who gave themselves to hearing me and mourning with me. Some of them didn't even know me beforehand. They know who they are, and I hope they know that they changed my life for the better. How can I not pursue compassion in light of their influence?
I've come to believe that the only idea more crazy than Jesus' resurrection is the belief that self-sacrificial love will ultimately conquer greed and violence. I've come to understand that the two principals are inseparably linked to each other. Maybe I'll turn out wrong and learn that self-preservation is the ultimate power. It really does seem that way this month. Maybe we'd be better off desensitizing ourselves to human pain and distracting ourselves with empty things. Maybe mourning isn't worth it after all.
Maybe. But I'm with Rachel on this one. She understands the beautiful irrationality of this movement.
It's a movement that gives without asking for anything in return.
A movement that blesses its enemies.
A movement that does not repay evil for evil.
A movement that honors the outsider above its own members.
A movement that breaks down tribalism and nationalism to make one family.
A movement that actively surrenders the power and influences it holds over others.
A movement that practices repentance and forgiveness hand in hand, moment by moment.
A movement that seeks out the lowly and associates with them. And honors them. And learns from them.
A movement that unabashedly mourns what is wrong with the world. And then does something about it.
A movement that considers the failings of its neighbors to be its own failings.
A movement that considers the poverty of others to be its own poverty.
And the pain of others to be its own pain.
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