NOVOSOLONE, Ukraine,

Nov. 25, 2022 — Maria Kamianetska leans over the body of her infant son Serhii in his tiny coffin. She is wailing, held up by her mother and sister-in-law. Days earlier, Maria had been nursing Serhii at 2 a.m. in the maternity room. A Russian rocket crashed into the hospital, collapsing the walls, trapping her and her son in the rubble. Rescue workers pulled her out, badly wounded, but Serhii did not survive. Maria leans over and kisses her son, his tiny face still badly scraped. The villagers prepare to lower him into the ground.

GAZA STRIP,

Nov. 8, 2023 — Eight-year-old Habiba was at home painting and watching the news with her family when their home was hit by an Israeli airstrike. “When the war started, Habiba’s little body was shaking all the time because of the sounds of the bombings and rockets,” her mother Feda’a said. “She wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. They killed her dreams, and they deprived me from enjoying the light of my beautiful moon.”

DALLAS, Texas,

Sept. 25, 2023 — During a gathering for a relative killed earlier this year, Debra Harper Smith heard gunshots. She grabbed her step-granddaughter, 2-year-old Zyah Lacy, and began running, but soon felt blood. “My baby is shot!” she cried out. Zyah was taken to the hospital, where she died the next morning. “She had a whole life ahead of her that was taken senselessly,” Harper Smith said.

History is stained with the blood of victims of brutality — and no incidents strike us as so brutal as the killing of infants and children.

Preparing to celebrate Christmas, we decorate our homes with lights and sing carols of hope and peace. Yet the Gospel of Matthew urges us to prepare for the coming of the Messiah by tuning our ears to the weeping of grieving mothers.

These, too, are Christmas stories.

Jesus’ origin stories in Matthew and Luke include dark and disturbing elements lost in our ecclesial rituals and cultural revels.

Matthew’s story is the most disturbing — but, perhaps for that reason, especially relevant. Jesus’ birth is of little significance in Matthew except in how it is framed in a prophetic message about the Savior’s coming out of the Israelite tradition and into a suffering world.

The opening two chapters move inexorably toward King Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” — the massacre of every boy 2 years old and under in the region of Bethlehem in Herod’s maniacal effort to eliminate any threat to his power (Matthew 2:13-18).

A puppet of Rome, Herod ruled with little popular support among the Jewish people. He cooperated with Roman legions in subjugating the people while enhancing his power and wealth. He imposed crushing taxes to fund the building of his palace.

A paranoid and unstable leader, he quashed several rebellions and brutally suppressed any threat, even executing his own wives and sons. The emperor Augustus said it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.

Matthew concludes the horrific account with a prophetic evocation: “Then was fulfilled what been ­spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘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’ ” ­(Matthew 2:17-18, citing Jeremiah 31:15).

Matthew applies the anguish of one of Israel’s foremothers, hundreds of years in the past, to bereaved women whose sons were massacred by Herod.

But Matthew is doing something deeper: Rachel’s weeping is for all mothers through the ages whose beloved children are victims of the savagery of politics and power.

The mothers of Bethlehem, of Ukraine, of Gaza, of violent inner-city neighborhoods — all their tears are gathered into the raging grief of ­Rachel.

They refuse to be comforted. Their children are not coming back. Their hearts will not be healed.

Just a few miles from Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, in the city of Sepphoris, around A.D. 5, a Roman regiment crushed a Jewish uprising. Numerous combatants and citizens were slaughtered. Two thousand militants were crucified, the town burned to the ground.

Jesus would have known of this ­trauma and brought the memory of it into his ministry. He would nonetheless assert that love, mercy and for­giveness are the way to live in such a world.

He would become a victim of this same violence. Though his family escaped Herod’s wrath, some 30 years later Mary would grieve over the broken body of her son, a victim of state terror.

Two millennia later, the players have changed but the cycles of violence continue. This Christmas, the mothers of Gaza and Ukraine — with mothers around the world — cry out in anguish as violence and brutality claim the lives of their children.

This is the blood-soaked world into which the Messiah has come: a world of Herods and Caesars, Hitlers and Stalins, tyrants and terrorists. What difference does it make that the Savior has come into this world?

This is the challenge of Matthew’s Gospel: The Savior’s message and mission unfold within the victims’ unresolved grief. What can Jesus say to them? Will his preaching, healing and forgiving make a difference?

Is his revolutionary manifesto, the Sermon on the Mount, an antidote to the horrors of the many Herods? What will it matter to the heart-shattered mothers if the reign of God is at hand?

How can Christians celebrate Christmas in a way that dares to engage the world of suffering and yet still express hope?

If we welcome the newborn Prince of Peace, we must know that peace is not a sentimental matter of privatized piety but a gritty engagement with the wounds of history.

We celebrate Christmas by joining in the mourning for victims of violence.

We celebrate Christmas by binding the wounds and working to ameliorate the social conditions that spawn such violence.

We celebrate Christmas by calling for and working for real peace, rooted in justice, reconciliation between peoples and nations, and the long, hard work of building the Beloved Community.

We light candles and sing carols proclaiming a defiant hope that light still shines amid darkness. That is also a part of Matthew’s Christmas story. May it be a part of ours.

Will O’Brien coordinates The Alternative Seminary, a grassroots program of biblical and theological study. He lives with his spouse, Dee Dee Risher, in the Vine & Fig Tree community in Philadelphia and attends Germantown Mennonite Church.