Suppose you had been a Christian believer in the mid-first century. Suppose you were observing Christmas and the birth of Jesus the Savior in whatever way the earliest church celebrated that season. But suppose that in the midst of marking Jesus' advent, you ran into a Jewish couple who trembled with rage at the very mention of this Jesus whose birth Christmas marks. Suppose further that upon inquiring what accounted for their vitriol and disdain, you discovered that the Jesus whose birth you get so excited about had been the cause of their own child's death. "Our two-year-old precious son died because your Jesus was born. We hate what you call Christmas. For us it is a season of death, a grim anniversary of our little one's violent demise at the hands of King Herod's thugs."

What would you say? It's a far-fetched scenario, but the biblical fact of the matter is that there were parents in the area around Bethlehem who really did weep over their slain toddlers and infants. What's more, it was relatively easy to connect the dots that would trace the sequence of events that led to this infanticide directly back to Jesus, the son of Mary. What do we make of this? What could we have said to grieving parents whose children died because Jesus was born? These are not easy questions.  But then, this Lectionary reading for the Sunday after Christmas is not a pleasant story.