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<div>Just yesterday, the little boy had taken his first, wobbly steps.Just yesterday, the mother had seen the little boy emerging from the disappearing rounded edges of baby fat, flashes of the man glowing in his tiny eyes.

Just yesterday, the little boy had stumbled into his first word with delight.

Just yesterday, the new mother had felt her exhaustion melt away with the first gummy grin from her baby boy.

Today, he was dead.

And she had been robbed of life.

Murdered by a distant king for the sake of a supposed savior. But what kind of savior carries the death of so many innocents in his healing hands? What kind of God is welcomed to earth by the blood of infants running in rivers, by the agonized drumbeats of wailing mothers?

In the wake of Jesus' birth, the gospel of Matthew explains that King Herod feared this infant upstart who might one day rival his divine-right rule. So, he does what any brutal megalomaniac might do: he kills every young boy in sight. Yet, Jesus, the boy he sought to exterminate, slips away to Africa, his parents having received some angelic version of an Amber Alert. Most scholars agree that this horrid massacre never happened, but was a hagiographical invention meant to establish Jesus’ birth in the pattern of Moses as well as to bolster Jesus' credibility as the Christ (further proof, of course, that men -- not women or God -- wrote the Bible).

Yet, so many of us believe it anyway, buying into its violence as proof of the divinity and uniqueness of Jesus, lauding the escape of Jesus while passing over the crumpled bodies of infants whose legs could not yet even support their bodies.

And 12 years later, as Jesus amazes the rabbis in the synagogue, Mary quietly treasures these things in her heart: her remarkable son and her lucky escape from the unending burden of burying a child. While she treasures these things in her heart, thousands of mothers, gulping back ever-present sobs, finger those small socks, that tiny hat, that little blanket, that only memento left from the life that ended all-too-soon so that the world might have a savior.

I imagine, if Jesus were intelligent enough to teach and ask questions as a preteen, he also probably would have wondered why he had so few male playmates his own age. I imagine he asked his mother why this was, why there were so many girls his age, but no boys. I imagine Mary began by explaining how special he was.

But this kind of special was more a curse than a blessing, knowing one's life was ransomed by so many others.

Why couldn't God have truly given Jesus the ignoble birth we celebrate? Why did God have to hang that damned star like some distant father in a waiting room smoking a celebratory cigar oblivious to the actual pain and joy of the birth? That damned star shining brightly in the dark sky signaling the magi of greatness below, notifying Herod of his tiny, helpless rival. That damned star of God that impaled, speared and crushed countless children with its prideful beams of light.

The twinkle, twinkle of that little star, in effect, ordered the deaths of the innocents.

Perhaps God's ways are our ways, after all.

But doesn't it seem somehow a terrible injustice that so many innocents died so that the Innocent One could live only to die, years later, at the very same hands?

Perhaps, Jesus didn't come to die. Maybe instead Jesus, like the rest of us, came to <em><strong>live</strong></em>. Perhaps, he got lucky, in exile, living out his formative years in a diaspora in Africa. Maybe knowing that his was a life lived at the expense of — no, in debt of — the blood of the Innocents made him, in part, the extraordinary person he was.

Maybe what Jesus did in his three decades on Earth was the least he could do in humble repayment to those that gave their lives that he might live, who gave their lives simply because he lived.

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