Matthew writes: “[Herod] sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.”

Jesus is born, but in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “at a devastating price.” No one knows how many children died; the New Testament alone documents the heinous event. Some say only four or five — surely no more than 10 — as Bethlehem was a tiny village.

But whatever the numbers, the weeping was ceaseless. Unnamed parents, wailing inconsolably. Matthew’s Gospel recalls Jeremiah 40: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; refusing all consolation, because they are no more.”

Two millennia later, our world, our country, is no stranger to inconsolable parents…

Just when we think the people and stories of the Bible are too distant from us, too pre-modern to fit our postmodern existence, yet another inconsolable voice is heard in Ramah, Kyiv, Newtown or Uvalde.

And we realize humanity still has a long way to go… When will we experience an epiphanic moment that compels us to end, or at least to reduce, the body count, for Christ’s sake?…

Death is real; human beings are ever so vulnerable…hope is a terrible gamble; but God’s grace won’t go away…

And there it is: the enduring hope that Christ’s gospel involves those epiphanic moments when and where God finds us, and, somehow, we find God, “clean, for the first (second, third …) time in (our) lives.”

An epiphany of grace, hidden in plain sight.

from “The Gospel as Epiphanic Moment”