Christmas in Ramah

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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Jeff Lampl  

Christmas in Ramah

The Lord spoke to me again, saying: "In Ramah there is bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children and cannot be comforted, for they are gone." 
Jeremiah 31:15 (TLB)  

"A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for
her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." 
Matthew 2:18 (NIV)

Rachel, Jacob's favorite wife, was the symbolic mother of the northern tribes (known as the Northern Kingdom or Israel), which were taken into captivity by the Assyrians in 622 BC.  Jeremiah pictures Rachel crying for the exiles at Ramah, a staging point of deportation five miles north of Jerusalem.   Ramah was actually the staging point for the deportation of the Jews in the southern Kingdom, Judah, in 586 BC when they were deported to Babylon.  Imagine women crying, double over in agony, because their husbands are dead and they will never see their children ever again.

After the Magi had left Bethlehem (Jesus was perhaps two years old), Herod sought to ensure that this prophesied new King of the Jews would not grow up to usurp his throne.   He did so be sending his troops into Bethlehem to kill all male infants under the age of 2.
(Matthew 2:13-17) Can you imagine the pain of the scene?  It must have been sickening, horrendous, certainly to awful to think about on Christmas.

Christmas is the most painful time of year for many people.  Maybe it is for you.  Some of us spend Christmas alone.  Others are with family, but all are not present, perhaps due to estrangement or divorce or death.   For others this Christmas will be sparse because of recent job loss.  For still others this Christmas is probably their last.

In the metaphor of Rachel weeping for her children we see God weeping for each and every sufferer on planet earth.   In Jesus we discover Immanuel, God who is with us.   It is to bring His salvation, comfort, love, hope, tangible presence to the Rachels who weep, to men and women who are alone, to teens who are hopeless, to the sick who are both sick and sick and tired of being sick. 

I find it to be a very strange but very real and powerful thing.   Having lived a decent number of years now, I can look back on many Christmas seasons and among the most special were the ones where I was hurting the most.   In retrospect it was in those times that that I made the discovery that God was there.   I probably can’t explain to you why and it probably didn’t look to others who were with me that I was being comforted by God.   Yet those times stand out.  I remember them.  I remember the excruciating, gut wrenching pain.  I remember feeling like I had hit bottom and there was nowhere lower I could go.  

But I also remember discovering, after a time, that the bottom was solid.

And, after a time, I was able to get up again . . . . . . or rather I was picked up again.

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