Quick Summary:

Having just celebrated the joyful birth of Christ with all the carols and feasting and family traditions that go with it, we are suddenly plunged into the depth of despair on this first day after Christmas. We tend to sentimentalize Christmas. But this morning Matthew bends over backward to convince us that Christmas is about a God who enters into the true reality of human life, even in its most bleak aspects. Paranoid, power-hungry Herod, hears of the birth of another King and he takes drastic measures to insure that there will be no threat to his reign from any quarter.

To those who live in the margins, Emmanuel represents HOPE. But to a power-hungry world Emmanuel represents THREAT. He must be destroyed.