The Magi—the Wise Men—do not arrive in Bethlehem until this evening, when we observe the Eve of the Epiphany. But for this morning, our lectionary has borrowed from our Roman Catholic friends what they call “The Feast of the Holy Family”—the story of the flight of Joseph, Mary, and the child to Egypt and their return after the death of Herod.[1] What is left out by our friends, and officially by us, is the heart of Matthew’s story. But we heard the omission: the three verses that tell of the killing of the young boy children in Bethlehem, a terrible story by itself, but made more terrible by the evil afflicted on Jews by Christians and others through the millennia.
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