Counting the Children

Not long ago a missile fell on a wedding. Not a military target. A wedding, with dancing and food and children running between the tables, the way children do at weddings everywhere on the earth. When the count came out, a six-year-old was among the dead. And the official response was the language we’ve all gotten used to: the reports are not confirmed, we are awaiting verification, every precaution was taken.

I’m not going to name the country, and I want to be honest about why. It isn’t to protect anybody. It’s because I could point to more than one this year, and I know how this works: some of you just filled in a name I never said, and somebody across the pew filled in a different one. Whichever name you filled in, somebody on the other side filled in yours. That’s not a flaw in the sermon. That’s the sermon.

Not confirmed. I want to sit with that phrase for a while, because it’s doing a lot of work. Somewhere in that rubble there either is a small body or there isn’t. Verification settles which, but it doesn’t settle the other question, the one the statement is built to dodge. Whose child was he? Who did his hair that morning? And who answers for him now?

The Bible has a name for the answering question. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It’s the first deflection in human history, spoken by the first murderer, and God’s answer to it stands: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:9-10). Crying from the ground. Not from the news report, not after verification. From the ground.

Rachel Is Still Weeping

Matthew tells a hard story about children at Christmas, which is why most of us have heard it so softly we don’t hear it at all. The wise men leave. Joseph gets a warning in the night. And Herod, furious at being tricked, sends soldiers to Bethlehem and kills every male child two years old and under (Matthew 2:16).

Matthew doesn’t give us the number. He quotes Jeremiah instead: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18).

Refused to be comforted. That’s the phrase that separates the mothers of Bethlehem from every government spokesman since. Rachel will not accept the condolence card. She will not accept “these things happen.” She will not accept the arithmetic that says her boy is an unfortunate necessity in a larger strategy. Scripture does not correct her weeping. It records it. Jeremiah’s own oracle goes on, one verse later, to promise her hope for her children’s return (Jeremiah 31:16-17), but when Matthew reaches for these words over Bethlehem, he takes the lament and deliberately leaves the promised comfort hanging. It preserves the sound of it for twenty-six hundred years so that no reader of the Bible can ever again say that the death of children is the price of somebody else’s policy without hearing what God thinks of that sentence.

And notice how quiet the story is. No crowd, no battle, no memorial. Bethlehem was small. A couple dozen boys, maybe. History barely kept the receipt. That’s how it works. The powerful dead get names and monuments and an eternal flame. The children of the wrong village get a statistic, then a shrug, then a sentence nobody finishes.

Herod was not a monster in his own mind. He was a responsible king protecting stability. He kept the peace, kept the taxes flowing, kept the temple running. His resources required his ruthlessness, he’d have told you, and plenty of priests in Jerusalem slept fine that night too. That’s the part that should keep us awake. Evil of this size always wears the clothing of prudence. Now let me say the other thing plainly too, because it’s true: prudence is sometimes just prudence. There are real enemies in the world, some governments deliberately put children in harm’s way, and a soldier or a statesman may weigh a strike honestly and grieve the child honestly. There is also this: no power on earth has spent more blood and treasure shielding other people’s children than the one some of you are thinking of right now. None of that cancels the question. It just means the question cuts every direction or it cuts none. Nobody drops a missile on a wedding believing he has dropped it on a wedding. He has dropped it on a “compound” or a “target,” and the child is a discrepancy in the after-action report.

The God Who Counts

Over against all that arithmetic stands a strange, persistent claim in Scripture: God counts.

Jesus said, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father… even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29-31). The Psalmist says God determines the number of the stars and gives to all of them their names (Psalm 147:4). That’s the Lord’s habit. He doesn’t do mass figures. He does names. Hagar, a pregnant runaway by a spring on the road to Shur, is the first person in scripture to give God a name, and the name is “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). And Jesus says the sparrows are not merely counted, they are not forgotten before God (Luke 12:6).

Now bring that back to the wedding. There were no sparrows at that wedding. There were children with names, and the hairs of their heads were numbered, and the God who numbers them watched the smoke go up and did not lose track of a single one. This is not sentimentality. It’s the arithmetic of heaven, and it runs in the opposite direction from the arithmetic of the war room. The war room counts acceptable losses. Heaven counts losses, period, and each one is a name he made and knew. And heaven’s counting is not a sedative. It’s an obligation, because God counts through his people. The number is taken in heaven so that somebody on earth will answer for it, and the people who answer are us.

Luke gives us the other side of it. Jesus comes over the ridge, sees Jerusalem spread out, and weeps. Not discreetly, the way we weep at funerals. The text says he wept over it, and said, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:41-44). The Son of God, the man with all power in his hands, looks at a city whose choices will kill its own children, and cries. Whatever else it means to follow him, it cannot mean less than this: he is not numb, and his people are not permitted to be.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now the mirror, because we have gotten very good at some kinds of counting and very bad at others.

We scroll past dead children depending on the flag. Be honest. The photograph of a child pulled from rubble moves us or doesn’t, mostly on the basis of whose flag is on the rocket. We have our grief pre-approved and our grief pre-dismissed, and we call it having a position on the conflict. And before anybody aims that at the other pew, it lands on me first. I have scrolled past children with names because they were on the wrong side of my opinion, and I have called it staying informed. James has a word for treating human beings differently by category (James 2:1-4), and church folks have gotten comfortable applying it to wealth and poverty while ignoring that it applies to flags too.

And closer to home: this congregation counted heads last Sunday, because we always do. Attendance, offering, the metrics that tell us whether we’re healthy. Suppose we counted differently for one month. Counted the children in this county who go home to nobody. Counted the kids in our own pews whose fathers have never once prayed with them. Counted, in the church’s own history, the little ones we didn’t fight for when fighting would have cost us. Herod is long dead, but prudence is still doing his work in respectable places, and the church has not always been the place where the weeping mothers get heard. Sometimes we were the ones handing out comfort like it was a sedative, and calling the silence peace.

Here is what holds all of that up so it doesn’t crush us. The same Lord who counts the sparrows counted you, and he counted your hardness of heart too, and he went to a cross for it. The census of heaven is not only over the victims. It runs over the cold-hearted too, and the price was paid there. Nobody in this room is disqualified from feeling again. That’s the whole point of grace. We can afford to grieve, because our comfort doesn’t depend on pretending nothing happened.

So What Do We Do?

See. That’s the first work. Refuse to be managed by the passive voice. When a statement says the incident is unverified, translate it in your spirit: children are dead and someone is buying time. Don’t build your heart a bunker.

Weep with somebody who weeps. There is a family in this county that lost a boy this year, and grief that has no witness curdles into something worse. Rachel refused comfort, but she should not have had to weep alone, and neither should anybody in the pew behind you.

Count something for God this week, and start close. There’s a widow two pews back who needs a casserole and a ride to her appointment. There’s a single mama in this county whose boy needs a man to ask him about school. The giving can reach further: real money toward a child you will never meet, here or overseas, through a relief agency that publishes where it goes. If you’re able, open your home to the foster system, which is full of children nobody’s counting well.

And last of all, the hardest one. Pray by name, out loud, for the children of the people you’re against. Not “bless all the children of the region.” Pick a name. Herod couldn’t have stood in the room while somebody prayed that way, and neither can the hardness in us. It dies exactly there. So pick a name.