WARNING: If you've experienced childhood sexual abuse, this post may be triggering. Please don't feel you have to read further.
My first term of seminary is over. As the focus shifts from essays and research to construction paper and stop-motion videos, a few concepts have been echoing in my mind. Today, I’d like to write a little meditation on a part of the Christmas story that we typically avoid. But first, some background, from Asia.
The yin and yang are conceptualized as ‘two complementary forces that make up all aspects of life’, perfectly balanced and harmonious. [1] A Malaysian professor named Edmund Chia observed that a worldview ‘of harmony strives to hold on to two polar opposites without dismissing one in favour of the other.... If there were no difference or polar opposites, then harmony would mean nothing.’ [2] When faced with a paradox, we in the West try to hold opposing sides of a paradox in tension without dismissing one or the other. But East Asians cradle the two in harmony. Eventually, a new understanding may appear, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
In sitting with the apparent opposites of divine love and divine wrath, a famous Japanese thinker named Kazoh Kitamori came understand something new: the concept of ‘divine love rooted in divine pain.’ [3] Influenced by Buddhist principles, people here accept suffering as a natural part of life, rather than trying to always avoid it. The pain of God, described by Kitamori, happens when Christ embraces people who defiantly cling to their sin. God’s refusal to relinquish His love for sinners even in the midst of His anger at their rebellion and rejection is the spark that ignites this relational pain. Jürgen Moltmann, a German thinker, later speculated that the pain of God is caused by His compassion over suffering. When I think about it, these approaches complement one another. Compassion and anger are not mutually exclusive in the heart of God. As Dane Ortlund once put it, ‘The two rise and fall together. A compassion-less Christ could never have gotten angry at the injustices all around him… compassion and indignation rise together in his soul.’ [4]
Kitamori went on to say, 'God in pain …[is the] God who embraces those who should not be embraced…[and] reconcile[s] the world to Himself.’ [5] God embraces the perpetrators—abusers, and paedophiles. [6] The monstrous harm these violators cause to innocents brings up in our hearts only a shadow of the wrath God must surely experience at human sin. The cross is the final expression of God’s love and wrath, joined together in agony. [7] God suffers not only with the victims. He also suffers at the damage the wrongdoers inflict on themselves, and at one person He loves wilfully causing hurt to someone else He loves. Yet He makes the decision to keep loving both the abused and the abuser.
‘How does this relate to Christmas?’ you might ask—and for good reason! No one likes to talk about paedophiles at Christmas time.
Then again, no one likes to talk about a massacre of babies, either.
Have you ever seen or heard a Christmas pageant or sermon that depicts King Herod’s vicious slaughter of the children of Bethlehem? I haven’t. And yet, it’s just as much a part of the story as the wisemen and shepherds.
Why do we leave it out?
For one thing, it’s gruesome.
It’s not exactly something that will attract visitors, we think, or invite them to stay.
Murdering babies is not something anyone I know would condone.
But there’s another side to my discomfort.
God sent his Son to earth, and as a result, babies died.
Did He cause it?
No.
Did He prevent it?
Also, no.
Could He have?
Yes.
The murder of these babies bring us uncomfortably close to questions we’d rather ignore. We’d rather focus on the tinsel, on the sparkling star, on angels’ songs than on questions that come very close to accusing God.
All that needless suffering, just because a king was jealous. The weeping of mothers over their lifeless babies’ tiny corpses. How can this side of the story not make us feel sick?
Herod was one mentally unstable man. Completely paranoid by the end of his life, he murdered his favourite wife, his sons—anyone he thought might usurp his throne. Murdering a village of babies and toddlers was no big deal for him.
And yet, ‘God embraces those who should not be embraced’ [5] and loves the unloveable.
What if the wisemen’s trip to Jerusalem was the result of more than a bunch of scholars’ disorientation? What if their arrival was one last invitation from God to Herod? ‘Turn back from your wickedness! Look, I have sent my Son! Go with the wisemen—they will lead you to Him.’
How amazing would it have been if Herod had followed in the steps of the Queen of Sheba, and gone to see the renowned King? [8] How amazing would it have been if Herod had embraced what it meant to be one of the people of God—not just in name only?
But King Herod of Judea, just like the Pharaoh of Egypt, hardened his heart. Freewill also means the freedom to be evil. Just like in Egypt, in Israel, Herod’s hardened heart led to atrocity. Just like the beginning of Moses’ life, the beginning of Jesus’ life was shadowed by the murder of innocents by a ferocious, ungodly king. [9]
But this story also points to something else. Without the massacre, we lose the message. We lose the whole reason why Jesus’ coming was necessary. Human sin is atrocious. Just like murdering babies. Just like paedophilia. There’s no getting around it.
To a holy God, all sin is atrocity.
In reaching out to King Herod, God also reaches out to us. He says, ‘It’s not too late! You, too, can be saved! You, too, can be rescued, transformed, made new. You don’t have to be subject to a decaying heart. Turn from your wickedness towards Me. Let Me embrace you. It will hurt Me, but it will save you. That’s how much I love you. Please let Me do this for you.’
The Christmas story reminds us of the cross. Jesus’ life began with the death of innocents, and ended with the death of The Innocent. Mothers wept for their slain children, and Jesus’ mother and God the Father were pierced with the pain of witnessing their Son slain. (‘And a sword will pierce your own soul too,’ said the prophet Simeon. [10] God the Father was the Person whose soul would be pierced, and Mary’s soul would be pierced ‘too’. )
Both Mary and God the Father lost the same son on Calvary. In this sense, Mary’s pain was not unique. Simeon’s prophetic words hence were not only for Mary, but they were intended to give a glimpse of what God would experience at the Crucifixion.
—How Chuang Chua [11]
That’s how much God loves us. He wounded Himself. Jesus was was 'pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.’ [12]
So this Christmas, come, let us adore the One who embraced pain right from the start, so that in the end, He could embrace us.
NOTES
[1] ‘Yinyang’, Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 4 December 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/yinyang.
[2] Edmund Kee-Fook Chia, ‘Asian Theological Methodologies’, in Asian Christianity and Theology: Inculturation, Interreligious Dialogue, Integral Liberation, (Routledge, 2021), 60.
[3] How Chuang Chua, Japanese Perspectives on the Death of Christ: A Study in Contextualized Christology (Regnum Books, 2021), 381–382 of 1252 in e-book.
[4] Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Crossway, 2020), 88-89 of 205 in e-book.
[5] Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005), 12.
[6] As someone who experienced sexual abuse in childhood, this is not a sentence I take lightly.
[7]How Chuang Chua, Japanese Perspectives on the Death of Christ: A Study in Contextualized Christology (Regnum Books, 2021), 419 of 1252 in e-book.
[8] See 1 Kings 10:1–13.
[9] The prophecies about Jesus said that He would be a prophet like Moses (see Deuteronomy 18:15–18). There are many overlapping details between the lives of Moses and Jesus; this is one of them.
[10] Luke 2:35, NLT.
[11] How Chuang Chua, Japanese Perspectives on the Death of Christ: A Study in Contextualized Christology (Regnum Books, 2021), 439 of 1252 in e-book.
[12] Isaiah 53:5, NIV.
