(14.) Women and Children First: Mother Weeping for Her Children
(14.) Women and Children First: Mother Weeping for Her Children.
Welcome the Children. “Jesus took a little child whom He placed into their midst. Taking the child into His arms and embracing him, He said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37). “Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me. But whoever gives these vulnerable ones a hard time, bullying them or taking advantage of them, or causes them to go astray, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matthew 18:1-6).
The Eternal Worth of Children. It should go without saying that children are uniquely honored by Creator God, but the world seems to have forgotten. For those who read the Gospels, one can’t help but notice that Jesus valued children highly. No one understood better than Jesus that children are icons of God made in His image, they are living sacraments and visible signs of the invisible reality of God in the world. He didn’t overlook them, He didn’t underestimate them. Jesus honored children, not only for who they were as human beings but also for what they symbolized. There is one gospel scene in particular where He makes His feelings known about the importance of receiving children. What did Jesus mean when, after taking up a child into his arms, he said that whoever welcomes, whoever receives, one of these little children in his name in fact welcomes him? (Mark 9:36-37).
“A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and lamenting loudly. It was Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no longer alive.” (Matthew 2:18; Jeremiah 31:15-17).
The biblical story of Rachel reads like a romantic tragedy. She was the younger sister of Leah who thus had the duty of being the shepherdess out in the fields (Genesis 29). She must have been hardworking, responsible and resourceful in her important role in the family business. She had to bring her flock out to pasture for food and drink, to care for them, watching out for predators, and being careful to nurse her flock through injuries and sickness. Rachel must have fulfilled this role well, or she wouldn’t have had the responsibility. One day her job brought her to a local well, where she met her distant cousin Jacob. He was immediately smitten, fell desperately in love with Rachel, love at first sight. This might have been the first time in the Bible that romantic love seemed to be the prelude to marriage. Their meeting at the well also confirmed the Jewish tradition that wells were the place for romantic meetings.
Jacob wanted to marry Rachel, of course. She was noted as being particularly beautiful, according to Scripture. In this way Rachel was like her other matriarchs before her, Sarah and Rebekah, both of them noted for their beauty as well. Rachel’s father agreed to marry off his daughter to Jacob if he worked seven years for Laban, but he didn’t say which daughter. So Jacob was fooled into marrying sister Leah. Jacob was furious, naturally, but agreed to work seven more years in order to marry his love Rachel. The trickster Laban gave the con man Jacob a bit of his own medicine. Finally, Jacob married Rachel, and now he had the misfortune of being married to two sisters. As he was to find out, it’s no wonder later the Mosaic Law forbade the marrying of sisters (Lev. 18:18). Theirs was not a happy family life, unfortunately.
Referring to Jacob’s undying preference and passion for Rachel, Rabbi Jonathon Sacks had a few observations in his commentary on Genesis. “What Jacob learned is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved. Without that, there will be conflict and tragedy. But to heed the unloved requires a special capacity: the ability to listen – in Jacob’s case, to the unspoken tears of Leah and her feelings of rejection. What the story of Jacob, his wives, and their children tell us is that love alone is not enough. There must be justice, fairness, a regard for how your sentiments impact on others. In the end, it was Leah, the less loved, who gave Israel its holy tribe, Levi (Moses, Miriam, Aaron, and the whole line of the priesthood), and its kings, the descendants of Judah.” And of course, it was from Leah, the rejected one, that produced the Messiah, the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
There is no doubt that both Rachel and Jacob deeply resented the deception of Leah’s marriage to Jacob. So the relationships were all strained right from the start. This led to Leah’s overwhelming feelings of rejection in her married life, that she was profoundly unloved. The sibling rivalry between Rachel and Leah really heated up when it was soon discovered that Leah was especially fruitful and Rachel was barren. There were many years of baby competition as Leah continued bearing Jacob’s children while Rachel remained childless. Rabbinic tradition holds that Rachel went fourteen years childless, which is a long time to maintain a fierce rivalry with Leah. Making matters worse for Rachel was the stigma that accompanied barrenness at that time. The inability to bear children assumed God’s disfavor. Pregnancy was accepted as an act of God. A barren womb brought guilt, shame, distress, and the sense that the major purpose in life was being thwarted. The baby battles continued, full of jealousy and resentment on Rachel’s part. She to her credit did continue to pray to God for a baby through these trying times. Rachel was competitive but faithful at the same time.
“God remembered Rachel’s plight, God answered her prayers, and He opened her womb.’ (Genesis 30:22).
God never “forgot” Rachel, of course. So He didn’t need to remember her. God was mindful of Rachel’s prayers all along, her repeated requests to be blessed with a child by Jacob, and in the fullness of time according to Him, He jumped into action. God doesn’t need a memory, He doesn’t need to be reminded, He holds everything in the universe in the top of His mind at all times. For God to “remember” is for God’s light to focus like a laser in order to act, to intervene. God becomes mindful when He wants to act.
Scripture makes the point that after continued prayers from Rachel, God finally became mindful of Rachel in such a way that He intervened and opened her womb. She soon gave birth to a biblical hero, Joseph, which means, “May He Add.” Rachel’s first words after this first birth was, “God has taken away my disgrace.” So having one child only whetted Rachel’s appetite for more in her competition with Leah. Joseph much later became the savior of Jacob’s entire family when he provided land in Egypt during a drought.
And now the tragedy. Rachel became pregnant again, but she died in childbirth. This was the first recognized death during childbirth in Scripture. Before she died, she named the boy “the son of my sorrow.” But Jacob soon renamed the boy Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand,” which meant a designation as a favorite son. Jacob was understandably devastated, and decided to bury Rachel while they traveled to their new home. Rachel was buried near Bethlehem, the land where she died. Ramah was just a handful of miles away to the north on the border of Israel and Judah in the future tribal land of her son Benjamin. Jacob did not want to bury her in the ancestral tomb in Hebron, but there was no clear reason given in Scripture. Rabbinic tradition has Rachel dying before her 40th birthday, a short life. Especially when you consider that Jacob lived until he was 147 years old.
That’s not the last we see of Rachel in Scripture. Through her son Joseph and his son Ephraim, Rachel became commonly known as the “mother of Israel“, the matriarch who came to represent all the people of the northern kingdom. Her grandson Ephraim, along with Manasseh, were the two tribes that settled in the north, apart from Judah in the south. In Jeremiah 31:15-17, Rachel is pictured by the Lord to be weeping in her grave for the exiled children of Israel, destroyed by the Assyrians almost 150 years earlier. In the Jewish imagination, Rachel was mourning the loss of her distant children of Israel as they were being dragged away past her tomb into exile. In her grief, the motherly heart of Rachel “refused to be comforted.” Rachel is symbolic of all the distraught mothers of Israel who mourn their children taken captive. Her weeping was considered by Jeremiah to be intercession, and her liquid prayers were answered by the Lord, “Stop your weeping, and dry your eyes. for your grief work will be rewarded. They will return from the enemy’s land. There is hope for your future. Your children will return to their own territory.” Her weeping for suffering children, and her being buried near Bethlehem, was prophetic and was quoted in Matthew 2:18, after the “slaughter of the innocents,” the horrific massacre of all the babies in Bethlehem by the insane king Herod as he tried to quell his fears about the new king born in Bethlehem. Perhaps in Matthew’s mind the loud weeping in Bethlehem after Herod’s unthinkable infanticide was heard even a few miles away in Ramah, and he was reminded of this important prophetic Scripture in Jeremiah. Rachel is embraced in Hebrew history as having the ultimate heart of the mother, and Jeremiah brought her compassion for children to the forefront in his prophecy. The slaughtered babies in Bethlehem became known as the Holy Innocents, and Rachel continues to be pictured as weeping from her grave for suffering children everywhere. To this day and since ancient times, Rachel’s tomb on the outskirts of Bethlehem is considered a vital holy site in Judaism, its 3rd holiest site, and continues to be visited daily by Jewish mothers who mourn for their children who have died.
Infanticide: It has been traditionally defined as the killing of an innocent young child. A relatively new term, Neonaticide, is now used to refer to an infant being killed within 24 hours of its birth. Infanticide, neonaticide, is unthinkable to civilized people, but the U.S. has a very spotty history regarding this grotesque way of denying the right to life of a newborn. The infamous case of “Baby Doe’’ in 1982 was a situation in which a newborn with Down’s Syndrome was rejected by the mother and allowed by the medical personnel to place the baby in another room and left alone to die of starvation. The case was brought to the County Courts, and they approved of it. And then it was brought to the Indiana State Supreme Court, who once again approved of that act, making it perfectly legal to commit infanticide. At that time, a doctor was quoted as saying that it was not at all uncommon, with many prestigious hospitals allowing newborns with a disability to die, a passive infanticide. This highly immoral act was brought to the surface once again in 2019 when Virginia Governor Raph Northan calmly explained how he approved of the infanticide of an impaired newborn. He was a pediatric surgeon of all things, and he saw no moral problem with denying life-giving care to a newborn. To this day in 2024, there are seven states that have legalized late-term abortions up to the point of birth, and each year there are a reported 13,000 deaths of preborn babies due to late-term abortions. We would have thought that modern science would have complicated things for him and many others… Surgeons are now able to perform life-saving surgery on unborn babies while still in utero. So on the one hand, a doctor can offer heroic surgeries on unborns, but on the other hand the doctor can simply sit on his hands and watch a newborn starve to death. Apparently, if a baby is wanted, it has inherent value, and save the baby at all costs. On the other hand, if the baby is not wanted, the baby has no value, and just let it starve and throw it out with the trash. And still on the other hand, a person responsible for the death of an unborn child within the pregnant mother will be charged with manslaughter. And science raises another question in this matter… If a viable unborn is delivered, no matter how many months of development, is it considered infanticide to perform an abortion on that baby?