Please read the Scripture passage before the homily.
The life and struggles of Adam and Eve we replicate in our own lives. Somehow, we relive the ups and downs of our history in our own lives. This is true also for Jesus. As the new Adam, Jesus must somehow relive the history of his people in order to remake it as an appropriately good history of the human race. Jesus became human to show us how we should live as humans.
He went into Egypt with his parents so that God could call him out of Egypt as God’s own beloved Son, just as God had called the Israelites out of Egypt as God’s own son at the time of the Exodus.
The Israelites also were sent in Exile. Rachel, a mother of the patriarchs, died giving birth to Benjamin in Ramah, which is a few miles from Bethlehem. The Exiles passed through Ramah. The cry of the matriarch became the cry of the people banished from their homeland. The cry of the exiles became the cry of the mothers of Bethlehem at the death their two-year-old sons.
The childhood of Jesus takes us out of Egypt, and out of Exile, through deserts so that we can recognize Jesus as the focal point of all human history. Jesus is recognized as the true Israelite in whom there is no guile, the true Israelite living out repentance from our sins.
Poor Herod, instead of thinking beyond his nose, saw only an attack on his position instead of a place in the glory of the real kingdom. He was the type of person who would kill his own brother or wreak havoc on innocent children to preserve his kingdom and his place in history. He is remembered more for cruelty than for bravery. Instead of being part of the New Adam, he became a partner of old Cain, who had killed his brother.
Where do we fit in the history of humanity, with the freedom from slavery and exile that Jesus brings us or the slavery lived by Herod and his ilk? It is for us to decide.