What Weeping Teaches Us About Joy

Encountering Jesus – Gospel of Matthew

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

March 22, 2026

What Weeping Teaches Us About Joy

If you have your Bible turn with me to Matt. 2. We will have the verses up on the screen for you to read along with as well.

¹³ Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” ¹⁴ And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

¹⁶ Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. ¹⁷ Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

¹⁸ “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.”

¹⁹ But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, ²⁰ saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead.” ²¹ And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. ²³ And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. Matt. 2:13-23

Pray

In 1947 a New Yorker named Glenn Chambers was getting ready to fly out of Miami to fulfill his lifelong dream of working with the mission organization Voice of the Andes in Equador. Just before taking off he wanted to write a short note to his mom and all he could find was a scrap of paper with an advertisement with one large word in the center of it, the word “why?” Chambers wrote his mother a short note around the edges, found a mailbox, and mailed it to her.

The plane he was flying in crashed in the mountains of Colombia with no survivors. A few days later Chamber’s mother received her son’s note centered around that one word “why?”

Tragedy is often accompanied by the question why? Why did this happen? Why me? Why now? Why did God allow it? Why didn’t God stop it? Everyone of us will at points in our lives encounter situations that make us ask, “why?” Maybe some are asking that question this morning?

Matthew 2 carries some big why’s in it. Right in the middle of all the good news about Jesus’ birth

comes the dark story of Herod killing every male child under two years old in Bethlehem. How terrible for these young moms to have their sons torn from their arms and killed in front of them. How the sound of their screaming and pleading must have filled the night, to be replaced by the sound of inconsolable weeping. Matthew sees this as a fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy:

¹⁷ Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: ¹⁸ “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.” Matt 2:17-18

We understand the weeping and loud lamentation and tears that refuse to be comforted, but there are some questions: why does the prophecy say the voice of weeping was heard in Ramah, when this tragedy occurred in Bethlehem? Why is it that Rachel’s weeping is heard? How does this prophecy about Rachel and Ramah connect to the massacre of the Innocents? And maybe the biggest why of all: why does God allow this to happen? Could not He who warned Joseph to escape with Jesus have stopped it from happening at all?

To understand Jeremiah’s prophecy better we need to go back to Genesis when Abraham’s grandson Jacob falls in love with a beautiful woman named Rachel and works for her father Laban for seven years just to win her hand in marriage, but Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Rachel’s older sister Leah first, before giving Rachel’s hand in marriage to Jacob. Leah and Rachel develop an unhealthy jealousy and competition between each other. Leah is jealous of Rachel because Jacob loves Rachel more than her. Rachel is jealous of Leah because as time goes on, Leah conceives and gives birth to five sons and one daughter while Rachel remains childless.

At last Rachel conceives and gives birth to Joseph and then some years later she conceives again. It’s at this time that Jacob decides to uproot his family and travel 550 miles south on his way to Bethlehem. But when they get to the town of Ramah (about 11 miles north of Bethlehem) that Rachel goes into hard labor and as she knows as she delivers her son, that she is dying. Rachel’s last act before she dies is to name her son Ben-oni, which means, son of my sorrow. Son of my weeping.

Rachel is weeping and refuses to be comforted because both her sons are being torn away from her, not by their death but by hers. She will never see her hopes and dreams for her boys realized. She will never see them grow into men, never see them get married, she will never hold her grandchildren. Her momma’s heart is broken as her sons are being torn from her arms. And there in Ramah Rachel wept as only a mother who is being separated from her children can weep.Rachel was buried in Ramah and then Jacob continued the journey with his family to Bethlehem. That is Rachel’s story.

So why, hundreds of years later, does Jeremiah have this prophecy about Ramah and Rachel? Because Ramah would yet again be the site of another tragic separation. After Nebuchadnezzar’s army laid waste to Jerusalem, burning their homes and destroying the temple, he took the best and the brightest young people to Ramah as a waystation before taking them into exile in Babylon. Once again Ramah was a place of heartbreaking separation as these young men and women, many of them teenagers or younger, were separated from their parents. Once again Ramah became the place of forever separation as mothers have their children ripped from their arms, knowing they will never see them again. As Jeremiah sees and hears this, he sees and hears Rachel’s inconsolable weeping. Rachel, buried long ago in Ramah, is once again weeping for the children taken from her.

Ramah is a place of separation. It’s a place of unimaginable pain and inconsolable loss. Ramah is about 11 miles north of Bethlehem, but on that night as Herod murders boy after boy, Bethlehem became Ramah. It became the place of painful separation. After all, Rachel died in Ramah while traveling to the Bethlehem.

The Bible is no stranger to tears. Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet and wrote the book we call Lamentations. Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And the good news of great joy that came with Jesus’ birth also came with the tragic news of great weeping. The weeping of Ramah. Of separation.

We will all experience our own Ramah’s where someone or something we love is taken away from us. This world is full of Ramah’s and it’s a very real part of life, so I’m glad that Matthew included it in his gospel.

Jesus didn’t come to deny our Ramah’s but to speak hope into them, and to redeem our Ramah’s into something beautiful. So I want to share some redemptively beautiful and powerful things about Ramah – that place of weeping and separation.

But first let’s balance this out emotionally. Life isn’t all sad or all happy. A balanced life will experience both at different times (and sometimes at the same time). There’s power in happiness. Power in being truly grateful for God’s blessings. If we camp out in sad all the time, chances are we are simply developing negative ruts in our thinking.

But if we try to camp out in happy ALL the time, we’re going to be very annoying at funerals. Happy all the time isn’t possible and it’s not reality. Jesus meets us in happy and he meets us in sad. He’s real in Bethlehem and he’s real in Ramah.

1. Weeping isn’t a contradiction to the joy of Jesus, it’s a beautiful part of it

As Peter Docter was writing Inside Out, an animated story about an eleven-year-old girl named Riley dealing with her emotions he decided to make the two main characters Joy and Fear. He chose fear because he knew that fear can lead people into humorous situations.

But as he was writing the third act, Docter hit a wall. At the point where his story arc needed to have Joy learn a lesson, he found that Fear had nothing to teach her. Ironically it was Sadness that had something to teach Joy. It was Sadness that connected most meaningfully with Joy.

Sadness can teach us important life lessons. Sadness can make our hearts softer. Sadness can teach us compassion. Kindness. Empathy for others. Sadness can help us know how much we need Jesus and make our hearts ready to receive him.

Psalm 56:8 says that God puts all our tears in a book. He collects all our tears in His bottle. God doesn’t forget our sorrows and pain, He collects them. Our sadness is precious to God because we are precious to God.

In heaven, we will be able to run on high-octane joy all the time. I think joy in heaven will be as emotionally complex as sadness is here on earth. But in this life, our joy can’t be 100% pure and undiluted. We need sad days too. It’s out of our brokenness that we see our need for Jesus. Sadness has something to teach joy. Sadness isn’t a contradiction to the joy Jesus gives us, it’s a beautiful part of it.

2. Jesus came so that weeping isn’t the last word, hope is

Jeremiah heard the voice of Rachel weeping, but that wasn’t the last voice he heard, for in the next verse he writes:

¹⁶ This is what the Lord says: “Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears,
for your work will be rewarded,” declares the Lord. “They will return from the land of the enemy. ¹⁷ So there is hope for your descendants,” declares the Lord. “Your children will return to their own land.

Jeremiah hears the voice of Rachel weeping, but then he hears another voice: the voice of God speaking hope. Your work will be rewarded. There is hope for your descendants. Your children will return one day to their land. Weeping isn’t the last word, hope is.

Rachel named her son Ben-Oni, Son of My Sorrows. Jacob renamed him Benjamin, Son of My Strength. Rachel only saw sorrow, Jacob saw strength. God is the God who brings beauty out of ashes. Ashes represent something devastated beyond repair. Burned beyond recognition. Broken beyond beauty. But God sees in ashes the potential for beauty. What sorrow has reduced to ashes, God can restore to beauty. He can take our regrets and redeem them into beautiful lessons. He can take our sinful mistakes and redeem them into opportunities for grace and forgiveness.

Jesus came so that for all who believe in him, weeping isn’t the last word, joy is. Some weeping lasts a season and then we move on. Some sorrows, like the sorrow of these mothers separated from their children, will last the remainder of our days on earth. We will never fully recover, never be “over it”, never laugh like we once did. Some will enter the presence of God with tears in our eyes, and the Bible says God Himself will wipe away our tears.

Weeping may last the night but joy comes in the morning. (Ps. 30:5) Jesus is the bright morning star that is the first to shine telling us morning is coming. Joy is coming. It may be dark now, there may be weeping now, but we see a light on the horizon. Eternal life. Everlasting joy. Our sovereign God and Father who will carry us through whatever life throws at us, and Jesus who says, well done, enter into my joy.

• Take that situation that is heavy on your heart and go ahead and weep, but as you weep, call upon God and ask Him to turn that sorrow into strength! Hold onto the hope that because you believe in Jesus, weeping won’t have the last word, joy will!
• Maybe you’re looking at bridges you’ve burned, relationships you’ve burned, or opportunities you’ve burned and all you see are ashes. Bring those ashes to God and believe that He can make them into something beautiful. You can’t. But God can. Jesus came to take burnt lives and restore in them the image of God.
• If someone in your life is in a sad season, don’t blast them with joy, weep with them. Gently encourage them that God is Emmanuel, God with us. Pray for God to connect their sadness to joy. Love them.

Jesus came so that weeping isn’t the last word, joy is. Jesus is good news of great joy.