Jesus and Aleppo

I’m in the middle of Matthew 14 right now. The first chunk is the story of John the Baptizer’s death — how the paranoid ruler Herod, outraged at being called out on his sin by John — threw him into prison and then had him killed. It’s a story that is frustrating in how senseless the evil seems to be. It also feels familiar, 2000 years later. There aren’t many days that go by without headlines of death and destruction brought about by terrorists — evil for the simple sake of causing fear and panic to gain power. Gunshots fired, bombs, trucks crashing into innocent people — these have all become commonplace in our world. Sometimes the terror strikes close to home — in America, in France, in Germany, in these places that we share history and linguistic heritage with. Sometimes it’s further away psychologically — in the Middle East, in the refugee crisis, in the devastated city of Aleppo and the heart wrenching messages from its citizens. So Jesus’s response to the mur