Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah. Matthew's fulfillment formula is uncharacteristically bleak here — the event being fulfilled is not rescue but slaughter. The citation of Jeremiah 31:15 is honest about the darkness of the event being narrated. Matthew does not paper over the grief of Bethlehem's mothers with a promise that the child was saved. The fulfillment formula communicates that this tragedy is not outside God's foreknowledge or beyond God's purposes, even as it refuses to minimize the reality of the suffering. Romans 8:28 does not say that everything is good but that all things work together for good — Matthew's use of Jeremiah maintains both the grief and the sovereign purpose without collapsing them.

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