HOLY INNOCENTS, Feast

December 28, Tuesday       

 

Today’s celebration shocks us into the realization that the birth of Christ was not all peace and joy. The coming of Jesus was the beginning of a struggle-to-death between the powers of evil and the kingdom of light, a struggle that would have its climax in the passion and death of Jesus. Herod stands here for the forces of evil. Even innocent children are often the victims of this enmity.

The story of the Innocents may very well be a theological illustration of Matthew on this climactic clash between good and evil that began with the birth of Jesus. Often the innocents have to suffer on account of so much evil in the world caused by people.

 

First Reading: 1 John 1:5–2:2

This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.

If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin.

If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.

 I write this, dear children, to guide you out of sin. But if anyone does sin, we have a Priest-Friend in the presence of the Father: Jesus Christ, righteous Jesus. When he served as a sacrifice for our sins, he solved the sin problem for good—not only ours, but the whole world’s.

 

Gospel: Matthew 2:13-18

After the scholars were gone, God’s angel showed up again in Joseph’s dream and commanded, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay until further notice. Herod is on the hunt for this child, and wants to kill him.”

Joseph obeyed. He got up, took the child and his mother under cover of darkness. They were out of town and well on their way by daylight. They lived in Egypt until Herod’s death. This Egyptian exile fulfilled what Hosea had preached: “I called my son out of Egypt.”

Herod, when he realized that the scholars had tricked him, flew into a rage. He commanded the murder of every little boy two years old and under who lived in Bethlehem and its surrounding hills. (He determined that age from information he’d gotten from the scholars.) That’s when Jeremiah’s sermon was fulfilled:

A sound was heard in Ramah,
    weeping and much lament.
Rachel weeping for her children,
    Rachel refusing all solace,
Her children gone,
    dead and buried.

 

Prayer

Lord our God,
today’s innocent martyrs
bore witness to you
not by proclaiming your name in words
but by laying down their lives for you,
even though they were not aware of it.
We pray to you on their feast
that we may bear witness to you
both by the words we speak
and the way we live what we believe in.
May we do so in the full awareness
of what we are doing.
We ask you this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

 

Reflection:

A Call to protect human life
Today the Church commemorates the killing of the children of Bethlehem ordered by Herod, who wanted to get rid of the ‘new-born King’. Herod the king of Judea, was so insecure and scared of threat to his throne. A master politician and tyrant who cared the least for extreme brutality, he had been responsible for the murder of his own wife and sons as well as for the deaths of countless others. Killing a few more helpless infants did not mean to him anything!

The Holy Innocents are few in comparison to the genocides of the history or the abortions of our day. In 2016, Pope Francis issued a letter to the bishops on the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Innocents. In the letter, the pope acknowledged the physical and sexual abuse of children by the clergy who destroyed their dignity and begged for forgiveness. He called on the bishops and the clergy to “find the courage needed to take all necessary measures and to protect in every way the lives of our children, so that such crimes may never be repeated.”

In 2017 the pope challenged the world saying, “children of today’s world, who are not lying in a cot, caressed with the affection of a mother and father, but rather suffer the filthy “mangers that devour their dignity”, hiding underground to escape bombardment, on the pavements of large cities, or at the bottom of a boat overladen with immigrants.” We must be challenged by children “who are not allowed to be born, by those who cry because no one satiates their hunger, and by children who do have – not toys in their hands, but rather weapons,” said the Pope.
Celebrating the feast of Holy Innocents is meaningless unless we identify the innocent victims of our own times. Pharaoh ordered the killing of the Hebrew children to secure his seat of power in the Old Testament. Herod ordered the killing of infants for the fear of threat to his power. Strange enough, the pattern continues to this day. Governments around the world are decided on the basis of the politician’s stand on abortion. Favouring abortion turns out to be a requirement to win elections in many parts of the world.

Pope Francis reminds us: Christian joy is born from a call – the same call that Mary and Joseph received – to embrace and protect human life, especially that of the holy innocents of our own day. Christmas is a time that challenges us to protect life, to help it be born and grow.

 

Video available on Youtube: A Call to protect human life