Feast of the Holy Innocents

This is the message that we have heard from Jesus Christ

St Francis worships
the Child at Greccio,
a window at Mt St Francis

and proclaim to you:
God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

It is hard to approach this feast day without remembering the abortions performed in this country and around the world. Hypocrisy kills the unborn. The most beautiful act of marital love, abused, has become a cauldron of death for unborn children. This cynicism runs so deeply we wonder if the earth and its people can be saved.

This feast, like its setting in Saint Matthew’s gospel, is like the hammer and anvil used to harden tempered steel. Just as we are glowing with the delightful heat and satisfying joy of Christmas, we are smashed by this memory of the Holy Innocents.

Historians might not regard this particular story as authentic; there is no substantiating, secondary witness in the few documents we have of that time. But they readily admit King Herod the Great was vindictive, vicious and erratic. To defend his status as a puppet king of the Roman Empire he murdered several of his own family, including his own sons.

But the story is not about King Herod or the slain children. Rather, Saint Matthew describes the scandalous failure of Jerusalem to welcome its savior. Perhaps it will help to contrast his description of the city with that of Saint Luke. In Luke’s gospel the city provides a ready welcome to Mary as she visits Elisabeth and to Jesus when he is brought to the temple. When John the Baptist is born and named the entire city is abuzz with the story. When Jesus arrives in the temple, Simeon and Anna welcome him and tell everyone about him. As a twelve year old, Jesus wanders freely about the city and questions the elders in the temple. There is neither darkness nor secrecy about the child in Saint Luke’s gospel.

But Saint Matthew’s Jerusalem is as horrid as the Whore of Babylon. It is so dark the magi lose sight of the star when they enter. The city is perturbed by their eager question, “Where is the new born king of the Jews?” Its scholars readily conspire in naming where the child might be found. And the king’s reply to the magi is so sinister it makes the hair on your neck stand on end: “Go and search diligently for the child. When you have found him, bring me word, that I too may go and do him -- homage. "

Finally there is the bitter irony of Jerusalem’s savage search for the child, driving him back into Egypt, just as their Hebrew ancestors were driven out of Egypt by the pharaoh and his people. The “flight into Egypt” indicates God’s total and final rejection of Jerusalem as the holy city, especially as His blessing has been transferred to the New Jerusalem, who is Mary, where the magi find the Babe.

Thirty years later we hear Jerusalem's reply as they again condemn him to death, “His blood be upon us and upon our children."

However, I hear a double irony in that final statement, for it echoes Moses’ blessing when he sprinkled the blood of the sacrificial ox on the altar and on the people. The hysterical mob in Jerusalem unwittingly blesses itself even as they seem to invite a curse.

In another dark hour the Spirit of God had challenged Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these dry bones live?” He wisely replied, “You know, O Lord.”

You and I might wonder as we ponder the horror of abortion, “Can this world and its people be saved?” Certainly, with man it is impossible. We continually dig ourselves more deeply into evil. But reading of the joy the magi felt upon finding the child with his mother, we remember the words of Saint John, the light shines in darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. And just as the Church canonizes these Holy Innocents, we hope that God will sprinkle his blessings upon us and upon our children.