“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”
It is a compelling and yet a most disturbing Christmas story but, like the other festal days of Christmas, it reflects upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Unlike the commemorations of St. Stephen and St. John, however, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as this day has come to be called, actually belongs to the narratives of the nativity.
Like so many biblical passages, the story is multi-layered. It is, on the one hand, an account of the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” locating the Flight into Egypt in terms of a New Testament riff on the Exodus story of Pharaoh’s policy of infanticide as a way of controlling the minority worker population of the Hebrews within Egypt. Here it takes on a further political aspect: Herod’s fear of a child-king who would be a rival to his throne.
Joseph takes Mary and the child Christ into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and fury but “out of Egypt” Jesus the Son will return to Nazareth and beyond to bring redemption to all people just as Moses led the people of the Hebrews out of the Pharonic captivity and into the wilderness to become the people of God, the people of the Law. On that score alone it is a powerful narrative and unfolds before our eyes something of the Christian understanding of divine Providence at work in and through the Scriptures.
It is, on the other hand, a powerful story about the meaning of redemption in the face of the most horrible sufferings and loss that is imaginable; the slaughter of little children. The Collect takes our breath away with its incredible insight that “thou madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths.” It is for many utterly unthinkable, a most disturbing claim that unsettles us and makes us most uncomfortable. I fear that for some this story and the theological idea expressed in the Collect is so revolting that they become atheists. The scene, even as told in the restrained language of Matthew, is such an affront to our conceptions of justice, especially divine justice. How revolting and impossible to say, at least at first glance, that children were made to die for Christ’s glory!
At first glance. And, of course, as Voltaire, the great philosophe and wit of the 18th century, recognized about all such statements of theodicy (the justice of God); they lend themselves so easily to parody and satirical ridicule. Such is the nature of his tour de force, his novel, Candide, itself an extended take-off on the philosopher Leibniz’ statement that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” How does that jive with the many, many forms of human suffering both natural and human?
The Feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us inescapably of the harsh cruelties of the world of power and politics unhinged from intellectual and moral principles. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as Lord Acton put it. In the biblical and philosophical understanding of politics, the misuse of power is a willful forgetting of the divine power upon which all power derives and all power depends. “Thou couldest have no power at all over me,” Jesus says to Pilate, “except it were given thee from above.”
The Feast of Holy Innocents makes an important theological point and one which certainly does not avoid the harshness of human suffering but addresses it head on. We live in a world of atrocities where the abuse and slaughter of children is constant: from the killing fields of Rwanda to the famines of the Sudan; from the sexual exploitation of children to the modern form of infanticide known as abortion. In every case, the powerless and the voiceless, the innocent and the infant, are the victims of those who wield a kind of power over them, however complicated their own situations may be. The theological point is that God’s grace and love is greater than the horrific and horrendous forms of our misuse of power. There is, perhaps, no tougher lesson and yet no greater lesson than what The Feast of the Holy Innocents proclaims.
For it says that the deaths of the little ones are not in vain. It says that the deaths of the little ones participate by anticipation in the sacrifice of God’s “great little one,” born in the stable of Bethlehem and who is Christ the Saviour. Holy Innocents reminds us of the meaning of the one who comes as Redeemer and whose redemption extends to the victims of the darkest acts of human cruelty and ambition, folly and wickedness. To my mind, such teachings are what make us believers. There is nothing sentimental and trivial about the Christian faith. We face the full horror of our human potential for evil in this feast and yet we contemplate the compassion and providence of God at work in and through our evil. Otherwise we remain atheists but in reality, dualists, facing an incomprehensible world of rigidly opposed principles of good acts and bad but without any way of understanding the divisions within our own hearts let alone any way of dealing with human suffering and its overcoming.
The Feast of Holy Innocents places all the deaths of the little ones with the sacrifice of Christ as “being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb.” Our hearts may be broken, like “Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not,” but our hearts are also opened to the healing grace of God because in the mercies of Christ we may place them through prayer with Christ. To do so is to contend against the abuse of all of the children of God.
The Holy Innocents are not outside the embrace of Christ’s redemption of the world and our humanity. They are a telling instance of its radical meaning.
“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of the Holy Innocents
December 28th, 2011