Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents
“Rachel weeping for her children, And would not be comforted,
because they are not”
There is no more disturbing and troubling image than the deaths of the little ones whether as here in the witness of the Scriptures or in the horrendous pictures of the suffering children of the world – in Calais, in Aleppo, in Kenya and elsewhere. We live in a world where children are not only commodities but collateral damage in the pursuit of power and dominance. There is no innocence, it seems.
There is blood in Bethlehem. To be sure, we have already seen blood, as it were, in the martyrdom of St. Stephen who was stoned to death confessing Christ and in imitation of the sacrificial sufferings of Christ. But that was in Jerusalem. Here we have the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, as they have been called, in Bethlehem, killed as a policy of infanticide in Herod’s effort to eradicate a potential rival to his kingdom. Herod’s policy to kill all the little ones, two years and under in Bethlehem, echoes the policy of infanticide by Pharaoh to control the population of the Hebrews in Egypt out of which came the birth of Moses. Thus we are made aware of a deeper theological idea, the idea that God and God alone can make something good out of the machinations of human evil.
“Never that which is shall die”, a famous fragment from the Greek poet, Euripides, avers. In a way, the Christian story both challenges and confirms his poetic insight. Christ, the everlasting Son of the Father, comes to redeem and save by dying for us. His rising to life again though is testament to the greater power and truth of God who ever is, the God who negates the negation, as it were. The death of death itself is accomplished in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Never that which is shall die” because it dies and lives again for it is what lives forever. Love conquers all because love never dies.
This is all part of the dark mystery and wonder of the disturbing Christmas feast of the Holy Innocents. They are innocent because in truth they are unable to harm and yet they are seen as a threat to Herod just by virtue of being infants like the child king sought by the Magi. They are already viewed as in Christ and that is the deeper wonder that redeems the horror and their slaughter. Their deaths, like the deaths of the little ones throughout history, are not without meaning. They share in the infancy of Christ and so in the purpose of Christ’s coming.
