Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents

admin | 28 December 2019

These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth

If the reality of the stoning of St. Stephen was more than we can bear, how shall we ever bear the heart-rending story of the Holy Innocents? And how shall we possibly make sense of it in relation to the sentiments of the Christmas season. How is this joy and peace and goodwill? How is this truth and love, mercy and grace? And yet it is.

No feast of Christmas week speaks more profoundly, albeit disturbingly, to the reality of Christ’s holy birth. Here is a story which disturbs or should disturb us and yet belongs to the tragic realities of our world and day, a world which witnesses to the endless sufferings and death of countless little ones. They are, as in Matthew’s account, the innocent ones, those who are unable to harm and yet are harmed themselves. They are the victims of the convenience of others, the victims of the machinations of individuals and nations. They are those whose deaths seem so utterly pointless and meaningless.

There are the sad realities of abortion, of the slaughter of children in the war zones of the world, of the deaths of the little ones through famine and pestilence. These are some of the inescapable realities of our world; complicated and complex, to be sure, but also terrifying and heart-rending. How amazing that during the Christmas season which celebrates the birth of God as a child we are asked to contemplate the deaths of the little ones!

Christ is God’s “great little one.” He takes his humanity from the blessed Virgin Mary. There is a sense of wonder in his birth, a sense of joy and an awakening to hope and peace, good will and harmony. Yet the Christmas story is very much about the dark realities of the human condition, about the stark realities of sin and evil. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” you might remember from Christmas Eve. “There was no room for them in the inn,” you might recall from Christmas Day.

Christmas does not hide from view such realities. It gives us a way to face them and to do so in the paradox of God’s grace signalled in the lesson from Revelation. The Holy Innocents are seen as the pure and innocent ones who “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” Yet the Holy Innocents are the little children of Bethlehem whom Herod, seeking to remove a potential rival to his throne, has killed. His violent act recalls the ancient policy of infanticide inaugurated by Pharaoh to contain and control the Hebrews. The phrase “out of Egypt have I called my Son” references the story of the Exodus. In every way, these lessons seek to connect the deaths of the little ones to Christ and to the purpose of his coming.

There is in this a great insight and one which belongs to the radical truth of Christmas. Nothing is hid from God and God alone and only God can make something good out of human evil. What the Feast of the Innocents proclaims is that no life is meaningless in the eyes of God. Here the Holy Innocents follow even as they go before and portend the sacrifice of Christ. There is blood in Bethlehem already in the blood of the Holy Innocents and yet their deaths are joined to Christ’s eternal sacrifice in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit from “before the foundations of the world.” And so while they go before, they follow Christ. The truth and meaning of their lives is found in Christ, in the love of God for our humanity, no matter the horror and the evil we confront.

In the pastoral ministry, there are perhaps no harder things to deal with than those who have suffered the loss of children, and especially little children. Yet it is this Gospel story which gives meaning to such terrible things, the terrible things which belong to our disordered world. The innocence of the little ones belongs to the sacrificial purity of Christ, “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure,” as Irenaeus says about Mary. They participate in Christ’s pure sacrifice. It is nothing less than the deep love of God who alone makes something out of the nothingness of sin and evil.

There is no human comfort, “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. ”There is only the divine comfort which says that they are in God for they “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” Such are the deeper realities of the Christmas mystery of love-in-purity.