Meditation on Holy Innocents
“Take the young child, and his mother, and flee into Egypt”
Fuga in Egyptu, the flight into Egypt, is one of the more intriguing stories of the Christmas mystery and yet belongs to its most disturbing moment, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Nothing more apocalyptical, it seems, and certainly no story speaks so hauntingly to the hideous spectacles of destruction and violence which belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It brings out something of the deeper meaning of the Incarnation as providing the only real counter to human evil and wickedness.
The fuga in Egyptu is a salvation story within the salvation story of human redemption. It looks back to Exodus and to Pharoah’s attempt to control the population of the Hebrews through a policy of infanticide. Out of that story comes the birth of Moses, God’s instrument for the Exodus, the intellectual and spiritual journey of Israel which culminates in the Law. With Matthew, the flight into Egypt portrays Joseph as the instrument of the deliverance of the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath, envy, and fear about a potential rival to his power through a similar policy of infanticide.
That this story should be captured in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season reminds us of how the Christmas story is substantial and serious and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a fifteenth century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which emphasizes the sense of Christ’s birth as deliverance from evil in the form of the political. “Came he to a world forlorn, the Lord of every nation”. “Cradled in a stall … with sleepy cows and asses”, the carol suggests that the beasts “could see” what evil of man sees but rejects “that he of all men surpasses”.
Herod then with fear was filled:
‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’
All the little boys he killed
At Bethlem in his fury.
The story deepens the theological idea of the Word made flesh coming to a world which “knew him not” and “unto his own who received him not”. It is the attempt to annihilate and destroy the one whose very coming and being as truth and goodness challenges all the pretenses of worldly power. It is an old story and one which sadly recurs over and over again in our world. The Holy Innocents are the nameless victims of the power games of those in authority. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm. In a way, the feast highlights a sad feature of ‘the city of man’ historically and in the global present; a world of many, many victims who are caught up in the machinations of political economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed by us.
