Meditation on Holy Innocents

admin | 28 December 2021

“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.

The point of Holy Innocents is that the unnamed victims are known and named in God. The whole theological thrust of the Feast within the Festival of Christmas is to gather us into the embrace of Christ’s grace. The lesson from Revelation places all such holy innocents in the vision of the redeemed, the proverbial “one hundred and forty-four thousand” who have “his Name, and the Name of the Father written on their forehead”. In other words the Holy Innocents participate in the world’s redemption accomplished in Christ. It is in that sense that the Collect suggests, perhaps disturbingly yet profoundly, that God “madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths”. This belongs to the idea of redemptive suffering but from the perspective of those who are the innocent victims of the machinations of worldly powers.

What connects the unnamed Holy Innocents to Christ is that they share in the purity of Christ. They are without fault; it is not by any sin in them that they are killed. They are simply inconvenient. They are seen to participate in the pure being and sacrifice of Christ. As such they exemplify love-in-purity, the purity of Christ and Mary which the Christmas proper preface wonderfully expresses: Christ being “made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin”, words which belong to a sophisticated form of theological reasoning. He is “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure”, as Irenaeus wonderfully puts it. As the lesson from Revelation suggests, the Holy Innocents are without guile; “they are without fault before the throne of God”.

The story shocks us, I hope, and moves us to consider the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. His coming not only engages our world; it exposes its wickedness in the way in which people are so easily regarded as expendable, as collateral damage, as mere statistics, simply bots and cogs in the machinery of technocratic culture. They are nameless. The beauty and the wonder of Holy Innocents is that they are named and known in God. They anticipate and thus participate in the Passion of Christ which they portend and signify.

The fuga in Egyptu is a story which has particularly captured the imaginations of countless artists and contributes to a series of apocryphal stories that attempt to fill in the gaps between the infancy and the childhood of Jesus in the canonical scriptures. But the theological idea is about the recapitulation of the story of Moses in the figure of Jesus. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”. In the Christian understanding, the flight into Egypt and subsequent return to Palestine, is about the greater Exodus of Christ, whose goings forth are for our salvation and good. Here the one who comes as saviour is saved by the flight into Egypt and by the unholy spectacle of the human evil of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.

As they are named and known in Christ, so are we bidden to place with God all of the myriad of innocent victims of our times such as the unnamed indigenous children who died and were buried in unmarked graves around the Residential Schools in various parts of Canada. The Feast of Holy Innocents has a disturbing contemporary quality to it. It speaks to the disorders of our times politically and economically but as such it bids us think more deeply about the purpose of Christ’s birth. It is the prayer of the carol, Puer Nobis Nascitur. “Now may Mary’s Son, who came/ So long ago to love us,/Lead us all with hearts aflame/ Unto the joys above us”. For “He”, as the carol says, is “the Source and he the End!” the alpha and omega of our lives.