“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 horrors of the 20th and 21st 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 giving of the Law. 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.
This story is captured rather movingly and paradoxically in one of the loveliest of the carols of the season. It reminds us of how substantial and serious the Christmas story is and not just sentimental. Puer Nobis Nascitur is a 15th century carol, though probably of much earlier origins, which highlights 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 was he with sleepy cows and asses”, suggesting that the beasts “could see” what the evil of man sees but rejects, namely “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 accentuates 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 pretensions 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 the mindless Herods of our times. Their innocence lies simply in their powerlessness, in their inability to harm, the true meaning of innocence. The Feast of Holy Innocents 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 and economic power and are destroyed. Most of them are unnamed and unknown by us, yet known to God.
The point 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. In that sense the Collect suggests, albeit disturbingly, to be sure, that God “madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths”. Yet this is the idea of redemptive suffering 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 and seen as a threat to Herod’s rule. They participate in the pure being and sacrifice of Christ. As such they exemplify love-in-purity, the purity of Christ’s humanity as derived from Mary which the Christmas Proper Preface expresses: for Christ is “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 for “they are without fault before the throne of God”.
The story shocks us, as it should, yet 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, as simply bots and cogs in the machinery of technocratic culture, or obstacles in the way of our selfish, even if at times, desperate, acts. They are nameless. The beauty and the wonder of Holy Innocents is that they are named and known in God, marked and named in God’s own naming which recalls our baptisms. They anticipate and thus participate in the Passion of Christ which they portend and signify.
The fuga in Egyptu 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. 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 is about the greater exodus of Christ, whose goings forth are for our salvation and good. 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 named and known in Christ, we are bidden to place all of the myriad of innocent victims of our dark times with God. 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 is “the Source and he the End!”, the alpha and omega of our lives.
“Take the young child, and his mother, and flee into Egypt”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Innocents, 2025, 8am service