CHRISTMASTIDE · 28 DECEMBER
The Holy Innocents
Martyrs · The First to Die for Christ · Rachel Weeping for Her Children · The Cost of the Incarnation
Innocents — IN-oh-sents · Herod — HER-od · Bethlehem — BETH-leh-hem · Rachel — RAY-chel · Ramah — RAY-mah · Jeremiah — jer-ih-MY-ah · Revelation 14:4
O Almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths; Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The feast of the Holy Innocents falls on 28 December, three days after Christmas, and it is the hardest feast in the Calendar to hold in the same mind as the joy of the nativity. Herod (HER-od) the Great, having been told by the Magi that a king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem (BETH-leh-hem), and having been outwitted by the Magi who returned to their own country by a different way, sent soldiers to kill all the male children in Bethlehem and its environs who were two years old and under. The Holy Family had fled to Egypt, warned by an angel. The children of Bethlehem could not flee. They died instead of him, in the place where he had been born, slaughtered by a king who feared a child. Matthew applies the prophecy of Jeremiah: In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. Rachel (RAY-chel), the mother of Israel, weeps for the children of Bethlehem as she wept for all the losses of her people, and the voice is not comforted, because the children are not.
The Church has always regarded these children as martyrs — the first to die for Christ, before any disciple had been called, before any sermon had been preached, before any miracle had been performed. They are martyrs without knowledge and without will, martyrs who never heard the name of the one for whom they died, whose deaths were caused not by their own faith but by their proximity to the place of his birth. The ancient Church called them flores martyrum — the flowers of the martyrs — the first blossoms of the Church’s red harvest, cut down before they could open. The Book of Revelation speaks of a great multitude who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, who were redeemed from among men as firstfruits, and the tradition has always applied this to the Innocents: they are the firstfruits of the martyrs, the ones who follow the Lamb into the presence of God without ever having known him by name, because he knows them.
The feast of the Innocents is also the feast of every child lost without knowledge or fault — every infant who has died in violence or poverty or disease, every life cut short before it could begin to understand itself, every human person whose existence was threatened by the fear or greed or cruelty of those with power. The Church places this feast in the middle of Christmas week not to darken the Christmas joy but to insist that the Incarnation is not a fairy story with a happy ending but a real entry into a real world in which children are killed and mothers weep and the powerful destroy the vulnerable to protect themselves. The God who came to Bethlehem came to this world, not to a better one, and the first consequence of his coming was the death of children. The manger is real; the blood on the streets of Bethlehem is real; and the Church that sings O come all ye faithful on 25 December stands at the graves of the Innocents on 28 December and refuses to look away.
The Holy Innocents close the Christmas week and close this series of meditations on Our Lord and his Apostles. The series began on 1 January with the Holy Name — the Name given to the child on the eighth day — and it ends here, on 28 December, with the children who died because of where he was born. The whole arc of the Incarnation is contained in this Christmas octave: the Name that is above every name, the purification and the sword that shall pierce through thy soul also, the doubt that becomes the highest confession, the first martyr whose blood is the seed of Paul, the beloved disciple who outlived everyone and said love one another, and the children of Bethlehem who died without knowing why. They are all in the cloud of witnesses — the known and the unknown, the named and the nameless, the Apostles who went to the ends of the earth and the infants who never left the streets of their birth. And the God who is Lord of all of them, who knows every one of them by name, is the one born in the manger three days ago, the one whose Name was given on the eighth day, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us.
O Almighty God, who dost number among thy martyrs those who died not knowing thy name but in the place of thy birth; Grant that we may hold in our prayer all the innocent lives destroyed by the fear and cruelty of the powerful, knowing that thou dost receive into the arms of thy mercy all whom the world will not protect, and that Rachel’s weeping is heard by the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.