What follows is a portion of a sermon from
an early Church Father commemorating the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. For
many people learning about this Holy Day, it seems both incongruous and somehow
wrong to put such a searingly awful event in the midst of the Twelve Days of
Christmas. For us, Christmas has largely become an exercise in middle-class
sentimentality rather than a season celebrating the totality of God’s embrace
of our condition in the Incarnation. But, for catholic Christianity from the
start, this event has been remembered and put front-and-center in our
liturgical life. This is because of how seriously the Church has always taken
the issue of Christian witness and the value of innocence.
The Holy Innocents were massacred because
they might have been Christ—a rival king to a nervously-despotic Herod. This
story has analogues all around us. Recent events in Syria, for instance, show
that the barbaric insanity of despotism remains alive and active in our own
day.
In our own land, we have recently endured
the horror of young schoolchildren murdered in a calculated fashion by a young
man apparently motivated in part by the fear his own autonomy was about to end.
Like Herod long ago, he chose to kill innocent children as part of a bid to
exercise the God-like power of life and death.
The painful truth is that innocents are
being murdered privately, publically, legally, and illegally all over the world
all the time. It is a horrible fact of our world from which we must not turn
away.
The author of the sermon below (Bishop
Quodvultdeus of Carthage, obit. Circa AD 453) lived after the great organized
Imperial persecutions of Christianity. He shared with many the understanding
that martyrdom is the result of a confrontation between the Truth of the Gospel
and the lie of sin. He looks at the Innocents as the first victims in this
conflict, seeking to give their sorrowful deaths a dignity and purpose found in
the Gospel’s final triumph over sin and death on the Cross and in the
Resurrection.
In so doing, he draws one of many links
between Christmas and Holy Week/Easter for us—for all the central mysteries of
our faith are part of one great event of Salvation. Bishop Quodvultdeus is not
trying to minimize the horror or the suffering in the story of the Innocents
(and neither must we), but he is putting that suffering in a context, the
context of Christ’s love and ultimate victory.
Doing that work is something that Christians
are privileged to do…but only with the greatest of care, for suffering and loss
are not problems to be solved hurriedly, but wounds to be healed in the ways
and on the schedules unique to each sufferer.
Perhaps most importantly, this sermon
nourishes us, in the midst of the horrors of this world, in an important truth:
God makes no compromises with evil, and neither may we. The Collect for this feast (found at the end of this post) puts this in direct terms as we pray to God. We must work with God
to confront all that is ungodly, carnal, and destructive—both within us and
around us in this world—so that the light of Christ shines brightly, and that
the memory of these and other innocents may be honored before God.
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A tiny child is
born, who is a great king. Wise men are led to him from afar. They come to
adore one who lies in a manger and yet reigns in heaven and on earth. When they
tell of one who is born a king, Herod is disturbed. To save his kingdom he
resolves to kill him, though if he would have faith in the child, he himself
would reign in peace in this life and forever in the life to come.
Why are you
afraid, Herod, when you hear of the birth of a king? He does not come to drive
you out, but to conquer the devil. But because you do not understand this you
are disturbed and in a rage, and to destroy one child whom you seek, you show
your cruelty in the death of so many children.
You are not
restrained by the love of weeping mothers or fathers mourning the deaths of
their sons, nor by the cries and sobs of the children. You destroy those who
are tiny in body because fear is destroying your heart. You imagine that if you
accomplish your desire you can prolong your own life, though you are seeking to
kill Life himself.
Yet your throne
is threatened by the source of grace, so small, yet so great, who is lying in
the manger. He is using you, all unaware of it, to work out his own purposes
freeing souls from captivity to the devil. He has taken up the sons of the
enemy into the ranks of God’s adopted children.
The children die
for Christ, though they do not know it. The parents mourn for the death of
martyrs. The child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to
himself. See the kind of kingdom that is his, coming as he did in order to be
this kind of king. See how the deliverer is already working deliverance, the
Savior already working salvation.
But you, Herod,
do not know this and are disturbed and furious. While you vent your fury
against the child, you are already paying him homage, and do not know it.
How great a gift
of grace is here! To what merits of their own do the children owe this kind of
victory? They cannot speak, yet they bear witness to Christ. They cannot use
their limbs to engage in battle, yet already they bear off the palm of victory.
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The Collect for the Feast of the Holy
Innocents
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy
innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your
mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of
evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
thank you.
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