The Holy Innocents

A priest and liturgist at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (my own alma mater) pointed out, in the Globe’s article, that in the Episcopal Church’s calendar we have these holy days during Christmastide which provide a context to address this legitimate  pastoral need. The day after Christmas, December 26th, is the Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr, who was stoned to death. Today, is the Holy Innocents. Professor Larson-Miller wasn’t suggesting that we not create Blue Advent services, only that if we look to our existing calendar we can find rich resources that are both Biblical and liturgical. I also inferred by her comments that we’ve been doing this for centuries...that our tradition holds this, already! 

Meanwhile the parish where I serve is shut-up for the days between Christmas and New Year’s, and I bet a handful of the people whom I serve, at most, know that these days are filled with “major feasts,” including today’s, the Holy Innocents. If our churches don’t keep these days (i.e. if the clergy take 3-4 days off) how can we expect the faithful to know about them, or to keep/celebrate them?

When King Herod had all those under-two-year olds slaughtered he was using his power to squelch what he knew to be a liberating Word in the birth of Jesus. But St. Matthew’s telling of this god-awful story isn’t merely news. It's a story in the most literary sense, one designed to draw us beyond ‘what happened to them’ to the depths of ‘what is happening to us.’  Reading about a Joseph with prophetic dreams should remind us of another righteous man who ended up exiled from his family in Egypt. Hearing of baby boys slaughtered by the empire would remind Matthew’s readers of the way Moses narrowly escaped that fate as well. And any Jew hearing this story in 1st century Palestine would remember the more recent terrors under Antiochus, when any mother caught circumcising her son would be rewarded with a dead baby hung around her neck. 

And, even more, reading this story better remind us, in 2012, that innocents are slaughtered every day...in Syria, in the Sudan, in the Congo, and yes, on the streets in the United States of America. 

This past year (from December 2011 until December 2012) I spent a great deal of time with Stanley Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew’s gospel (Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, 2006). I leave you today with a quotation from this book, and an invitation to reflect on our own response and feelings to today’s commemoration of the Holy Innocents, in the first century, as well as on those children who will die at the hands of tyrants, at home and abroad: 

"Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants [like Herod]."