Thursday in the Octave of Christmas, December 28, 2023

The Feast of the Holy Innocents

Matthew 2, 13-18

When the magi had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi. Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet: “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.”

The Church might have placed this feast after the Feast of the Epiphany to make better chronological sense, for we celebrate the visit of the magi on the Feast of the Epiphany.  But it also is fitting to today’s feast to put it in greater proximity to that of the Nativity of the Lord, for whom they died.  To understand the event this feast commemorates, we should reconstruct the chronology:  the Birth of Jesus Christ on December 25.  His circumcision and naming, presumably in Bethlehem, eight days later on January 1.  Jesus would have been presented in the Temple and Mary purified from her childbirth within forty days of his Birth, according to the Law, and this is celebrated on February 2.  After this, the Holy Family would have returned to Bethlehem, and it is on some night after this that Joseph is warned in a dream to take the Mother and Child and flee to Egypt, out of Herod’s grasp.  Thus, the Holy Family spends over forty days in Bethlehem, beginning in a niche in the rocky hills outside the town and ending up in a house, probably that of a distant relative.  We might wonder at all this time spent there, but since they were near Jerusalem, reasonably they should stay until they had completed the rites necessarily done in the Temple, such as the Presentation.  In other words, why go all the way back to Nazareth a week or two after the Birth when they would have to return within forty days to present Jesus in the Temple, anyway?  Joseph may have planned to return to Nazareth within days after the Presentation and was on the verge of doing so when the angel appeared to him.  We may wonder why Herod waited so long for the magi before realizing they were not returning to him.  But only a month had passed from the day they found Jesus and his Presentation in the Temple and Herod may have thought they were making a long stay.  

At any rate, Herod’s response to a threat from a newborn Child in Bethlehem, when it came, came fiercely.  He sent assassins into the town and the region around it, killing any child of two years or younger, doubtlessly killing others in the process.  It was a horrific, senseless event.  Perhaps a dozen or two baby boys were ripped from their mothers’s arms and ruthlessly slaughtered.  Matthew uses a verse from Jeremiah 32, 15 to describe the horror: “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.”  Jeremiah is speaking of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the massacre that resulted.  Matthew does not engage in hyperbole in using this verse: the Israelites killed by the Babylonians had defied God and worshipped idols.  Jeremiah had warned them for years about this, but they had rejected, threatened, and finally imprisoned him.  They had brought their doom upon themselves.  But the babies of Bethlehem were innocent, and their slaughter unprovoked.  The grief and heartbreak brought on by innocent suffering far exceeds that brought on by any other kind.  Their deaths prefigures the suffering and Death, years later, of the most innocent of all, the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

Because these innocent babies were killed out of hatred for Jesus, the Church, from ancient times, has commemorated them in a feast.  We pray that they may intercede for all who are suffering likewise.