The Feast of the Holy Innocents, Monday, December 28, 2020
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 celebrates the Feast of the Holy Innocents a few days after Christmas and before the Feast of the Epiphany, but the events celebrated would have occurred in a different order, historically. First, Jesus would have been born in a stable in or near Bethlehem on December 25. Eight days later, on January 1, he would have been circumcised. This was formerly commemorated in the Roman Church by the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord. Following this, on January 6, the Magi brought their gifts to the newborn Child, still at Bethlehem, but at this point the Holy Family is living in a house, as per Matthew 2, 11. This is celebrated in the Feast of the Epiphany. Then, on February 2, forty days after his Birth, the Lord would have been presented in the Temple in fulfillment of the Jewish Law. It is after the Holy Family returned to Bethlehem from Jerusalem that Joseph was sent the dream in which an angel warned him to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod. Some time after this Herod unleashed his killers on the boy children of Bethlehem.
How many children were killed? Archaeologists think that Bethlehem held a population of about three hundred at the time of our Lord’s Birth. Based on this, perhaps a dozen baby boys of two years and younger would have been alive then. The killers would have descended upon the tiny town without warning and they would have gone from house to house in violent search of their victims. Every family in the town would have lost at least one baby. The raid would have lasted an hour or less, and then the killers would have ridden away, leaving the town devastated. Truly, “sobbing and loud lamentations” would have filled the air then and for days afterwards.
St. Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31, 15 to describe the horror of this slaughter: “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 Prophet Jeremiah is warning the people of Judah of the destruction that Babylon will wreak upon them if they do not repent. He speaks of Rachel, the wife of Jacob, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, and so the ancestress of the tribes formed from the children of Benjamin and from the sons of Joseph: Manasseh and Ephraim. These tribes settled in central and southern Israel after the Exodus from Egypt. Rachel, then, weeps over the massacre of her descendants by a foreign army. Likewise, the Jews regarded Herod as a foreigner and a usurper, as Matthew’s quote of Jeremiah makes clear. Here, we understand Herod, spiritually, as the devil seeking to kill the Son of God before he can call the people to repentance, and also as how sin destroys souls.
The Church calls the children killed at Bethlehem “the Holy Innocents” because of their innocence and has always regarded them as martyrs. We might wonder about this because they were not of an age to bear conscious witness to Christ, but a martyr is one who is killed out of hatred for Christ or the Faith, and clearly this entitles them to the rank of the martyrs in heaven.
We pray to the Holy Innocents and ask them to intercede for the safety and good health of all children, born and unborn.
Why is it only Matthew that tells us about the escape to Egypt and murder of the innocents? This are big events.
ReplyDeleteLuke may not have been aware of it. Luke obtained the information for his Gospel from people whom he had interviewed. If Luke did not know of the Massacre and the Flight beforehand, he would not have asked about it, and the people whom he interviewed may not have thought of it while he was questioning them.
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