Take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him (St. Matthew 2:13).
Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. We know for certain that the church has kept this feast since the fifth century, and most likely before that. The whole idea of the Holy Innocents has a strange sound to modern ears. The collect for today begins, “O Almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths…” This is a revision of an even older collect that began, “Almighty God, whose praise this day the young Innocents, thy witnesses, hath confessed and showed forth, not in speaking but in dying…” We know these prayers frighten us, maybe terrify us, but do they make any sense to us?
Consider the Innocents. Why would we call them holy? They did not choose to die. Their parents certainly did not want them to be murdered by Herod’s soldiers. They seem to be victims of circumstance: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so they died. Is there anything holy about any of this tragedy? Many people would say, “No, of course not.” And yet the church has called them holy for over fifteen hundred years. Why?
Herod himself is part of the answer. Herod, as the Gospel tells us, enquired diligently of the wise men where Jesus was to be found, so that he might destroy him. When the wise men understood Herod’s intentions, they were of no further use to him in finding Jesus, so Herod decided to kill every baby in Bethlehem just to make sure that he destroyed the new-born king. Herod committed these murders with diligence, unable to bear the thought that a greater king, a greater power might exist than Herod. This evil act is especially hateful when we remember that Herod was only a puppet-king under the Roman Emperor. The puppet-king murdered innocent babies to preserve his power, his right to be a slave to the Roman Empire.
It was the Herods of the world that Christ was born to defeat. All sin begins with the attempt of Adam and Eve to be as God, to be their own god. Sin is the Herod within each of us as we struggle in our pride to be our own gods, to put our own will above the Law of God and above the needs and lives of our fellow men. We do this all of the time, and tell ourselves we are only being reasonable, only protecting our own interests, only finding our own fulfillment, as Herod must have told himself when he issued his orders to the soldiers. We too easily make ourselves slaves to sin, to earthly powers, to the rebellion against God, just as surely as Herod was a slave to his own ambition and to the emperor in Rome.
Christ came to change all this. We say He came to free us from our sins. We forget that “freedom from sins” isn’t a line of poetry or a symbolic phrase, but a real freedom, a real release, and a real salvation from powers within us and without us that strangle the very life right out of us. Many would say that mankind has out-grown any need for God, that we are smart enough, wise enough, powerful enough to run the world ourselves. But is this true? Look at the last 100 years: The world wars, the genocides, the totalitarian regimes which have accounted for, conservatively, over a hundred million innocents slaughtered. Add to that the millions who have died through private crimes, through starvation, through economic violence, through selfishness, through the murder of the innocent in abortion and we see that mankind needs salvation and freedom from sin more today than ever.
Those hundreds of millions of innocents cry out, while the babbling fools our world carefully elevates talk of personal fulfillment and valid alternative life-styles. The world cannot bear the fact that God Incarnate is among us, that Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, was born as one of us, was killed for our pride and sin, and rose again faithful and obedient to the Father, free from sin, freeing us from sin, all while conquering emperors, kings, princes, and all our own private Herods.
We know why the Innocents died. We know why the innocents of every era have died: man in his efforts to defeat God, to destroy Him and His power, has struck about him both blindly and with diligence and hated and killed others. What we still have to answer is what makes the victims holy.
When God made the world, the earth, and mankind, He said that they were good. This was true then, and it is still true now. Under the burden of his sins, man is still the good creature of God at least potentially, he can always repent his sins and become good in fact by joining himself to Christ. We forget sometimes that being alive, being God’s creature is good and holy in and of itself. The victims of sin are targets of mankind’s rejection of God and a mad, futile resistance to the Incarnate Christ. To be an intended victim with God is a holy thing because it makes clear our basic union with God through Jesus Christ and by the Holy Ghost.
The Innocents “confess and show forth” God’s praise by suffering with Christ, the same Christ who is murdered Himself by the mob in Jerusalem on Good Friday, the same Christ who is attacked time and again by human sin. God made us all, so He made children to glorify Him, and as long as mankind attacks God, tries to destroy God, children will die, glorifying God by their deaths because they are victims by virtue of their union with Him.
This fits no earthly definition of holiness because the earthly definition is corrupted by sin. We think of holiness as saintly actions: doing things for God. But God does not need the things that we do. The holiness that God offers us is our being, cleansed of the corruption of sin by the perfect obedience and love of His son born in Bethlehem as a man for us all. Faith in Christ and love of God which grows out of that faith, and the lives we live because of that faith are the only true holiness. Actions the world calls “good” if they are done for selfish reasons are sins, because we seek to be our own justification and our own god. Living with God, however weak we are, however powerless we are, even if we are as weak and powerless as little babies, is holiness.
The modern mind that rejects the idea of the holy Innocents betrays the fact that the modern mind takes neither the emptiness of sin nor the fullness of faith in God very seriously. We keep the Feast of the Innocents every year to remind ourselves of the terrible price mankind pays for sin and disobedience of God; to remind ourselves that Herod lurks within us, as well as without; to remind ourselves, as the Gospel tells us, that the Herods die, that they fail, and that only Christ and the innocents live with God forever. Christmas is the first step our Lord takes toward Calvary, and the death of the Holy Innocents forces us to face that terrible fact and all of the reasons for it, even as we glory in the victory of God and the eternal salvation of mankind.