The Innocents Today

 

 

The Massacre of the Innocents by Léon Cogniet (1824)

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men,[

he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children 

in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, 

according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.

Matthew 2:16

I could never convince folk of the value of observing the Twelve Days of Christmas as the shortest liturgical season of the Christian Year. Once Christmas Day was past everyone was ready to pack up the decorations and seemed bewildered when we sang carols. Through the years I did a couple of services where we sang the Twelve Days of Christmas and I talked about mummering and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as  reminders that the season was important in another time, but it didn't really fly. 

I never emphasized this day in the calendar which is the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. It is the acknowledgment of the story in Matthew's gospel of  Roman ruler Herod's paranoid decision to murder children in the vicinity of Jesus' birthplace, Bethlehem, after the Magi visited him looking for a king. 

This is a grisly footnote in the story of the arrival of the Magi from the east and the decision of the the Holy Family to flee to Egypt. Yet this year it got me thinking about the vulnerability of children in our time. 

Recently hundreds of boys were kidnapped in Nigeria by the Boko Haram militant group and some of them died. 

Just before Christmas a boat full of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean with a number of pregnant women and children amongst those who drowned. 

In the United States migrant children have been kept in detention camps for years, some permanently separated from their parents. Several children have died in these camps, a reality almost beyond comprehension in a democracy which wears its Christianity on its sleeve. 

Here in Canada there are thousands of Indigenous children who have been separated from their families and communities, supposed for their good. Thousands more are growing up in communities where the water supply has been unsafe for human consumption for decades. 

We may consider the story of the flight of the Holy Family and the verse about the slaughter of children as curious footnotes in the larger narrative of our Christian faith. Instead we might shine a light on them as reminders that we are always called to respond to the needs of the young and vulnerable and innocent, for Jesus' sake.