The Holy Innocents
It was the first funeral that I remember attending. It was for a boy my age, and I was a young boy. I can recall the commemorative photo of him on display and thinking ‘I look like him.’ Unlike many funerals I’ve since attended, the body of the departed was present with us, and the casket was open so that everyone present could process forward and say goodbye. It all seemed like it could barely be real. I could not have articulated it then, but later I realized that my first exposure to death would challenge the notion that death was something ‘far away in the distance.’ If that could happen to someone my age, then it could also happen to someone at whatever age I was from then on. I can still see in the row behind me my neighbor from across the street. She was crying and asking her mother ‘why did this happen?’
Why did this happen?
From the sensations of pain we naturally feel when we endure grief as the result of a loss, there is the story we begin to tell about the meaning of that pain. This story arises out of either the recalling of or participation in a larger story than ourselves, or else depends solely upon us to construct it. Often there is a strange comingling of both. It seems that, as human beings, we have to find the meaning of pain and loss. As Victor Frankl notes, it can be the difference between life and death. But any attempt to assay the perplexity of loss brings us quickly to what we do not know and, perhaps, what is not ours to know. This adds to the burden of loss. If we are left to ourselves and the meaning we construct, we will reach the end of what we are able to assert and then await despondency and despair. If we are able to offer our loss and its attendant perplexity into a story capable of receiving and bearing it, though, we are made able to observe our grief vicariously with wounded humanity. We are able to enjoin in its prayer of lament through which we anticipate an answer to the question of our lament.
As with the funeral I attended, our yearly commemoration of the Holy Innocents puts pressure on our easy answers to the mystery of death. It is a uniquely difficult day to account for in the Church’s liturgical year because we lack the testimonial record. St. Stephen bore courageous witness in his diaconal ministry, confessed the true faith and forgave his persecutors to the end. St. John endured the martyrdom of the long obedience all of his days, through torture and schism and exile. We do not know about the children of Bethlehem except that they were born around the same time as our Lord. We lack the biography, and so we lack that accessible way to rationalize the ending of a life. We cannot make their death make sense in the same way we can those who had more of a say in their deaths. Our modern tendency to swap funerals and eulogies for celebrations of life becomes difficult to exercise when we know so little about the life we seek to celebrate. We are returned quickly to the struggle to find meaning and consolation. We cannot deny or suppress the sense of loss and so we feel the grief most keenly. We have to wait until the meaning is revealed.
The Lessons for Mass on Holy Innocents Day lead us into a meditation on this experience and the struggle to wait for the meaning. The Gospel Lesson especially highlights the manner in which the Lord responds to the question of a centuries-long lament and begins to reveal His answer. As we read in the account of Herod’s slaughter of the babies in St. Matthew 2, we conclude the episode with the prophecy of Jeremiah: “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Cf. Jeremiah xxxi.15). To understand the significance of it, we have to go back to Genesis and the story of the matriarch, Rachel.
Rachel was the second wife of Jacob, the younger daughter of Laban, his kinsman. Although Jacob chose Rachel for his wife, Laban tricked Jacob into marrying Leah, her sister, as well. Leah always knew that Jacob’s love was for Rachel, and caused her great sorrow. But the Lord had compassion on her: “When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren” (Genesis xxix.31). Leah would end up giving Jacob six of his twelve sons.
Rachel, on the other hand, bore the burden of knowing that she was her husband’s true love but was unable to conceive a child. Her anguish over this fact reached such a point that she cried out to Jacob: “Give me children or I will die!” (Genesis xxx.1). And so she sought to have children regardless of her infertility by conscripting two servants to bear two sons each for Jacob. It was an echo of Abraham and Sarah before them, and would heighten the conflict among the sons of Jacob later on. But after all her envy and machinations, she was given the gift of a son, Joseph. But as Rachel gave birth afterward to her second son, complications of childbirth claimed her life and so she named the child “Ben-oni” or ‘son of my sorrow.’ Yet Jacob refused this name and instead called him Benjamin, ‘son of my right hand’ indicating good fortune or strength. After she died by the road, Jacob buried her and marked the place, and the memorial stood as a landmark for centuries.
By the time of Jeremiah, the tribes who had sprung from the sons of Jacob had risen and fallen through infighting and invasion. Only Judah’s land remained and it was in a poor state due to rampant idolatry and poor kingship. This came to a point in the slaughter of the children of Judah by the hands of their own parents in the Valley of Hinnom, a short distance from the Temple Mount, as they were offered to the pagan god Molech. For this sacrilege, the ground was cursed and the doom of Judah was pronounced by Jeremiah. Soon, the king of Babylon would arrive to cart away the prize youth of Jerusalem to serve in his kingdom. Before they commenced their long March north, they were gathered by the invaders just outside the city, at a crossroads overlooked by Rachel’s tomb. Again, Rachel continued to weep for her children, lost once again. And again her lament was suppressed, this time by the king and false prophets crying ‘Peace, peace, where there was no peace.’ But the fact of loss could no longer be denied. And there from beginning to end was Rachel weeping over her children.
In the centuries that followed, there was precious little to suggest that those lost children would be gathered again. There were those who returned from the Captivity, yes, but the prevailing sense after the return was that something still was not whole again. Even in the victories and celebrations of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Judas Maccabaeus something remained broken at the heart of Jerusalem. This was to say nothing of the many who remained abroad in Persia and those who had been scattered by the Assyrians long before. Rachel still wept for her children.
By the time of Christ, King Herod had done what seemed impossible—he had reconstituted Judah and gained the sanction of Caesar to rule over it and to restore what he saw as its former glory. So he built up its Temple and palaces, enhanced its trade, eliminated dissidents, and curried imperial support for a thriving culture and economy. It was just about perfect, as long as you kept your eyes on the big picture, as long as you didn’t think too much about Rachel’s tomb when you passed by on the way up to Jerusalem.
Children, however, have a way of complicating the neat schemes of politics, economics, and culture. The birth of Christ was no exception, but shook to the core Herod’s carefully-curated identity as Israel’s deliverer and sustainer. What were a few infant boys in a small town compared to the stability of the kingdom? As Abp. Haverland noted recently, Herod’s logic makes worldly sense. Resonant with the logic of Caiaphas later in the Gospel, Herod saw the expedience in a horrific but limited act of violence if it would spare the many. In the grand scales, would not the ends justify the deaths of a dozen perhaps nameless boys from Bethlehem?
So Rachel had to weep for her children again. Her loss at childbirth, her loss through exile, her loss through callous sacrifice and murder—her lament gathered together the grief of Israel. And this is the beginning of the Gospel, the beginning of God’s answer and consolation. Unlike virtually everyone else, our Lord does not suppress the reality of Rachel’s lament—He hears her cry and makes it part of His story of redemption. What unfolds through Him is the healing of that grievous loss. We can see the horizon of this healing extended in the imagery of Revelation, which serves as the Epistle for Holy Innocents: the redeemed of Israel and the Church gathered around Christ. We do not receive in this an explanation to rationalize the centuries of sorrow, rather we see in the vision the truth that not one of Rachel’s children has been forgotten, that they have been carefully found again and brought back again by the One who wipes away every tear from every eye. And, what is more, He has made them the icon of inheriting the Kingdom.
Why did this happen?
Holy Innocents provides no easy or quick answer. Instead we are invited to meditate on one of the worst moments in salvation history through the vision of Jesus Christ. Today reminds us that even amid our celebration of Christmas all has not yet been made well. Many mothers wept in Bethlehem; Mary would be made to weep for her Son in time, as well. We anticipate even in the festivity of Christ’s birth His eventual Passion. The world will not receive Jesus; the spirit of Herod is the spirit of antichrist, and will be with us to the end of the age. It will always tempt us with expedience and the so-called bigger picture which rationalizes true horrors in the name of stability and progress. We cannot ever assent to these temptations, and the holy innocents teach us that innocence of life will triumph over the violence and death of worldly power.
Today teaches us that the murder of innocents is objectively evil, and precisely the reason our Lord came to save us. The callous disposal of innocence is the endgame of all ambition in our hearts. It is a grace that we are preserved from it, and we must never presume upon that grace to tolerate compromise with a vainglory that resorts too easily to violence. It is not just the problem of some distant past time. It is an ugliness possible for all of us even as the beauty of salvation is open freely to us. Today is a sobering reminder that we all really do need to be saved, but also that Christ was born to do precisely this. The Church’s time calls us to observe sorrow in joy and joy in sorrow on this day—and so we are conformed to the reality of life in the Kingdom in this world. We are better prepared to journey with God-with-us as He now goes to work our salvation.