The Holy Innocents

The Collect
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Psalm
124

The Readings

Jeremiah 31:15-17     +     Revelation 21:1-7     +     Matthew 2:13-18

When the wise men had departed, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.

~Matthew 2:13-15a

Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,

because they are no more. 

~Jeremiah 31:15

Even in the midst of Christmastide, the church will not allow us to descend into a fantasy of sentimentalism. In contrast to many more recent depictions of "the manger scene" on Christmas cards and even in many hymns and carols, in traditional iconography Jesus' swaddling clothes clearly resemble a winding sheet, a shroud, and the darkness of the cave stable a tomb. This is why he came among us. And on the fourth day of Christmas, just when I am ready to slip blissfully into a sugar-induced coma, along comes Holy Innocents' Day--a stark reminder of the world of terror, violence, and injustice into which our Lord was born; the world in which he is still being born among us today.

Over at the Grow Christians blog, Ryan Kuratko reflects on our need for Holy Innocents:

To be clear, the Jesus birth took place in a world that we would recognize, not a fantasy. It is a world with empire, an unwed pregnant mother and cuckolded man, poverty, and now, on Holy Innocents, murder . . .Holy Innocents arrives every Christmas to remind us to step outside of our fantasies. Real innocents die, and we owe them more than to create a fictional, self-soothing pacifier-Jesus. Our imagination is for better things than this . . . We need to imagine, envision, empathize, and dream all of the implications of Jesus’s presence among us—what it says about our compassion, our justice, our joy, our sorrow, our society, our planet, our money. Holy Innocents reminds us of all the people our fantasies would prefer to leave out.

Read the rest here.

Closing Prayer

For the sake of the Holy Innocents, slain by cruel Herod, may we never turn a blind eye to injustice, and never forget the sacred humanity of the vulnerable and the sorrows of those under tyranny and oppression. Amen.