After Christmas reflection one: Innocents

I thought we’d have a little series of reflections to take us from Christmas to Epiphany, one each day. Let’s start with a scene we’d rather not include…

Today the liturgical calendar asks us to remember the Holy Innocents, the victims of the brutality of Herod. The weeping of Rachel for her children comes to jolt us out of any sleepy post-Christmas contentment. Listen to these words about the kings from Kate Compston, a poet and writer of prayers reflecting on the magi whose journey has started by now to get them to the house some time in the future, a journey that will unsettle Herod and his henchmen…

“We call them wise and I had always thought of them that way respecting the pilgrimage of anyone who sees a star and follows it to his discomforting being prepared to change.

And yet - in following their star, the star that was to lead them to enlargement of the soul (their own) they blundered mightily, and set in train the massacre of many innocents. Naive and foolish men they were, not wise to go and ask of Herod “where is your rival? where is he who might unseat you?”

I wonder if back in their own countries for all that they themselves were born again, they heard the voice of Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more?”

Kate Compston plunges us into the world of good intentions and even courageous deeds that prove to have unintended consequences. The travellers from the East upset the political balance in Herod’s kingdom and St Matthew tells us that the outcome was horrifying.

How did Herod take the surprising news of a revival in the lineage of King David? Not well. Herod had too much respect for the venerable magi to dismiss it as “fake news,” so, as Matthew tells us, “When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.” The birth announcement brought by the magi filled Herod with dread, and Herod’s fear of a baby shows just how fragile his ego was. And Jerusalem was afraid too. The citizens of Jerusalem were well aware of how dangerous life can be when a powerful ruler with a fragile ego is afraid. So all of Jerusalem was on edge — anxious about what the paranoid king might do. 

What Herod did was commit one of the greatest crimes in the Bible — we call it the Slaughter of the Innocents. Though it’s true we have no corroboration of this atrocity outside of Matthew’s Gospel, the account is in keeping with what we know about Herod’s ruthless methods. Matthew tells us that the paranoid king sent death squads to Bethlehem with the ghastly instructions to kill all male babies under the age of two.

The words of Kate Compston were included in a book of prayers ‘Bread for Tomorrow’ commissioned by Christian Aid. The commentary on this section said ‘Prayer that is deaf to the ‘voice of Rachel’ has missed the epiphany. Prayer is only truly ‘contemplation’ when it enables us to see all that is to be seen, including the violent realities we are normally not prepared to contemplate’.

Are we shocked by Herod’s crime? Of course. But though we are horrified, we should not be surprised. Tyrant kings and kingdoms have a long history of ruthlessly dealing with threat and dissent, even today, and innocents get swept up in their brutality. Threat can lead to terror. Look at 20th and 21st century examples of this: Hitler’s barbaric Nazi project swept all those who were “different” aside, leading to unimaginable Holocaust; Ukraine this past year has seen innocent blood spilt as the neighbouring leader wants more and more land. There are so many examples. 

I once preached on the slaughter of the innocents when the Matthew passage fell on a Sunday and I was asked “are you alright?” I’d spoilt the church’s Christmas party! But in beginning a series of these little reflections up to Epiphany, I again remember incarnation comes in the dark… and it isn’t a nice story detached from reality but deep within it. So today we remember innocents caught up in something desperate happening, and we remember the Rachel’s of today lamenting the loss of innocent children. Don’t forget the abuse of children in today’s world in its many forms. 

Here’s the collect for today:

Heavenly Father,

whose children suffered at the hands of Herod,

though they had done no wrong:

by the suffering of your Son

and by the innocence of our lives

frustrate all evil designs

and establish your reign of justice and peace;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

One of the remarkable things about the Bible is that it doesn’t paper over atrocity or shy away from giving vivid depictions of the brutality of life in the time of tyrant kings. We need to read the Bible as honestly as it is written and not try to domesticate it into the saccharine clichés of sentimental Christmas cards. For the light of the gospel to shine truthfully, we need to be honest about the darkness in which it shines. Don’t we?