he
celebration of Christmas is such a pious custom!
The Christmas tree, the pretty presents, the excitement of the children
and a little Christmas music are always beautiful.
A religious mood intensifying the atmosphere makes it especially
touching. To be sure, we are a
little self-indulgent, and so we readily let ourselves fall into a mood that is
peaceful and comforting.
Is this all there is to Christmas?… Christmas is more than a bit of cheerful mood. The child – he is the one that counts today, - the Son of God, and his birth. Everything else about this feast is based on and quickened by this, or else it dies and turns to illusion. Christmas means that he has come. He has turned the night of our darkness into Christmas. The night of our anxiety and hopelessness is now a holy night. This is what Christmas tells us.
But are all happy about the birth of this child? It is the constant fear of every tyrant that somewhere, perhaps in an obscure village, perhaps at this very moment, there is a baby born who will one day signal the end of his power. This fear was realized for King Herod when wandering wise men from the East came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?”
By all accounts, Herod was a man of extreme brutality. Rather than sit and wait anxiously for the day of reckoning with this future “king”, why not simply kill the babe before he could grow and pose a threat? So Herod simply ordered his troops to the village of Bethlehem, there to kill every male child under the age of two. The order was given and it was dutifully carried out.
But
the reader knows, as Herod does not, that the massacre is pointless.
Joseph, forewarned in a dream, has taken his family into exile in Egypt.
This terrible story is a vivid reminder of the violent world into which Jesus was born. There were certainly those for whom the coming of the Messiah represented anything but good news.
The Church commemorates the feast of these Holy Innocents. Unlike traditional martyrs who would later die bearing witness to Christ, these little ones died unwittingly in the place of Christ. They were killed by the same interests that would later conspire in the death of Jesus and for the same reasons – to stifle from birth any hope that the world might be changed.
In
our own time whole villages have been massacred on the basis of similar reports:
“In such-and-such-a-hamlet the peasants have formed a cooperative…
It is said that in such-a-village poor families are gathering at night to
read the Bible and other subversive literature…
It is well known where this is likely to lead…
Advise that appropriate action be taken before the danger spreads.”
The image of innocent children being slaughtered is one we’d just as soon
erase from our memory and imagination. In
the same way we like to forget the images of similar atrocities that we
experience regularly: images of dead children being carried out of a bombed
building, small, bloodied bodies in fields and ditches in East Timor, Rwanda,
the Congo, Sierra Leone; abused children, youngsters struck by random violence
on school grounds and streets. We’d
like to forget the images of starving children with distended stomachs, orphans
of war, hollow-eyed children reaching to us for help.
Our imaginations refuse to picture Herod’s soldiers braining babies and
running toddlers through with their swords.
Just so, we prefer to forget skeletal tots with Nazi death camp numbers
tattooed on the arms, the tiny bloodied bodies that lay in a ditch in Vietnam,
the tiny fetuses torn from their mothers’ wombs.
We do not know how many “Holy Innocents” were executed by Herod’s death squads, but we know that they were not the last. “When evil wars against the person and mission of Jesus, it wars against God’s children,” says Fr. F. Corvini, Xaverian missionary in Sierra Leone.
Our 20th century has seen the Holocaust, the vicious methodical genocide of six million Jews. Our 20th century has seen uncounted millions slaughtered by government death squads in Central and South America, in Russia, Cambodia, Tibet, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone. Our 20th century has allowed children to be snatched from their mothers’ arms and sold to the highest bidder, their mothers imprisoned, tortured and made to “disappear” by dictators’ whims, and has seen the lynching of African Americans in parts of our own country.
Xaverian Missionary Fr. Joseph Berton, who has opened St. Michael’s Lodge, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a center for the recuperation of former “child soldiers” observes, “Here, as elsewhere, the child soldiers conscripted, forced, and drugged, are the No. 1 victims of the war and of the atrocities committed by them… It is always the children, the holy innocents, who suffer most from human sinfulness. The children die first when famine strikes. Children suffer the most when war deprives them of parents and home.”
The remembrance of the Holy Innocents at Christmas time challenges our attitude toward suffering children, victims of war and atrocities, refugees, exiled, displaced, unjustly evicted, reduced to slavery in the sex market, oppressed by foreign rulers, welfare recipients, homeless. Where do we stand on abortion, the death penalty, anti-war efforts? Do we challenge our government to counter not only the atrocious behavior taking place today, but to break the cycle of violence and killing?
Irreverence is a power that kills life, and endangers children more than anything else in the world today. Reverence for life is the root source of all social rebirth and renewal.
It is important that we not close our eyes to the images of horror and atrocity in our midst. Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel has said, “It is by remembering that we keep hope alive.”
The feast of the Holy Innocents, placed in the Catholic liturgy soon after Christmas, is not simply a memorial to those who died before their time. These infants represent all those cut down to prevent the seed of liberation from taking root and growing. They are those who die in the dream of a different future, hoping but never knowing that their redeemer lives. In remembering the feast of the Holy Innocents the church commemorates these victims of Herod’s rage. But it also celebrates his failure. His power is doomed.
The Child Lives.
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)