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 . . .
Collect for the Feast of the Holy
Innocents
Today is the feast day of the Holy
Innocents. It is that day on the Church calendar when we remember
the Holy Family's terror-driven night flight from Bethlehem to Egypt
in a desperate attempt to escape the murderous rampage of an
out-of-control despot. It is that day when we read from the Gospel
of Matthew of Herod's attempt to eliminate his preordained successor
by killing all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two
years old and younger.
Unfortunately Scripture isn't all rose
petals and people playing nicely with each other. We tend to
overlook those nasty bits of Scripture, especially Christians who
want to focus on the nice, loving God of the New Testament. But in
the second chapter of Matthew we hear of a loss of life that shocks
us. We hear of innocent children being killed for no other reason
than that they were born at the wrong time. We hear of the Holy
Family's skin-of-their teeth escape from persecution, themselves
becoming homeless refugees seeking shelter in a foreign country.
This is a hard day to celebrate.
Questions abound as to why this had to happen? Couldn't God have
foreseen this and done something to stop it? Did Jesus and Mary ever
suffer from PTSD or the Why Me syndrome that causes one to wonder why
they got to live while everyone around them died?
Within this story we need to understand
that this wasn't God's doing. God can't stop people from doing evil
things. God never promises to wave a magic wand and make everything
all better.
What God does, as I've said earlier, is
promise to be with us. It then becomes our job to understand that
God's desire is for a rule of justice, love, and peace; and it
becomes our job to work for those things.
Can we read this terrible story of the
Holy Innocents and see it played out today? Are there children
suffering at the hands of unjust rulers and laws? Are there people
persecuted simply for being who they are? Are there innocent people
dying because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Are
there systems in society that allow for innocent people to be
mistreated? Are people of God fleeing persecution, on the run, and
looking for asylum?
If this story of the slaughter of the
Holy Innocents does anything for us today, may it open our eyes to
any number of problems and injustices still faced by people today;
and may it help us to, in the name of God, resist evil tyrants and
work to establish systems of justice, love, and peace.
Amen.
People often say they don't believe in God because He didn't stop the Holocaust. God gives up Free Will, and we have to remember that our choices always affect other people. He never puts His Hand in front of our faces and shouts "STOP". He was sitting on His throne, with His hands over His face, weeping at the cruelty of Herod, or Hitler, or Pol Pot, or any number of other people. Maybe even us, sometimes.
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