The Holy Innocents allows us reflect on the present day as much as it does on the orders given by King Herod in the wake of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the hope that by killing every boy born in Bethlehem at the same time as Jesus, he would succeed in killing the new-born King of the Jews.
There was nothing about those baby boys that made them deserve death. Look at any one of them, and you can see that he had no chance to do anything, or be anyone, or become anyone. So passive are these babies that some people find it hard to level off the the title of “martyr” with people like St Stephen, who insisted on preaching the truth until his hearers stoned him for it, or St Thomas Becket, who insisted on living the truth until King Henry II had him killed in 1170 because of it.
These children didn't insist on anything except their mothers’ nurture; and unlike Stephen and Thomas, they did or said nothing to provoke their martyrdom.
In our little human brains, these babies are a puzzle, and that is one reason why God has inspired the Church to celebrate the feast of The Holy Innocents – to expose how inadequate our seemingly rational, worldly-wise thoughts are!
As he reminds us again and again throughout salvation history, his thoughts are not our thoughts. Babies may not rank high on the scale as far as our human calculus is concerned; but then neither do sparrows, and yet God has told us that God sees and counts every one of those.
So, in honouring them I suppose we effectively honour the martyrdom of the people these children could have become, and their children’s children as well; and at the same time we can remember the contemporary and continuing massacre of those who die before birth for the convenience of those who have them killed as happens in abortion clinics and hospitals the world-over.
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