A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.
With these words the prophet Jeremiah describes the collective grief of the Jewish people as they faced the impending destruction of the Kingdom of Judah (31:15). The mention of Ramah would have evoked the site where captives were deported to Babylon. Rachel, who died while giving birth to her son, Benjamin, has now become a symbol for all the mothers of Israel who have lost children, either to war or exile. It is an image of desolation and despair.
The New Testament adds yet another layer of meaning to this text. St. Matthew’s gospel declares that these words were “fulfilled” by an event that occurred many years later: Herod the Great’s decree to kill all the male children in Bethlehem who were two years old or younger (2:16-18).
What could have motivated such a heinous decree? It was an act of pragmatism as much as sheer cruelty. Herod heard the prophecy about a baby who was destined to become king of the Jews (2:2). If true, this child presented a great threat to Herod’s political power. Why not play it safe and eliminate the possibility (so he thought) of this infant king ever growing into an adult-sized threat to his kingdom? The other children were simply collateral damage.
Every December 28, just a few days after the Feast of the Nativity, the Church remembers these massacred children. Amid the joy and festivity of Christmas, we are invited to reflect on the profound darkness of the world into which Christ was born. The world in which the Word became flesh is not the saccharine, pollyannish setting of Hallmark movies. Christ was born into our world: a broken place of bloodshed and heartbreak.
This is what happens when God’s love enters a world not ready to receive it. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). Light came into the world, but our first impulse was to snuff it out. As the Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe writes,
We cannot live without love and yet we are afraid of the destructive creative power of love. We need and deeply want to be loved and to love, and yet when that happens it seems a threat, because we are asked to give ourselves up, to abandon our selves; and so when we meet love we kill it. […] It is when love appears nakedly for what it is that it is most vulnerable; and that is why we crucified Christ.
Herod wanted to kill Christ. The only thing stopping him was that he didn’t know which of these innocent children was the Christ.
There is a long tradition of recognizing these Holy Innocents as the first Christian martyrs. While they don’t fit the standard criteria for martyrdom — they did not willingly give up their lives — their blood was shed on Christ’s account. Their lives were tragically cut short because of one man’s greed and hunger for power. The voice of their grieving mothers is captured in the haunting music of the late medieval Coventry Carol:
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child
Bye bye, lully, lullay
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye bye, lully, lullay?
(A sidenote to the reader: If you do anything at all today, take five minutes to listen to Philip Stopford’s gorgeous and heartbreaking setting of this carol, as performed by Voces8. If you haven’t shed a tear within the first three and a half minutes, just wait until the descant.)
The suffering of these children and their families foreshadows the suffering Christ would endure years later. Christ’s mother, Mary, shared in this suffering, as she was told by Simeon, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” (Luke 2:35). The lyrics of the Coventry Carol can be read proleptically as Mary’s words, as she raises her son who will one day be crucified at the hands of an angry mob.
And yet this day is not merely a memorial or commemoration but a festival. December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It falls within the twelve days of Christmas and is a feast in its own right. We celebrate the fact that God spared Jesus from Herod’s murderous plan so that he could carry out his Father’s mission. We celebrate this even while we lament and mourn the loss of innocent children.
This is the beauty — and the challenge — of the Church calendar. As the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (3:1). We’re frequently reminded that we cannot properly celebrate Christmas without Advent, or Easter without Lent. We’re told that we cannot fully enjoy the sweetness of these celebratory seasons without first enduring the bitterness that prepares our spiritual palates. But feasts like The Holy Innocents demand even more: they ask us to lament and rejoice at the same time.
The Holy Innocents is a feast that calls us to spiritual maturity. Its asks much of us. It calls us to recognize that the final victory over sin and death is certain (thus we rejoice) and to identify all the places in this world that have yet to be redeemed by the Light of Light (thus we mourn). It prepares us to become the kind of people who “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). It reminds us that there is “a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecc. 3:4). Sometimes, even in the same day.
The Rev. Dr. Stewart Clem is associate professor of moral theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology (St. Louis, Missouri) and theologian-in-residence at The Church of St. Michael & St. George.