How do we make sense of it all? Babies barely able to dream, pure hearted and vulnerable. Ripped from their cradles, others from their parents arms and massacred! They died in place of their Saviour who would later lay His life down for all of us! But still how do we make sense of it all? Innocent and pure of heart the little ones had to die? Again innocent and pure of heart our Saviour had to die for us?
This is the nature of sin and darkness and we see it Herod’s miserable life. He lived in fear of losing his power. And gave in to grave sin by his allowing his wounded pride of being outwitted and his fury to take over. He sought to diminish the light of one life but instead brought darkness upon many lives when he extinguished the light of the Holy Innocents or so he thought! For their light shines brightly with the light of Christ Jesus our Saviour even to this day and forevermore. For Christ died to save us from sin and darkness!
Have we ourselves not sought to diminish the light of innocents? With our snide remarks, gossip, impatience, rage, pride and unforgiveness. How many spirits have we murdered by our loose wicked tongues! How about when we objectify another by our impure thoughts and actions? Can we say then we are holy and pure? That we have not sinned?!
Let us turn our hearts to Jesus as we pray….Save us Saviour of the world, for by your Cross and Resurrection You have set us free! Amen
First reading
1 John 1:5-2:2 ·
The blood of Jesus Christ purifies us all from sin
This is what we have heard from Jesus Christ,
and the message that we are announcing to you:
God is light; there is no darkness in him at all.
If we say that we are in union with God
while we are living in darkness,
we are lying because we are not living the truth.
But if we live our lives in the light,
as he is in the light,
we are in union with one another,
and the blood of Jesus, his Son,
purifies us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin in us,
we are deceiving ourselves
and refusing to admit the truth;
but if we acknowledge our sins,
then God who is faithful and just
will forgive our sins and purify us
from everything that is wrong.
To say that we have never sinned
is to call God a liar
and to show that his word is not in us.
I am writing this, my children,
to stop you sinning;
but if anyone should sin,
we have our advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ, who is just;
he is the sacrifice that takes our sins away,
and not only ours,
but the whole world’s.
Gospel
Matthew 2:13-18
The massacre of the innocents
After the wise men had left, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, because Herod intends to search for the child and do away with him.’ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt, where he stayed until Herod was dead. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:
I called my son out of Egypt.
Herod was furious when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, and in Bethlehem and its surrounding district he had all the male children killed who were two years old or under, reckoning by the date he had been careful to ask the wise men. It was then that the words spoken through the prophet Jeremiah were fulfilled:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more.
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