Today’s feast makes no sense whatsoever, if we simply read the Gospel passage and see only that innocent babies were brutally murdered on account of the birth of Jesus. To appease a dictator, who did not want his throne to be usurped by a would be king? Then an infant! Is the idea of it all not ridiculous!
But the key to unlocking its depth, can be found in the ‘collect’ (the prayer before the liturgy of the word) “O God whom the Holy Innocents confessed and proclaimed this day, not by speaking but by dying, grant we pray, that the faith in You which we confess with our lips may also speak through our manner of life.”
The little ones died as martyrs for their faith. From their birth they were already children of God our Heavenly Father, by their death they were witnesses to Christ Jesus our Lord.
Let the way we lead and live our lives then be a testimony to our faith in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And if means we are to lay down our lives for His namesake then let us be ready to pray, “Lord into Your hands I commend my Spirit.” Amen
The Holy Innocents pray for us…
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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.
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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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