HOLY INNOCENTS

 

Sermon delivered on Holy Innocents’ day, the Sunday after Christmas Day the 28^th December 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes at St. Alban's Church, 461 Shedden Road, George Town, Cayman Islands

Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:15-17    1 Corinthians 1:26-29    S. Matthew 2:13-18

Jeremiah 31: 18 "A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more."

As if to remind Christians that the season of Christmas is not altogether about gaiety and happy indulgence, the Season’s second and fourth days are marked by the commemoration of martyrs: S. Stephen the first Christian martyr and the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem, for both of which the liturgical colour is red, reminding us of the spilling of blood. One reaction to this might be: can’t Christians be completely happy about anything? Surely Christmas of all times ought to be completely about joy and gladness? Most of the carols seem to suggest this after all. And the answer is no doubt, It is right to be joyful and happy at Christmas, as indeed Christians are right to have an underlying joy that is ready to bubble up to the surface at any time, yet it is only right too to remember that joy comes at a cost, and a profound joy may come only at great cost.

To the modern mind especially, the price paid by S. Stephen seems the more understandable of the two. S. Stephen consciously stood for what he believed in, and paid the price, dying with the vision of the resurrected and ascended Christ urging him on to a courageous expression of forgiveness for his persecutors, reminding us of our Lord’s words themselves as He approached His exodus. The price paid by perhaps about ten to thirty young boys aged two years and under, of tiny Bethlehem, may seem to us to be crueller. According to the account neither they nor their mothers made a conscious choice, as S. Stephen did. They were just in the way of Herod the Great, living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps a little like King Henry VIII of England much later, Herod felt compelled to regard the continuation of his dynasty as of overriding importance, at the cost of human life indeed. Herod seemed to think he could trick even God, whatever understanding Herod may have had about God, out of His Providential purpose. Or maybe he felt that the eastern sages, the Wise Men, who had come to him talking about the rising of a special star denoting the birth of someone they called the "King of the Jews", were just nutters who would cause problems to him by attaching significance to one particular baby boy that was not his boy. Having found out from them when this star, they said, had appeared, he calculated what the maximum age of this boy must be, and for good measure had all the boys of that age or less, slaughtered around the birthplace that the prophets of Israel had declared for the expected Messiah.

Although by that time the true Christ had been removed from Bethlehem through the obedience to God by S. Joseph, who by this obedience eluded Herod’s search, we can say that in the end the Christ did die for the innocent children of Bethlehem, in that He died for us all. The lives of the children were cut short on earth through no fault or even choice of their own, but they were brought to that place of those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, attached through their innocence and God’s grace to that multitude which none can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh: and with whom, in the same Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one. All who have seen their children die in innocence or before they were born have this truth to rely upon as they contemplate their loss. The choice of the New Testament lesson, in which S. Paul speaks of the relative values of the foolish and the wise, the weak and the strong, and so on, can show us that no human being, however unnoticed by the world, is unknown to God. All the children who have died starving or of preventable disease or as victims of cruelty throughout the world may be largely unknown to us, but the value that God places upon them, no matter what their fate may have been in this world, may one day surprise us. "God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are."

As so often in the New Testament, the use of Old Testament prophecy here seems less than straightforward. My study Bible suggests that the phrase "Rachel is weeping for her children" may have become proverbial by Jesus’ time for the mistreatment of Jewish children. In that meaning it was of course directly fulfilled in the treatment of the children of Bethlehem by Herod. Perhaps the phrase is still used in modern Israel when a Jewish child is blown up by a rocket launched from a neighbouring territory. In Jeremiah, though, the saying was applied more logically with its original meaning of the grief of the Exile of the people of the Northern Kingdom. Rachel, Jacob’s beloved wife, was the mother of Joseph, traditionally the father of Ephraim, the predominant tribal group of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In Jeremiah, who ministered in the southern Kingdom of Judah after the Northern Exile had occurred, the grief of the Northern Exile is spoken of as shared personally by the ancestor Rachel. She is said to weep and lament over the fate of her children, because they are no more. By New Testament times the saying had acquired a somewhat wider connotation. That perhaps is associated with the fact that Rachel’s tomb was not in the old North, but near Bethlehem in the south.

There is precedent therefore for applying the phrase with a yet wider connotation - that Rachel weeps for the fate of her innocent children of every race who die before their proper time. Yet in Christ we may be sure that with them, Rachel rejoices upon another shore.