Every year the Feast of the Holy Innocents (part three of the dance of the ‘Companions of Christ’ at Christmas) draws a straight line from the lectionary to the front page of the newspaper for me – the photos of children in Gaza this year, but it could be Ukraine, South Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, elementary schools in the US, indigenous residential schools in Canada, or any number of other places caught in the midst of violence, war, and revenge. Because I often preach and preside on this day, my ongoing sense is that the gathered community expects, assumes, and focuses their prayers on children today, rather than the historical story of infants slaughtered under King Herod’s order in a fit of jealousy, cruelty, and anger. I don’t know why, but this year the ‘trend’ in interpretation particularly struck me as counter to the church’s history and its association of martyrs with Christ as “the seed of the church” versus the ‘victim’ language of martyrs, contemporary and ancient. It seemed a bit of research was in order…
First – comparing the current RC and US Episcopal appointed scripture readings and proper collects of the day yields somewhat subtle differences.
Proper Prayers
RC Collect
O God, whom the Holy Innocents confessed and proclaimed on this day, not by speaking but by dying, grant, we pray, that the faith to you which we confess with our lips may also speak through our manner of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
1979 BCP Collect
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Presidential prayers (proper and general collects) almost always remind God of something God has done, seen, known, revealed, and then move to what we hope God will enact in and through us today. Both of these collects do that, but in different ways. The BCP collect directly moves to the “designs of evil tyrants” today whereas the RC prayer plays with the metaphor of not speaking and speaking through actions. The BCP Collect (unusual compared with many other vague collects) is more direct in focusing on “innocent victims” today.
Lectionary Readings
RC
I John 1:5-2:2; Psalm 124:2-3; 4-5; 7cd-8 ; Matthew 2:13-18
BCP 1979
Jeremiah 31:15-17; Psalm 124; (Revelation 21:1-7); Matthew 2:13-18
The gospel reading and the psalm are the same, the newly added option of a third reading in the BCP is, in my experience, rarely used, (one can choose the Jeremiah or Revelation in this case); but the first reading differences are interesting. The Jeremiah reading is, of course, the source of the quote in the midst of the gospel (“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.”) which could certainly reinforce the historical setting of the actions of Herod, or the Matthean tendency to see in Jesus the fulfilment of OT prophecy. But the Roman lectionary choice of I John focusses instead on sin (the highlighted summary is “the Blood of his Son Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin”) which could lead to any number of interesting angles of homiletic approach.
Perhaps more revealing, however, are the differences between historical preaching (on the feast and on the same gospel passage) and contemporary preaching – particularly as it focuses on our ‘dis-ease’ with involuntary (and even mindful) martyrdom. The first example was right at hand, Liturgical Press’s Give Us This Day, which contains a homily by Quodvultdeus, (North African bishop, who died c. 450)
The children die for Christ, though they do not know it. The parents mourn for the death of martyrs. The child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to himself…To what merits of their own do the children owe this kind of victory? They cannot speak, yet they bear witness to Christ. They cannot use their limbs to engage in battle, yet already they bear the palm of victory. (pages 302-3)
There is no surprise that his teacher, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in similar ways about these martyrs of Bethlehem:
Today, dearest brethren, we celebrate the birthday of those children who were slaughtered, as the Gospel tells us, by that exceedingly cruel king, Herod. Let the earth, therefore, rejoice and the Church exult — she, the fruitful mother of so many heavenly champions and of such glorious virtues…for as today’s feast reveals, in the measure with which malice in all its fury was poured out upon the holy children, did heaven’s blessing stream down upon them. (sermon for the innocents, National Catholic Register)
But these are Western Christian texts and theologies – texts that link the Holy Innocents to the birth of Christ in the calendar. Lester Ruth reminds us that much of early Eastern Christianity did not necessarily put the feastday in Christmastide nor shy away from the sorrow and ‘wrongness’ of this slaughter of innocents (Ecclesia Orans, 1995), images later picked up in the Western Church traditions through mystery plays and lullabies sung to the murdered children.
My particular focus here, however, is to ask whether this particular feastday (with the natural human tendency to mourn the death of innocents) is a factor in the popular discomfort with celebrating the deaths of those who witness to Christ, young or old. Are martyrs victors – bearing their palms and wearing their crowns through their deaths in Christ, or are they victims in and of themselves – within a popular piety sense that they represent themselves, dying, rather than joined to Christ? The official prayers rarely lean that way, nor is this shift necessarily found in the lectionary readings, but what of individually composed prayers, what of preaching? How do these tensions play out in our various pastoral settings?