Opinion | The Bloody Fourth Day of Christmas

According to the Christian calendar, the birth of Jesus is followed by the state-mandated murder of children. But somehow, hope breaks through.

The song “The 12 Days of Christmas” paints a whimsical picture of the stretch of time between Christmas Day and Epiphany. A suitor sends a series of lavish, if impractical, gifts to his beloved. Some have attempted to claim that the song contains coded messages related to the Christian faith. In reality, this song has nothing to do with the way that Christians are called to celebrate the season.
Within the narrative of the Christian calendar, the birth of Christ is followed not by leaping lords and milkmaids but by a massacre of children. The Feast of the Holy Innocents, observed on Dec. 28 by Western churches and on Dec. 29 by Orthodox churches, speaks a particularly powerful word to this cultural moment. It’s a bloody story, out of which hope fights its way to the surface.

The story in the Bible goes like this: Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod. In the Gospel of Matthew, Herod is described as “disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him” by the news of Jesus’ birth — he perceives Jesus as a rival. A “furious” Herod then orders the killing of all the boys 2 years and under in Bethlehem. These children are remembered by the church as “holy innocents.”
Scholars debate the historicity of the event because it was not recorded by the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, who provides an otherwise detailed description of Herod’s reign. Nonetheless, Josephus does tell us that Herod had three of his sons killed because he saw them as threats to his power. Commanding the slaughter of children would not be beyond the pale for Herod.

The Gospel of Matthew reports that an angel warns Jesus’ family of the impending danger, and they leave the country. Jesus spends the first years of his life on foreign soil, in Egypt. When he finally returns from Egypt, his family cannot settle in their ancestral home of Bethlehem because there is still unrest.
The Bible story, then, depicts Jesus as a refugee fleeing a nation marked by political violence and being displaced within his own country even after some of the violence settles down. And though he avoids murder by Herod, he does not escape death by the state altogether — three decades later, Pontius Pilate, an official of the Roman Empire, pronounces Jesus’ death sentence. Like Herod, Pilate does so to maintain power and remove a threat.

Why is it important that the church calendar tells this story at the beginning of the Christmas season? Why should anyone care about the dates on a Christian calendar, especially in a time in which people have rightly questioned the excessive quest for power that marks some corners of the church?
The church calendar calls Christians and others to remember that we live in a world in which political leaders are willing to sacrifice the lives of the innocent on the altar of power. We are forced to recall that this is a world with families on the run, where the weeping of mothers is often not enough to win mercy for their children. More than anything, the story of the innocents calls upon us to consider the moral cost of the perpetual battle for power in which the poor tend to have the highest casualty rate.

But how can such a bloody and sad tale do anything other than add to our despair? The Christmas story must be told in the context of suffering and death because that’s the only way the story makes any sense. Where else can one speak about Christmas other than in a world in which racism, sexism, classism, materialism and the devaluation of human life are commonplace? People are hurting, and the epicenter of that hurt, according to the Feast of the Holy Innocents, remains the focus of God’s concern.

This feast suggests that things that God cares about most do not take place in the centers of power. The truly vital events are happening in refugee camps, detention centers, slums and prisons. The Christmas story is set not in a palace surrounded by dignitaries but among the poor and humble whose lives are always subject to forfeit. It’s a reminder that the church is not most truly herself when she courts power. The church finds her voice when she remembers that God “has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble,” as the Gospel of Luke puts it.
The very telling of the Christmas story is an act of resistance. This is how the biblical story functioned for my ancestors who gathered in the fields and woods of the antebellum South. They saw in the Christian narrative an account of a God who cared for the enslaved and wanted more for them than the whip and the chain. For them Christianity did not merely serve the disinherited — it was for the disinherited, the “weak things” that shamed the strong.

Christians believe that none of this suffering was in vain. The cries of the oppressed do not go forever unanswered. We believe that the children slaughtered by Herod were ushered into the presence of God and will be with him for eternity. The Christian tradition also affirms that Jesus’ suffering served a purpose, that when the state ordered his death, God was at work. Through the slaughter of the truly innocent one, God was emptying death of its power, vanquishing evil and opening the path toward forgiveness and reconciliation.
I once served as a priest at a church in St. Andrews, Scotland that kept all the Holy Days. I gathered with a small group on Dec. 28 to receive communion and remember the innocents. Most in the group were at least 30 years my senior. One was in his last months of life after a long battle with cancer. I had very little wisdom to offer such a group, so I simply told them the stories of death, massacre and the hope in the form of a child.

We weary few, gathered around the bread and the wine, reveled in our rebellion. Anyone who has visited Scotland will tell you that winters are a dreary affair, and the old church buildings with their odd angles can be gloomy. But in my memory that day was filled with light.