Childermas Again

The Killing of the Innocents by Herod, Leon Coginet

The original version of this post was written five years ago. It’s tragic to note that, since then, not much has changed; in some ways the situation has become worse. On the Feast of the Holy Innocents, this is something we need to confront; on the brink of a new year, this is something we need to take forward.

It’s the Christmas hangover of commemorations, isn’t it? The joy and beauty of the Nativity give way to the world’s brutal realities as Herod’s death squads march into town.

It’s not a part of the story we like to think about too much, a liminal atrocity on the fringes of the narrative. And yet so many of those kneeling beside the manger are either affected or complicit – Herod issues the order, sure, but it’s inadvertently thanks to the blunders of the Magi. Jesus, Mary and Joseph have to flee to Egypt, but what of the shepherds left out in the fields? Did any of them have infant sons waiting for them at home?

We pretend, of course, that this sort of thing is rare. That we live in a civilised society where children are valued and loved. And yet there are 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK (that’s gone up since I wrote my original post); UNICEF reports that one in six children globally live in extreme poverty. The UN tells us that around 33 million of the world’s refugees are under 18, but it takes a photograph of one of their bodies washed up on a beach to make us give a damn about that statistic for five minutes. Churches cover up child abuse.

Herod casts a long shadow.

Over recent years, I’ve slowly begun to appreciate the wisdom of the church calendar. Not just the big celebrations, but the hidden feast days, the obscure remembrances, the idea that someone somewhere decided it would be good to honour Herod’s victims, and in doing so remember all the other infant victims of our politics and greed, our rage and corruption. Childermas isn’t just a call to memory, it’s a call to repentance.

And yet there’s also space for hope – there has to be, because this is too important to fall victim to nihilistic cynicism. There are people working to end child poverty, people operating shelters so families can escape domestic violence, people opening their homes to refugees. They need our support and our prayers, because they’re saving children from war and want, violence and apathy; because they’re a sanctuary along the flight to Egypt; because they’re building the Kingdom of God in the shadow of Herod’s legacy and that’s a sacred calling, at Christmas and beyond.

Childermas Again (Matthew 2:13-18)

Dawn breaks on the Feast of Holy Innocents, on memories and statistics: Manchester Arena and Kameron Prescott, North Park Elementary and Aztec High School, Yemen and Syria. Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey. One in four children in the UK are affected by poverty, 21% in the US, 1 billion worldwide. Children are bought and sold for sex, we hand children guns and force them to be soldiers. Herod’s shadow still stalks the land.

Only that’s not true, is it? Because Herod’s not our shadow, he’s our mirror. We write off the Slaughter of the Innocents as an anomolous event aimed at killing the Son of God, but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s yet another example of a normalised assault on children. If Herod was our historical dark side rather than our twin, we wouldn’t see churches covering up child abuse, we wouldn’t see so many bombs falling on civilians, we wouldn’t pat ourselves on the back as politicians enact policies that push more children into poverty.

The Slaughter of the Innocents was all about who gets to be king, and the children of Bethlehem were that most obscene of euphemisms, “collateral damage”. Given the situation facing many children throughout the last twelve months, we’re more open to Herod being king than Jesus.

Maybe that’s why it’s so important to celebrate Holy Innocents: not simply because it reminds us of the crimes of Herod, but because of its present reality. It’s a time to remember the realities of the season now we’ve stopped greeting each other with “Merry Christmas” and started to return to our ordinary lives. It’s a time to remember that Christmas has consequences, and that’s not just about distant atrocities but about the societies and cultures in which we live, the societies and cultures we help create with our spending, our attitudes, our blessings, our silence.

We live in worlds in which Herod still occupies a throne and in which it’s still children who suffer the most as a result. On the Feast of Holy Innocents, it’s time to stop empowering that.

A Weeping in Ramah (Matthew 2:16-18)

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

Today is the Feast of Holy Innocents, or Childermas Day. We commemorate the Slaughter of the Innocents, the New Testament’s signature atrocity carried out when Herod the Great sought to eliminate a threat to his throne by engineering the murder of Bethlehem’s baby boys. Matthew’s gospel links this with a quotation from the prophet Jeremiah; it’s a familiar reading simply because of its connection to a familiar story. But what’s Matthew getting at here?

The key is the reference to Rachel. The wife of the patriarch Jacob, she died in childbirth in the region between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with the region eventually becoming known as Ramah. Later in Israel’s history, Ramah became one of the places from which the Jews were taken into exile in Babylon – that’s the context of the original passage from Jeremiah, in which Rachel is the personification of the land weeping over her children being exiled, not killed. Matthew appropriates Jeremiah’s words to express the horror of Herod’s actions.

That’s all very interesting, but it’s not really the point, is it? The truth is, the Slaughter of the Innocents isn’t an isolated incident, an act of archetypal horror that exists within the pages of the gospel as an example of pure evil. No, we see the innocent slaughtered on a regular occurrence.

When I was 15, I visited Israel on a school trip. We went to the Yad Veshem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. In it was a hall filled with photos of children, all of whom had been gassed or shot or starved by the Nazis. You can’t walk through that room without hearing the weeping of Rachel. It echoes down the years: Dunblane, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Rwanda, Aleppo, child refugees. The Slaughter of the Innocents is a totemic example of the horrors we unleash upon children, not a one-off atrocity; Jesus was born in the midst of a world of destruction and death, was forced into hiding because of it.

So today we remember all the sins against the world’s children; maybe we need to pledge to work more actively against that. Maybe we need to reconsider how we vote, or how we spend money. Maybe we need to consider where we go to church, or if we’re willing to financially support denominations that aren’t proactively acting against child abuse. Maybe this Christmastide we need to awaken to the reality of the Slaughter of the Innocents and commit to responding with urgency whenever it threatens to recur in our own day and age.

 

Childermas Day: Feast of Holy Innocents (Matthew 2:13-18)

It’s the Christmas hangover of commemorations, isn’t it? The joy and beauty of the Nativity give way to the world’s brutal realities as Herod’s death squads march into town.

It’s not a part of the story we like to think about too much, a liminal atrocity on the fringes of the narrative. And yet so many of those kneeling beside the manger are either affected or complicit – Herod issues the order, sure, but it’s inadvertantly thanks to the blunders of the Magi. Jesus, Mary and Joseph have to flee to Egypt, but what of the shepherds left out in the fields? Did any of them have infant sons waiting for them at home?

We pretend, of course, that this sort of thing is rare. That we live in a civilised society where children are valued and loved. And yet there are 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK; in 2014, UNICEF reported that one in three children in the USA are in poverty. The UN tells us that around 41% of the world’s refugees are children, but it takes a photograph of one of their bodies washed up on a beach to make us give a damn about that statistic for five minutes. Churches cover up child abuse.

Herod casts a long shadow.

Over the last year or so, I’ve slowly begun to appreciate the wisdom of the church calendar. Not just the big celebrations, but the hidden feast days, the obscure remembrances, the idea that someone somewhere decided it would be good to honour Herod’s victims, and in doing so remember all the other infant victims of our politics and greed, our rage and corruption. Childermas isn’t just a call to memory, it’s a call to repentance.

And yet there’s also space for hope – there has to be, because this is too important to fall victim to nihilistic cynicism. There are people working to end child poverty, people operating shelters so families can escape domestic violence, people opening their homes to refugees. They need our support and our prayers, because they’re saving children from war and want, violence and apathy; because they’re a sanctuary along the flight to Egypt; because they’re building the Kingdom of God in the shadow of Herod’s legacy and that’s a sacred calling, at Christmas and beyond.