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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. (Amen.)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,’
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
In the days after Christmas, you and I may be more accustomed to imagining young children playing around a Christmas tree with their new toys than we are to imagining martyred boys playing around a heavenly throne or altar with their victory palms. Yet, that is the image before us on our martyrs’-blood-red bulletin-covers and in our Hymn of the Day (Lutheran Service Book 969) on this Feast of The Holy Innocents, Martyrs. Today’s Gospel Reading tells us only that Herod the King killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old and under, however many there were, but the Church has long understood the murdered boys variously to have been both “holy innocents” and “martyrs”, though we point out from the outset that the boys were neither “holy innocents” nor “martyrs” in the senses that we usually use those terms (confer Gibbs, ad loc Matthew 2:13-23, pp.144-145). Nevertheless, considering primarily the Gospel Reading on this Feast of The Holy Innocents, Martyrs, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we realize that we ourselves are “Forgiven Confessors”.
The events of today’s Gospel Reading obviously follow the visit of the Wise Men, and we note that the events of all of the Gospel Readings for our four Divine Services between Christmas and The Baptism of Our Lord go back and forth in their historical sequence and so also in Jesus’s age: from His being newborn on The Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day (John 1:1-18), to His being maybe one‑year‑old at the Feast of The Holy Innocents, to His being eight‑days‑old at The Circumcision and Name of Jesus (Luke 2:21), to His being twelve‑years‑old on The Second Sunday after Christmas (Luke 2:40-52), to His being again maybe one‑year‑old on The Epiphany of Our Lord (Matthew 2:1-12), and to His being about thirty‑years‑old at The Baptism of Our Lord (Matthew 3:13-17; confer Luke 3:23). Do not let the back and forth bother you!
What arguably should bother you, however, is the idea that the murdered boys on their own were “holy innocents”. From a civil point of view, the boys certainly were “innocent” of any civil charge that would have been made against them: they were “not guilty” of being the One born King of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, and so they were not the threat to his authority that Herod the King perceived and tried to eliminate. But, spiritually speaking, by nature the boys still were sinful before God, as by nature we all are sinful. We all are un‑holy and guilty! With the psalmist, we all should say that we were both conceived sinful and brought forth in iniquity (Psalm 51:5). Regardless of our age, our sinful nature leads us all to commit all kinds of actual sins of thought, word, and deed. Unscriptural excuses for children’s sin are modern mistaken notions of an “age of innocence”, or an “age of assent”, or an “age of accountability”. For example, St. Paul writes to the Romans and to us: that God’s law stops every mouth and holds the whole world accountable to God (Romans 3:19), that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), and that, because all sinned, death spreads to all (Romans 5:12). We all deserve both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity. All are spiritually dead in their trespasses and sins until God the Father makes us alive together with His Son by the power of His Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:1, 5). Regardless of our age, the Holy Spirit can and does lead us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, and to want to stop sinning. When, like the murdered boys, we ourselves so repent, then, like the murdered boys, we ourselves are forgiven, and so, like them, we are considered holy and innocent!
As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, when the Wise Men had departed, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him, haven risen, to take Jesus and Mary, to flee to Egypt, and to remain there for a time, and so Joseph did exactly that. Thus, the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew uniquely tells us, the Lord fulfilled what He had spoken by the prophet Hosea about His calling His Son from Egypt (Hosea 11:1). Entailed in that prophecy are both God’s love for His people and God’s redemption of His people (confer Numbers 23:22; 24:8). Fulfilling that prophecy, like fulfilling all prophecy, serves our loving God’s purpose of redeeming us! Jesus is said to be Israel reduced to One, its representative and its substitute. By the Holy Family’s fleeing to Egypt, Jesus was spared from death before His time to die had come, and, interestingly enough, when Jesus’s time to die did come, Herod the King’s son, Herod Antipas, did not find Jesus guilty of the Jewish leaders’ political charges against Him (Luke 23:14-15). Nevertheless, Jesus died on the cross as humankind’s substitute, and then Jesus rose from the dead. God in human flesh, Jesus is the spotless Lamb of God, Who took on Himself and then took away the sin of the world (John 1:29, 36), including the murdered boys’ sin and your sin and my sin. As they, led by the Spirit, repented and were saved, so we, led by the Spirit, repent and are saved. The use of today’s Second Reading certainly seems to suggest that those murdered boys are the first‑fruits for God and the Lamb from all those who ultimately will be redeemed from humankind (Revelation 14:1-5).
Jesus Himself elsewhere speaks of infant faith (Matthew 18:6; Mark 9:42). Faithful Jewish families circumcised their male children on the eighth day, as the Early Church baptized their male and female children on the eighth day. Those circumcised boys were part of God’s people, and they could eat the Passover Meal, as the Church, at least at times, let all baptized children partake of the Holy Supper of Christ’s Body and Blood. In writing to the Colossians and to us, St. Paul arguably sees circumcision as prophetically pointing to baptism, where God makes us alive together with Christ, having forgiven us all of our trespasses (Colossians 2:11-13). As those in today’s Second Reading had the Lamb’s and His Father’s Name written on their foreheads, in Baptism we receive the sign of the holy cross both upon our foreheads and upon our hearts to mark us as those redeemed by Christ the crucified (for example, LSB 268). And, we, who are so baptized and absolved, are admitted to the Holy Supper, and there we receive forgiveness, life, and salvation.
We praise and honor Jesus, Who died and rose for all, including us and the murdered boys; they did not die for Him, although they certainly died in connection with Him. The Word’s becoming flesh did not happen without at least a potential cost to those who believe in Him. The birthday of the Lord has long been followed by three feast days for those who are called “companions” of Christ: St. Stephen, a martyr in both will and deed; St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, a martyr in will but not in deed; and “the Holy Innocents”, said to be martyrs not in will but in deed (Pfatteicher, Commentary, 213-214). To be sure, today’s Gospel Reading does not say one way or the other; while our assuming that the murdered boys were not given a choice seems reasonable, not difficult to imagine is that the regenerate murdered boys, like St. John, nevertheless might well have willed to confess the Christ even at the cost of their own lives. Also we should be so willing! We may not be miraculously delivered from an immediate affliction, as the Holy Family was, but instead we may suffer, as the families of the murdered boys did, and, even then, God works all things together for good (Romans 8:28). We believe in our hearts and confess with our mouth (Romans 10:9-10), and, in the Collect of the Day, we prayed for God to put to death in us all that is in conflict with His will so that our lives may bear witness to our faith, and we who are forgiven may even be called on to confess by our deaths for Christ’s sake. If so, unlike the equivocal terms “Holy Innocents, Martyrs”, we are in the fullest sense of the words “Forgiven Confessors”.
In today’s Gospel Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. Matthew tells us that Herod the King’s murder of the boys in and around Bethlehem fulfilled the prophecy that God spoke through Jeremiah that we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading about the matriarch Rachel’s weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted (Jeremiah 31:13-17). Bible commentators debate the details of the interpretation, but whatever trouble we have understanding either passage is our problem, not the Word of God’s problem. At least this much is certain, the loved ones of the “Holy Innocents, Martyrs” had available to them the same comfort that we and the loved ones of us “Forgiven Confessors” have, namely, the comfort that, by grace for Jesus’s sake through faith, the souls of departed believers are before the Lord already now (confer Revelation 6:9-11), if not playing around a heavenly throne or altar with their victory palms, certainly joining with us in singing the song of the redeemed of the earth, and awaiting with us both the resurrection of the body on the Last Day and the blessed reunion in heaven for eternity.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Amen.)
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +