The Holy Innocents

A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Sunday 28 December 2025

Jeremiah 31:15-17 and Matthew 2:13-18

Today the Church commemorates the Holy Innocents, the children who were massacred by King Herod in his attempt to eliminate the child Jesus shortly after he was born and the Wise Men came to pay him homage.  This is a day, at the heart of Christmas, to remember children, and all who are vulnerable, and to lament the abuse of those who have no voice by those set in positions of power over them.

This is the darker side of the Christmas story, a reminder that the stories of the birth of Christ were filled not only with joy, but also with terrible suffering.  We see this very clearly in Matthew’s Gospel, in the part of the Christmas story we just heard.  His account of the first Christmas sounds the note of fulfilment- the promised Saviour has arrived- and yet its emotional tone is ominous.  Driven and dominated by Herod’s plot to kill Jesus, it is dark and foreboding.  It speaks of the murderous resistance of the rulers of this world to the coming of God’s Kingdom of justice and peace.

This is the time of year when we remember Christ’s coming as a vulnerable child.  That God should come to earth not as a thundering angel or mighty overlord, but as a frail infant sums up the mystery and paradox of Christmas and the unfolding of its drama.  The one who is powerful has become powerless.  As St Augustine puts it, “Infant, he is called, that is in-fans, one who cannot speak.  So then he is both speechless Infant and Word of God”.

In fact, as an adult, Jesus gives a central place to children, not because they are innocent or without sin, but because they simply come to him; they have a faith which, instead of grasping power for oneself, is open to receive all that God has to give.  The Kingdom, he says, cannot be understood by those who would seek status and power; it is inhabited instead by the weak and vulnerable.  The key lies in becoming like a child; to have this attitude is to belong with God.  God chooses what is weak in the world to shame the strong; that is why the Christ child is such a threat to Herod.

We, too, are called to see Christ  and to celebrate his birth under the harshest conditions: in a country occupied by foreign invaders, in winter, in the dirty manger of a crowded inn, his mother unattended by family.  We are called to place ourselves, with Christ, alongside the poor and vulnerable, and to see Him, to live out a message of hope and to believe God’s promise that ultimately all suffering and injustice will cease, and that those who inflict it will be called to account.

Some people say we shouldn’t keep a Feast that remembers the slaughter of the Innocents.  When we look at artistic depictions of Herod, a large and evil man with glowering eyes and a large knife in his hand, surrounded by women pleading with soldiers who are about to stab their babies, they seem incongruous; such violence, the argument goes, does not belong in the season of good tidings and joy. But to believe this is to ignore evil.  And that is to not take the Christmas story seriously; simply averting our eyes will do nothing to help people who are vulnerable.

How else, then, can we mark today’s Feast than by recommitting ourselves to support children and others who are on the margins, the single parents struggling to feed their child, the mentally ill and elderly?  There are still plenty of Herods to fear, and we fail those who are neglected- we fail ourselves- when we do not reach out to their victims.

At this turn of the year, our news is full of stories and comment about migration.  The flight of Mary and Joseph with the child Jesus into Egypt to avoid Herod’s wrath is indeed a story of migration, at the heart of Christmas.  As Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani writes in her Advent book this year, Listening to the Music of the soul, this second arduous journey they undergo to Egypt is mirrored two millennia later, during the most recent conflict between Israel and Palestine, when many Gazans have found themselves doing exactly the same.  Elsewhere in the book, she points out that, in our own immigration system, evidence shows how age verification processes are notoriously unreliable, meaning that children who are migrants, who arrive in this country on small boats for example, are particularly vulnerable, as they can often be assessed as older than they actually are.

What can we do to ensure the human dignity of such people?  To stand alongside the mourning parents of Herod’s realm, to weep with Rachel, refusing to be consoled for the loss of her dead children, is to face the reality of suffering and evil, and to ask the question, “Where is God in all this?”

In this season of the Incarnation, we are challenged to take our place within the mystery of human suffering and to allow ourselves to be transformed.  This isn’t about adopting a political opinion; it is about undergoing a radical conversion.  It means identifying with Christ, who identified with the most vulnerable, marginal, disenfranchised ones- especially with the poor and children of the poor and children at risk all over the world.

So this is a day to remember children, to value them for who they are, not who they will become, to remember those children for whom holidays and family life are difficult.  It is a time to mourn the loss of those who have died because of the violence of others, whilst holding on to the hope that- in the beautiful words of Isaiah- God has no more forgotten his children than a mother forgets her child.  It is a time to rediscover the gift of humility, to renew our calling as followers of Christ to defend the weak and to love beyond the confines of our own nuclear family, to recommit ourselves as a society to striving to build structures and institutions that protect the child, to doing what we can to nurture the poor and orphaned in our society and in our world, so that ALL God’s children can be free.