Monday, December 28, 2015
The Feast of Holy Innocents, Truly a Strange Feast?
In the Western Christian Tradition, a couple
days after Christmas, a special celebration takes place for what are called “The
Holy Innocents”. It refers to the babies who, according the Bible, were
murdered in and around Bethlehem when the then ruler, Herod, found out that one
of them was the “King of the Jews”. Feeling threatened by this birth but not
sure which child was the one, he decides to wipe out all potential usurpers.
This bout of ethnic cleansing, as we would now classify it, was like all such
events, a tragedy; so why do Christians make a celebration out of it? Is this another
case of Christianity glorifying pain and suffering?
In order to understand the thinking of
Christian tradition one needs to wrap one’s mind around the idea of martyrdom.
This concept, which literally (from the Greek) simply means witness, refers to
a person testifying to his or her faith by rather dying than denying it. So a
martyr is somebody who dies for his beliefs and convictions: in so doing he is
believed to be the ultimate follower of Christ who himself died for his
beliefs. In honoring martyrs one honors the courage of people who did not deny
their faith simply to save their skins.
But the respect of martyrs goes deeper:
they also show with their lives that Christianity cannot be suppressed by
violence and killing. Indeed one of the early Christian thinkers observed that “the
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” since the courage of martyrs traditionally
attracted new followers to that religion. The church does not simply celebrate
the faithfulness of its members, but the victory that they have won in
defeating their enemies through shedding their blood. What seems like defeat
actually turns out to be victory. Strange indeed!
I cannot help but turn my mind to
Christians in Syria and Iraq when I ponder today’s celebration. Does this mean
that we should be happy at the news of more Christian believers being killed or
driven out of their homes in that part of the world? Surely that would be
perverse; our hearts need to go out to them, and any support we can lend them
and their relatives must be provided. But there is a fine line between showing
sympathy to them and becoming alarmists, as if the most recent persecution was
going to threaten the very survival of God’s people in the Middle East and
beyond. If it is true that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,
then such calamities, in God’s miraculous way, only serve to strengthen and
revitalize the church.
So what should alarm us is not when
Christians are persecuted in the Middle East, but when their confreres in the
West succumb to materialism, immorality and lukewarmness, thus losing their
saltiness. It is not those whose witness is daily tested through hardship and
opposition we need to be concerned about, but those whose witness is subtly
eroded through ever greater conformity to the reigning spirit of the age. While
not looking or praying for persecution to come our way, we Westerners should
very carefully observe today’s feast and ask ourselves what it has to teach us.
# posted by tino @ Monday, December 28, 2015 
