Confessing the Lord By Living, Dying, Speaking and Walking, Feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Feast of the Holy Innocents
St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York
Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal
December 28, 2022
1 John 1:5-2:2, Ps 124, Mt 2:13-18

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today’s feast of the Holy Innocents brings us to face one of the most challenging parts of the faith. We’re celebrating the mass murder of all the boys in Bethlehem under two, in which the words of Jeremiah that were fulfilled in Bethlehem, “sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.” If we mourn the death of any loved one, how much more we mourn the death of those murdered, and how much more we grieve the execution of innocent children! Yet today, despite those fundamentally human reactions, implanted in our nature and supernature by God, we celebrate with a Gloria the feast of the Holy Innocents, and we have to ask why. The answer is not just “because they’re in heaven with Jesus,” because that would be celebrating only a good outcome of a deplorable evil. We’re celebrating something more profound. We’re celebrating the fact that these baby boys made in Jesus’ image and likeness in a very important way experienced the fullness and purpose of human life, which is to live and die for Jesus who had come to die for them and for us. Much later Jesus would say that the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel would save it. This is a truth we proclaim every time we celebrate the feast of a martyr. No matter how much that martyr was tortured and killed, we celebrate it as a victory, because the martyr died heroically out of love for the Lord and because of that death now lives forever with Jesus in heaven. The Feast of the Holy Innocents is the most powerful articulation of this most challenging Christian truth we have in the liturgical cycle.
• How Christians mark the feast of the martyrs and, a fortiori, of the Holy Innocents really indicates a great deal about our faith and how we go about our life. Do we look at their deaths principally as great victories or colossal defeats? If we look at their deaths as manifestations of the triumph of evil, then we often will seek to avoid suffering, avoid martyrdom, avoid conflict. If we look at their deaths as exclamation points on lives lived as lives ought to be lived, then we will often accept our own martyrdom should it come to that and, in the meantime, live a life in regular self-offering to Jesus, to the people for whom he gave his life, and to his kingdom. The purpose of human life is to live and die for Jesus, to live and die with Jesus, in little things and ordinary moments, and even in big things and extraordinary ones.
• That’s a truth many don’t want to accept or to live. King Herod certainly didn’t want to live it. When he heard the Wise Men speaking about a newborn king of the Jews, of the long-awaited Messiah, he viewed Jesus only as a threat. And when the Magi didn’t fall for his ploy to return to him to tell him where he was to be found so that he could be selectively assassinated, in a rage Herod killed every infant boy in the area. His lack of willingness to serve God’s plans in the coming of the Messiah led him to wreak so much evil. Once upon a time he had been a faithful man, building the temple, obeying scrupulously the Mosaic law. But he began to get corrupted by lust, power and pleasure and then was totally opposed to sacrifices big and small, not even wanting to put up with people who didn’t agree with him or like him. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us that he murdered most of the members of the Sanhedrin. He murdered his wife and mother-in-law. He murdered three of his sons. And upon his death he commanded to be murdered most of the leading citizens in and around Jerusalem, saying that if people wouldn’t weep because of his death, they would weep at his death. The same principle can be at work in any person. If we don’t want to sacrifice ourselves out of love for Christ, we say instead, “Give me Barabbas!” in the disguise of the one at whom we look in the mirror or in the form of someone who brings us pleasure or solace — and we say “Crucify Christ!” with regard to God and to whoever stands in our way.
• St. John talks about this principle in the Gospel of Christmas Day and in his first epistle, which is our first reading today. He told us on Christmas morning that Christ is the Light who has come into the world, but that many did not accept the light. They rejected it because, he tells us later, their deeds were evil. He tells us today that if we receive Christ the Light into our lives then it will change all our actions. “If we say,” St. John tells the first Christians, “‘we have communion with him,’ while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.” There must be a correspondence between what we say we believe and how we live. In the opening prayer of the Mass today we stress this connection between faith and deeds in the life of the Holy Innocents and in the truly Christian life: “O God, whom the Holy Innocents confessed and proclaimed on this day not by speaking but by dying, grant… that the faith in you that we confess with our lips may also speak through our manner of life.”
• St. John calls each of us to acknowledge that there are parts of our life that we don’t want to give to the Lord, that we don’t want to “lose” so as to live, that are still in darkness rather than light. That’s why he tells us in the first reading that we must humbly acknowledge the darkness in our life and bring it to the Lord so that he may irradiate it with his light. “If we say, ‘We are without sin,’ we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. If we say, ‘We have not sinned,’ we make him a liar and his word is not in us.” Part of the death involved in sacrificing ourselves to God is the death to a false image of ourselves, one in which we think we’re in the light when we continue to walk in darkness. Today on the feast of the Holy Innocents, how can we not think about all those Catholics, Christians and others who think they’re “good people” while having, supporting, funding and facilitating the continued slaughter of innocent boys and girls in the womb through abortion? They may self-righteously think they’re in the light but in fact they’re in the depth of a dark moral abyss. Others, those who have suffered abortions or some who have worked in these human slaughterhouses, know they’re in darkness but don’t know how to escape. Today is a day on which we pray through the intercession of the Holy Innocents for divine mercy. 400 years ago today, the great doctor of the Church, St. Francis de Sales, died, and he died invoking the intercession of the Holy Innocents to pray for him. Today we implore them to pray for us, so that we might give witness, and to pray for the conversion of our culture and all those who are involved in the industrial killing of the youngest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters.
• Jesus Christ was born for us to show us how to follow him down the path of self-sacrificial love for God and others. He was brought myrrh, an ancient burial ointment, to indicate that even from his earliest days he had a mission to die for us and to call us to follow him on that path of courageous love. But that myrrh was not just for Jesus, but for the entire mystical body, for all who would be associated with him. The Holy Innocents were the first to follow him down that path of the grain of wheat, the path of true human fulfillment, and among the first to enjoy the eternal joy for all those who lose their lives for Christ’s sake and the sake of the Gospel. But as we enter more deeply into the Eucharistic Revival, we can also think of the many martyrs who, like the Holy Innocents, made in the image and likeness of the Eucharistic Christ, have given their lives in communion with him. We can think of St. Isaac Jogues, who gave his life 113 miles from here over the Mohawks’ superstitious reaction to the Mass kit he had left to celebrate Mass for them upon his return. We can think of St. Tarcisius, the acolyte during the ferocious persecution by Valerian taking the Eucharist as viaticum to Christians on death row in prison, who was attacked by a mob on the Appian Way trying to desecrate the Eucharist; as they beat, clubbed, kicked and stoned him, he died protecting the ciborium. We can think of the Franciscan martyrs of Gorkum — St. Nicholas Pieck and his eight companions — the 550th anniversary of whose martyrdom we marked July 9th this year, who were executed by Calvinist authorities for refusing to renounce their faith in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and were hung by their cinctures in a barn in Holland. We can think of the Martyrs of Abitene, all 49 of whom died because they knew they couldn’t live without receiving the Lord on Sundays. We can think of St. Oscar Romero, who celebrated Mass knowing that those who were trying to assassinate him who had recently placed a bomb under the pulpit where we was preaching but that had failed to detonate would have an easy target when he was at the altar. We can think of Fr. George Weinmann, who in 1967 gave his life successfully rescuing Jesus from the tabernacle during a fire that was destroying St. Philip Neri Church in Rochester, New York, one of a long list of heroic priests who have risked or given their lives to save Jesus during Church fires. All of them gave evidence to the myrrh that signifies not only Christ’s heroic death out of redeeming love but of members of his Mystical Body, following in the line of the Holy Innocents who gave their life for Christ in whose image, whose self-giving Eucharistic image, they have been made.
• The great Eucharistic martyrs learned how to be heroic at the celebration of the Mass. The way we learn how to sacrifice ourselves for Christ so as to become sharers in his divine life is through the Mass, as we receive Christ’s total self-offering for us and respond to his help to give of ourselves totally to him. This is the path by which, one day, we will one day meet the Holy Innocents and join with them in the celebration of all eternity when Rachel will no longer be weeping but where every tear will be wiped away.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download