Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It rarely gets marked because it falls on 28 December and, after Christmas, most people feel like a rest. However, since this year it falls on this Sunday and I was leading the service at St Theo’s, I wanted to take the opportunity to note it. It marks a bit of the Christmas story that is often missed out in our modern British retellings. The wicked King Herod, thwarted in his effort to find out the location of the infant Jesus, orders that all the young boys in Bethlehem be killed.
The story was part of today’s passage from Matthew (2:13-23). There was plenty else in the service too but we took some time to remember those innocent young children in Bethlehem and what they and their families endured, the many others who have suffered similarly (during what the carol “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” characterises as “two thousand years of wrong”) and those young innocents who suffer today through religious persecution and state-led violence in places like Nigeria and The Ukraine.
It’s a heavy throught but that’s why this oft-bypassed story is important to remember.
