Patrick Comerford
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love sent to me … ‘four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree’.
This is the fourth day of Christmas and today the church calendar remembers the Holy Innocents. The eight days of Hanukkah continue, and this is the Sabbath in Hanukkah, known as Shabbat Mikets. Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 2: 13-18 (NRSVA):
13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’
16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
18 ‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
Today’s Reflection:
The Christian interpretation of the song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ often sees the four colly birds as figurative representations of the four evangelists or Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
It is theologically important to remind ourselves in the days after Christmas Day of the important link between the Incarnation and bearing witness to the Resurrection faith.
Saint Stephen’s Day on Sunday (26 December), Holy Innocents’ Day today (28 December), and the commemoration of Thomas à Beckett, usually on 29 December, are reminders that Christmas, far from being surrounded by sanitised images of the crib, angels and wise men, is followed by martyrdom and violence. Close on the joy of Christmas comes the cost of following Christ. A popular expression, derived from William Penn, says: ‘No Cross, No Crown.’
The Church Calendar today (28 December) recalls the massacre of the Holy Innocents, who are sometimes revered as the first Christian martyrs. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the feast on 29 December.
These dates have nothing to do with the chronological order of the event. Instead, the feast is kept within the octave of Christmas because the Holy Innocents gave their life for the new-born Saviour. Saint Stephen the first martyr (martyr by will, love and blood, 26 December), Saint John the Evangelist (27 December, martyr by will and love), and these first flowers of the Church (martyrs by blood alone) accompany the Christ Child entering this world on Christmas Day.
This commemoration first appears as a feast of the western church at the end of the fifth century, and the earliest commemorations were connected with the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January), bringing together the murder of the Innocents and the visit of the Magi.
The story of the massacre of the Innocents is the biblical narrative of infanticide by King Herod the Great in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 2: 13-18). According to Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem to save him from losing his throne to a new-born king whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi.
In Saint Matthew’s Gospel, the visiting magi from the east arrive in Judea in search of the new-born king of the Jews, having ‘observed his star at its rising’ (Matthew 2: 2). Herod directs them to Bethlehem, and asks them to let him know who this king is when they find him. They find the Christ Child and honour him, but an angel tells them not to alert Herod, and they return home by another way. Meanwhile, Joseph has taken Mary and the child and they have escaped to Egypt.
Saint Matthew’s Gospel provides the only account of the Massacre. This incident is not mentioned in the other three gospels, nor is it mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who records Herod’s murder of his own sons. When the Emperor Augustus heard that Herod had ordered the murder of his own sons, he remarked: ‘It is better to be Herod’s pig, than his son.’
Saint Matthew’s story recalls passages in Hosea referring to the exodus, and in Jeremiah referring to the Babylonian exile, and the accounts in Exodus of the birth of Moses and the slaying of the first-born children by Pharaoh.
Estimates of the number of infants at the time in Bethlehem, a town with a total population of about 1,000, would be about 20. But Byzantine liturgy estimated 14,000 Holy Innocents were murdered, while an early Syrian list of saints put the number at 64,000. Coptic sources raise the number to 144,000 and place the event on 29 December.
This morning, as I reflect on the day ahead, my heart is weighed down by the plight of the children caught in war and violence in Gaza, Isreal and Palestine, in Syria and Lebanon, and in Ukraine and Russia, the forgotten child refugees on Greek islands, in Lampadusa and in Calais, in cheap hotels across this land and across Europe, and the child refugees and innocent children soon to be the victims of the appalling decisions about to be made by the incoming Trump regime.
It was distressing, to say the least, to read a report by my former colleague Helena Smith from Athens in the Guardian on Christmas Eve of a refugee ‘children’s emergency’ facing Greece, where the number of unaccompanied minors reaching the country rises and concern grows over a lack of ‘safe zones’ to host them.
Large numbers of children arrived this year (2024) along a new trafficking route from Libya to Crete, prompting NGOs to urge Greek authorities to take emergency measures that would allow children to be transferred to protected shelters or other EU member states.
‘What we are seeing amounts to a children’s emergency of the kind that we haven’t witnessed in years,’ said Sofia Kouvelaki, who heads the Home Project, an organisation that supports refugee and migrant children in Athens.
Ten years after Greece was at the centre of a refugee crisis, when nearly a million EU-bound asylum seekers crossed its borders, child arrivals have doubled this year, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. More than 13,000 minors arrived in Greece by sea in the first 11 months of this year. Landings by unaccompanied and separated children have also risen sharply, from 1,490 in 2023 to approximately 3,000 so far this year.
‘There are a huge number of kids turning up on boats every day and an urgent need for the creation of more safe spaces to house them,’ Sofia Kouvelaki said. Recent arrivals referred to the Home Project included exceptionally young children from Syria and Egypt.
Greece’s migration minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, predicted last week that pressure on east Mediterranean migration routes to Greece was likely to continue in 2025. By the end of the year, 60,000 people are expected to have entered Greece. Camps on Aegean islands are at full capacity, he said.
Aid groups report hundreds of children on the frontline isles of Samos, Leros and Kos without clothes or shoes and little or no access to essential services. Spending cuts by the Greek government have resulted in fewer protective shelters and about 1,500 unaccompanied children have been forced to fend for themselves throughout Greece. Incidents of violence and abuse have proliferated in overcrowded state-run reception facilities that frequently host children and adults together.
There were shocking reports this month of a teenager from Egypt being gang-raped, beaten and burned at the Malakasa refugee camp outside Athens.
Save the Children and other aid organisations report critical failures in Greece’s reception system, overcrowding in camps and asylum seeker facilities, shortages in basic services, placing children at risk as their asylum requests are put on EU funding is blocked from reaching shelters.
The Greek Council for Refugees and Save the Children report alarming living conditions that minors continue to face in the camps. ‘It is unacceptable that, even now, when so much money has been invested in Greece and we are no longer in crisis mode, that we should be discussing such basic issues,’ says Lefteris Papagiannakis, the director of the Greek Council for Refugees.
Christian CND and the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship are coming together this evening to mark Holy Innocents’ Day to pray for peace with an online, half-hour vigil on Zoom at 7 pm with prayers, readings, singing and reflections on all the innocent victims of war and violencethe, especially children.
Today’s Prayers (Saturday 28 December 2024, The Holy Innocents):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), has been ‘Love – Advent’. This theme was introduced last Sunday with Reflections by the Revd Lopa Mudra Mistry, Presbyter in the Diocese of Calcutta, the Church of North India (CNI).
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Saturday 28 December 2024, The Holy Innocents) invites us to pray:
Lord, heal all who are hurt by injustice – mend spirits, wipe tears, comfort with divine love, bring assurance that justice will prevail.
The Collect:
Heavenly Father,
whose children suffered at the hands of Herod,
though they had done no wrong:
by the suffering of your Son
and by the innocence of our lives
frustrate all evil designs
and establish your reign of justice and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ,
in your humility you have stooped to share our human life
with the most defenceless of your children:
may we who have received these gifts of your passion
rejoice in celebrating the witness of the Holy Innocents
to the purity of your sacrifice
made once for all upon the cross;
for you are alive and reign, now and for ever.
Collect on the Eve of Christmas I:
Almighty God,
who wonderfully created us in your own image
and yet more wonderfully restored us
through your Son Jesus Christ:
grant that, as he came to share in our humanity,
so we may share the life of his divinity;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Yesterday’s Reflection
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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