Feast of the Holy Innocents, also called Innocents’ Day.
Book of Alternative Services, January 11th — Book of Common Prayer, December 28th
Traditionally, the Feast of the Holy Innocents is observed by Western churches on December 28 and in the Eastern churches on December 29. This remembrance was between Christmas and Epiphany, so the Revised Common Lectionary has placed it on January 11th, after the Feast of Epiphany and the Baptism of Jesus.
This is a Christian feast in remembrance of the massacre of young children in Bethlehem by King Herod the Great in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:16–18). Herod the Great was titled “King of the Jews,” but he held his throne at the pleasure of the Roman Emperor. The precariousness of his power made him all the more ruthless in defending it. Thus, when he learned from the Wisemen that Christ, the true king of the Jews, had been born at Bethlehem, Herod wanted to do away with him. But he did not know the exact identity of the child, so he sent his troops to slaughter all the male infants of Bethlehem on the chance that one of the victims would be the Christ-child. Of course, Herod’s plan did not work out as an Angel told Joseph in a dream to flee from Bethlehem to Egypt with Mary and their son. There they stayed until Herod died, then it was safe to go back home to Nazareth.
In many ways, the story of the Innocents recounts the biblical story of Pharaoh’s attempt to kill the Israelite children in the Book of Exodus. Pharaoh kills the Hebrew children after his scribes warn him of the impending birth of the threat to his crown (i.e., Moses), but Moses’ father and mother are warned in a dream that the child’s life is in danger and act to save him.
The slain children around Bethlehem were regarded by the early church as the first martyrs, but it is uncertain when the day was first kept as a saint’s day. It may have been celebrated with Epiphany, but by the 5th century it was kept as a separate festival. In Rome it was a day of fasting and mourning. In medieval England children were reminded of the mournfulness of the day by being whipped in bed in the morning; this custom survived into the 17th century.
The day is still observed as a religious feast day throughout the Anglican Communion. The murdered infants never had an opportunity to know Jesus or to confess him in their own right. But they all died for the sake of Christ, and Herod’s atrocity sealed the name of Christ on each one of them. The Holy Innocents are therefore considered the prototype of all Christian martyrs.
The Holy Innocents may also be considered the patron saints of our own age. For we live in an age of atrocities, in a time infamous for the slaughter of innocent bystanders who never chose the causes for which they have been made to die. In the past year, we are still startled by the mass shootings in schools mostly in the United States. We pray for the innocent children and parents being systematically killed in Ukraine. We must also remember the children dying of starvation in Somalia and other African Countries. Canada is not immune to the dying of innocents, for example Aboriginal children in the Residential Schools, murdered young native women, or Jews and Muslims being abused and even killed for their faith, and currently those fighting a deadly respiratory virus in children’s hospitals when staff, bed and drugs are at critical levels across Canada.
By celebrating this feast, we perform an office for the Holy Innocents and all other victims of massacre. We become their voice and cry out for God to remember the slaughtered — and to remember them for the sake of Christ, himself the great Innocent who was crucified by “the rulers of that age.”
