I recently read in a homily that the Christmas season is far more complex than greeting-card images suggest, and that a sign of that complexity is the variety of liturgical colors that the Church uses during this time.
The unsigned homily appeared in a Jesuit blog (Whosoever Desires).
The subject was the Memorial of the Holy Innocents, observed on December 28, in which the Church recalls the children who, according to Matthew’s Gospel, were killed at the order of Herod the Great.
The evangelist writes that Herod was incensed when the magi who had spoken to him of a “newborn king of the Jews” failed to return after visiting the child Jesus in Bethlehem.
Afraid that this new king was a threat to his power, Herod is said to have instructed his soldiers to kill every male child in the vicinity of Bethlehem who was two years old or less.
Scripture scholars and historians debate whether this incident ever occurred.
It was not reported by any contemporary source outside of the Gospel, not even by the historian Flavius Josephus who did write about Jesus and John the Baptist and about other atrocities committed by Herod.
Some authorities believe that may be because there may have been fewer than two dozen children in Bethlehem who fell under Herod’s order.
Others have speculated that the author of the Gospel may have been drawing a parallel in which the creation of Adam and the crime of Cain was counterbalanced by the birth of the “new Adam” — Jesus — and the crime of Herod.
We may never know for sure, but the Jesuit homilist says that the story of the innocents fits into a pattern:
“If you include … the colors of Advent we have the purples of penitence, the blush of gaudete joy, the white of the star of David. And the red, yes, the red of the blood of the martyrs. All of this transpires over a period of a few weeks. This is not the seemingly unrelenting white of the fifty days of Easter. The Advent and Christmas seasons have a panoply of colors—and of experiences. Elizabeth, once barren, now conceives. Mary, unwed, yet betrothed to Joseph, also conceives. There’s no unalloyed joy in that annunciation. In one gospel passage, John the Baptist leaps for joy and then later on he languishes in prison.
“On Christmas day the whole world exults in joy over the birth of a child, then, typically, the next day we Christians remember the blood of the first martyr to die on behalf of our faith (St. Stephen). On Christmas day, we remember a child born on an inky dark night pierced by a searing star, then only a few days later we remember the slaughter of a host of children—we wear the color of the blood of martyrs too young to know why they died the vicious death they did.’’
The point is that while it is true, as the carol says of Jesus, that “his law is love and his gospel is peace,’’ it is also true that he was born into a complicated world, a world in which evil is real and persistent.
The good news is that God did not abandon us to evil. On the contrary, the meaning of the Nativity is that God joined us in this complex world to give us what we need to overcome evil — his intimate friendship which we encounter in his word, in the sacraments, in prayer, and in those to whom we reflect “the wonders of his love.’’
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.