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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 28, 2003
The innocents
This is my belated Christmas lay sermon for MMIII published instead on "Holy Innocents" an interesting day in the ancient Christian calendar. An echo of the paradox that ran through Advent Holy Innocents could be interpreted as martyrs' feast or as penitential fast. We commemorate the incident recorded in the second chapter of Matthew when Herod the Great ordered the massacre of all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two on the rumour that some claimant "King of the Jews" had been born among them. It becomes the cause for the Holy Family's flight into Egypt the mystical signification of which is vast. Modernist Christians as many of their puritan ancestors tend to discount the nativity scene and other early references starting from the genealogy for Jesus at the opening of the Gospel of Matthew. They look upon this matter as a legendary cloud out of which Our Lord later emerges fully grown and in the middle of his calling. The later life of Christ fits well with everything we can reconstruct of historical circumstances in Roman Palestine about the third decade of the common era. It fits better and better the more we learn from the archaeologists. But the nativity story with such details as the coming of the Wise Men from the East to the cr?che in Bethlehem the massacre of the innocents the flight into Egypt are hardly accepted as factual in our culture today. And in the mind that frankly doubts the fact of Christ's Resurrection the story of Christmas doesn't have a chance. I am not myself a modernist Christian just a catholic one. My scepticism works the other way. If the tradition and the scriptures were divinely inspired as I solemnly believe they were I don't see why the account we celebrate through the Christmas season should have been false. There is most certainly "fog" in this account but a different kind of fog from the sort that the pseudo-rationalist mind protests. It is the fog that presents itself to human minds when events transcending our experience and understanding obtrude into the world. The boundary between what we see and what we can't see becomes indeterminate. Christ touches the earth -- this we can know. Yet much of what happens in that touching is necessarily murky to us. For think again: either Christ is Saviour or he is not. Either he is as the Church has taught through almost twenty centuries and as the whole Gospel of John avers the very Son of God sent down into the earth to save us or he is not. And if he is not he is most certainly the biggest and cruellest imposture in all the history of men. For every person who has learned of the claims made by and on behalf of this Jesus the acceptance or rejection of Him is the most important event in life. Everything hinges on this act of faith. And if Christ is Christ his coming into the world could not have been unattended by miracles -- being itself the greatest miracle to occur in our surprising universe. End of all minor objections save one. For it remains that the universe though miraculous in its very existence is founded in the principle of non-contradiction. And as Christians we subscribe to a theology which holds that not even God can achieve a contradiction. Moreover the world for us is real -- not illusory not "maya" -- as Christ was real and in the flesh. Should there be a fact stated even in scripture that could not possibly have been true -- because for instance we can rationally prove that its chronology is impossible -- that fact is contradicted and is therefore false. Example the birth of Jesus could not have coincided with the census of the Syrian governor Quirinius. St. Luke himself must be wrong on that (minor) point even if right in the main. There is no positive corroborating evidence for the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem. Yet we know from non-Christian sources that Herod was a human monster of a paranoid disposition. He was the kind of man quite capable of ordering a massacre of small children and who elsewhere did just such things; the kind of man who might order such a massacre for just such a reason. We can't prove that it didn't happen and have the evidence of scripture that it did -- therefore I vote that it really happened. "There were shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo the angel of the Lord came upon them and the glory of the Lord shone about them and they were sore afraid." This too is in scripture and I will pray with it. For it is the sort of thing not only possible with God but in the nature of God as we understand Him -- in the moments when He chooses to reveal or announce Himself in His glory. I believe in angels. Though my understanding of angels is necessarily murky. "And the angel said unto them fear not: for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people." It is the message running throughout the scriptures from Old Testament through New especially those two comforting words Fear not. Do not be afraid the Lord is with us the Lord of Love however frightening in his justice and power however awed we are in our own smallness and helpless as babes. "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: Glory to God in the highest! And on earth peace goodwill among men." The authors of the Gospels inquired diligently into what had happened. They found out what they could find in their proximity to events. They wrote by the light of divine inspiration and yet with fallible human hands. Though sometimes disagreeing in minor details they nevertheless agree in the main one witness piled upon another. The Bible itself is witness not an idol -- a testimony to huge events and the human means through which Our Lord has explained what we must know about Him. Our Bible points to Christ -- Christ is our religion. We always hear Him imperfectly through our human eyes and ears and minds which are our imperfections not His. Yet the honesty of this Gospel testimony shines through the scriptures the more candidly through its minor imperfections. And all witnesses agree as we recall them in this season: that He has come. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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