Slaughter of Innocence

The Slaughter of the Innocents is attested nowhere in the historical record except in the Holy Gospel of St. Matthew. Nonetheless, no historian of the first-century Levant doubts that Herod the Great was up to the work. He had murdered his wife Mariamne, his mother Alexandra, and three of his sons, Alexandro, Aristobulus, and Antipas, among other family members. The Emperor Augustus quipped in Greek, "I would rather be his hus [his pig] than his huios [his son]," suggesting the Jewish prohibition on eating pigs.

Following our silent night, our holy night, when all was calm and bright, we are presented with slaughter, not merely preying upon one ethnic group, but upon all male children and in their most tender years as infants and toddlers. The scope of this massacre is "Bethlehem and all its districts" — that is, in a notable suburb of the largest city in the Levant. The scale of the crime is sufficiently great to summon a Matriarch: "Rachel .... a voice .... heard in Ramah." The Holy Orthodox Church reckons that 14,000 children were murdered. The crime strikes at the essence of the human lifeworld, which is family, and at the heart of family, which is newborn children.

Is this essence not the reason our God appeared to us as an infant? After all, Jesus, Who would ascend to the Kingdom in the fullness of years at age thirty-three, could also have entered the human lifeworld in the fullness of maturity (according to the flesh). But He does not. Isaiah prophesied that a Virgin would bear a child. God chose to reveal Himself to the world in the midst of family.

God's creation of new life is manifestly luminous. A blessing is manifestly placed upon all new life. Which child .... or puppy or kitten does not evoke an emotional response to innocence? In this, Divine blessing is conspicuous, a blessing that would also grace marriage, the scene of His first miracle. And Jesus would teach of the sacred inviolability of marriage: "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder." Children, too, who were deprecated in first-century Levantine culture, would be elevated to an unprecedented dignity: "Suffer [the] little children to come unto me .... For such is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mt 23:13).

The succession of verses in this morning's lesson, therefore, is breathtaking. In Chapter 2, verse 11, we have this:

Two verses later, we have this:

And then,

Where in all human history is new birth more venerated, even worshiped, than the Nativity of Jesus? And, then, where is it more emphatically desecrated than at the Slaughter of the Innocents? For these children are massacred because of their innocence. In this, they share a Divine property with the Holy One, the slaughtered the Agnus Dei, the Pure One. No sooner is Heaven born amongst us than a most heinous earthly crime is laid at Heaven's Gate: an attempt to erase Divine purity and goodness.

A principle is articulated here. Human arrogance may aspire to create new life, but it cannot. It can only subvert new life. It can only desecrate what is holy. It can only invert morality, for Man has no capacity to engender life nor to define morals. Life and goodness and morality belong, inseparatble, to God alone.

Surely these two events in St. Matthew's Gospel are no coincidence. They are crafted to be bookends. The Holy One is immediately followed by a foreshadowing of His persecution and murder. The message is clear: fairest Lord Jesus is born into an evil age. And what sort of kingdom is this?! we ask. And what shall we say of the Roman government, which tolerates such monstrosity?

In all honesty, however, we must admit they would not be the last to claim the mantle of goodness while tolerating death squads among their client states. U.S. Secretary of State Sumner Welles told Franklin Roosevelt that Nicaraguan President Anastasios Somoza "was a so-and-so." (Actually, his language was more colorful than mine.) "Yes," Roosevelt replied, "but he's our so-and-so." The same precise words were used to describe U.S. ally Manuel Noriega in Panama during the Cold War .... and many other U.S. allies over time.

Are these anomalies? No, they are the run-of-the-mill: the pragmatic solution. Pragmatism constituted a school of thought coined with the German name Realpolitik (emerging in the nineteenth century). Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Charles De Gaulle were foremost practitioners of Realpolitik. The idea is that nothing must interfere with national interest. It goes without say that morals have no role to play in politics. To quote a culture icon of the twentieth century, an NFL owner: "Just win, baby!"

Needless to say, Christians deplore a divorce between morality and public policy. And we all must see a great boundary, therefore, lying across our lives. On one side are those who seek the Kingdom of God, who seek to be God's subjects, who cherish His rule of life which we call morality. Paradoxically, they strive to be servants to all and to love their neighbors. They live simply that others might simply live. They lay down their lives for their friends.

That is morality equates to godliness. Morality proceeds from God alone, for God alone is good (Mk 10:18). Orthodox Christians are mindful that

Hell is the scene of restless strivings and the clash of egos claiming entitlements. The citizens of Heaven bow, by contrast, before the Gift of Authority and practice self-sacrifice.

On the other side of this great boundary are those who trust in human reason. The eighteenth-century idea that reason will supplant God in the sphere of human conduct, though, has utterly failed. Certainly, rationalism has served the purposes of science, but it has stumbled in the area of morals. For rationalism always returns to the human insistence on personal prerogative and individual rights: "But why can't I have .....?" "But why can't I do ....?" and the list, as our own era has amply demonstrated, has no end.

With the rise of post-modern thought, the notion that reason might form a coherent consensus has dropped away. Under this rubric, each person possesses his or her own truth and morals. There can be no consensus, therefore, but at most agreement to tolerate each other as we go forward each under the compass of her or his personal morals.

Last week, I saw a teenage girl wearing a tee-shirt that read, "Why do I live the outrageous life I do?" (Actually, I cannot repeat the exact words.) "Because I can!"

.... three short words that capture an entire era. Here is the mind of Hell. In like measure, we find no hint of gentle charity, caring solicitude for others, chaste modesty, or saintly godliness. There is no fragrance of holiness here. Instead, we read the most concise expression of human free will: Because I Can! .... and, as we used to say in the schoolyard, "Who's going to stop me?" The answer in twenty-first-century America is mostly, "No one."

This morning's Gospel is a hard one: amoral government, pragmatic public policy, and the cold, hard pursuit of "national interest," as we consider Herod the Great. But is this not the true image of our age? The two holiest words in the American lexicon are freedom and democracy. These abstractions have a pleasing sound to most Americans. But what do they mean in practice?

The American cultural package is only to well known to the world. The New York Times has defined "strong liberal democracy" in terms of same-sex marriage (March 20, 2022). But same-sex marriage most of the world does not want .... aside from the Americanized countries of the West. Nor does it want an American-style "tryanny of the minority" together with its intellectual underpinnings of relativism. You see, if each of us has his or her own truth, then each of us is in a position of sovereignty .... a tyranny of the minority.

The great contribution of the Roman Catholic Popes of the latter twentieth century was their fight against the doctrine that each person possesses his or her own truth. Benedict XVI wrote,

His thesis would be demonstrated in real terms for all to see with the vanishing of gender. For what does the term non-binary mean if not this: that the slippery and momentary urges of ego and desire have supplanted the demonstrable and solid footing of our DNA? Sexual desire has emerged as the only gender. And Heaven help the child who has mutilated his body only to discover that his desire has shifted.

Those of us born in the 1940s and '50s, decades now reviled for their love of traditional family, might well ask, "How did all of this unfold .... or (better said) unravel?" The answer forces us to approach the two great gods of our era: sex and equality.

Could anyone dispute that our society has sacrificed everything — our children, our families, our churches — on the altar of sex, whether it be homo-sex, trans-sex, pan-sex, inter-sex, or pervasively practiced hetero-sex even among our children .... even with our children? Sex is the master subject of our time.

As I say, who will step forward to dispute that? The more difficult subject, and the more powerful god by far, is what we call equality. We claim that it is consecrated in the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal." But we do not bother to notice that its author owned slaves and thought himself to be equal to few men (at least as we now use the term equal). John Kennedy quipped while receiving Nobel laureates at the White House,

Jefferson would not have disagreed. And many would have said, "Jefferson has no rival. There is no equal to Thomas Jefferson." What does equality mean then?

We at the Hermitage believe that every human life born into the world is incommensurably holy, that every citizen of Heaven enjoys the same high dignity, not as a matter of legislation, but truly and really. Thus, every pilgrim journeying towards Heaven must enjoy that same incommensurably high dignity. We believe that God's human creature was made to be permanent and to be holy, destined for the fullness of unity with God. We read that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 28, 34-45). And those who love God are also no respecters of persons .... which is how the Second Great Commandment "is like unto" the First. There is no caste system in Christianity.

We believe that God contemplates a vocation for each of our special geniuses. Vocation does not mean "career" or "job." It points to a role God created us to play. We reverence this special genius as being sacred. And above all vocations, our most profound reverence is reserved for Motherhood. For no other vocation is entrusted with so many, so varied, and such consequential and precious offices of love, yes, and of holiness.

We do not discount Fatherhood. Psychologists have learned that emotionally balanced and well-developed children arise from homes having both a loving father and mother. The secret to happy children? Parents who love each other. I grew up hearing that the most beautiful gift a father can ever give his children is to love their mother.

Yet, above all, the sanctity of Motherhood shines with a special radiance. Mother's sense of proportion, her beautiful modesty, her charity towards all, her patient understanding, and her most tender heart .... these shine with a particular radiance. I know a nun who is about to turn eighty whose mother's picture is set in a prominent place, which she sees every morning.

Here is the nucleus of family. Here is the essence of humanity.

We do not say that all women were called to be mothers or wives. Many women manifestly are not called to this vocation. In like measure, the unmarried state is an honorable vocation especially in the form of military career or religious vocation or men and women who are "married to their careers," a passion that leaves no room for anything else.

Is it not very odd, then, that motherhood should have come under a withering attack beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the current time? Did not everyone have a mother? Is it not so that most boys and girls loved their mothers?

I recall the attacks my college classmates endured who described themselves as homemakers in our alumni magazine. Their female counterparts would quote Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." And we see the inner logic of feminism: motherhood must be torn down so that a new vision of "equality" could be propped up .... "our equality."

But this is not equality, but rather its opposite. This is the insistence on a one-party system in which one ideal of womanhood is to be tolerated. It would only take two generations to advance to the next step: womanhood must also go. Gender must be toppled. For equality, this twisted logic goes, can only be real when women have the government-enforced right to be men.

Meantime, what has happened to most of the men of this era? They are passive. They have agreed to condemn masculinity as being toxic. The have accepted the cartoon of male-ness as being cruel, egotistical, and violent. And what has all of this produced? A culture so unwelcoming to men that it has become a wasteland nearly devoid of healthy, masculine, and present fathers.

Let us stand back and survey this calamity — the unrelieved attack upon mothers who stay home and raise their children, the men who are beaten down for being masculine, the confused children who are deprived of role models of motherhood and fatherhood, and who, then, are indoctrinated at school to question their own gender. Let us take the full measure of this scene. Is this not a slaughter of innocents beside which Herod's massacre pales by comparison? For this is not the work of an afternoon, however horrible. This is the annihilation of an entire lifeworld, even a Divine Creation.

We are presented today with two bookends: literally, the birth of all good and then, immediately, the human reply: a frenzied declaration of profound evil. "Let us overturn good!" evil declares. "We cannot create good, so let us overturn it!"

And what does mother say to all of this? What does mother do when one of her children chooses for evil .... or seems to be carried along on an irresistable tide? She responds with patience, compassion, even understanding, but she does not insist that the whole world be remade in the image of a wayward son or daughter. For her heart is for all of her children, not only one. She reaches out in love to the one outlier. But she does not frame a general rule around the exception. For this is to devolve into Pandemonium, which is Hell's name for chaos.

Two great archetypes burn brightly in our souls — one beckoning to all men and the other to all women. Men who rise above the debris of culture scan the horizon for a cause worth dying for. And women who rise above the debris of culture seek a cause worth being faithful to. The great type of the first is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And the great type of the second is His Mother, the eternal and most pure Mother. She is the Mother, who denied herself everything. She said Yes, thus releasing her children from the darkness of eternal and chaotic No. She loved without limit, and she never counted the cost. Are not these the true marks of Motherhood? And are they not so now and forever?

On this day, when a voice is heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children, let us enshrine the holiness of sacrifice in our greatest practical hope: Motherhood. And let us pray that no little girl or young woman ever be assailed or abused simply because they have bowed before this radiant goodness and holiness.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.   Amen.