A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
and she would not be consoled,
since they were no more.
~ Matthew 2: 18 ~

As you may know, the shapers of the Christian calendar of saints and the liturgical year saw fit to have us celebrate immediately following the jubilation of Christmas Day the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr on December 26 and then today, on December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It makes me wonder if the fashioners of the liturgical calendar were wise men or wise guys. The Gloria in excelsis Deo is still lingering in the air. We light yearners and Christ revelers barely had time to digest our eggnog and pumpkin pie when we turn the corner to stories of stoning and slaughter. It’s enough to pinch a nerve in your neck from the spontaneous face contortions and the confused head-shaking. WHAT!? It’s cause to send one’s fingers tapping their way on the keyboard to Dictionary.com to look up the meaning of the words celebrate and feast.

Suddenly the readings go from a tableau of a motley crew of giddy shepherds goo-gooing a radiant-faced babe in a manger, bowing reverently and repeatedly to the child’s mother, and shaking hands and slapping the back of the self-effacing father to two scenes of mayhem and madness. One is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles about an event that takes place after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into heaven and the other takes place months or perhaps a year after this child was born.

On the 26th, less than 24 hours after the church sacristan has laid the plaster of Paris Christ-child in the straw before the Family Mass, we are hearing about an angry mob stoning Stephen to death for being longwinded as a Fundamentalist preacher in front of the Sanhedrin, for publicly announcing a long litany of their crimes and misdemeanors over the years, for calling them stiff-necked people, for being accomplices in the death of this Manchild in a Promised Land, and (I suspect this accusation might have been the last straw) for telling them in no uncertain terms that while their manhood was long ago circumcised that their hearts and ears for too long had been covered not with flannel and ear muffs but rather with foreskin. This sent them searching for hefty stones. And so, Stephen, one of the first deacons appointed to take special care of the poor and needy among the early Christians, became the first Christian martyr.

The scene today in the gospel reading from Matthew 2: 13-18 recalling the slaughter of infants by Herod’s executioners is even more horrific and haunting because of the sheer scale of the massacre perpetrated and because of the innocence and vulnerability of the victims. In an effort to communicate the unsayable horror and the visceral pathos of mothers and fathers losing their innocent children to the brutality of those greedy for power and indifferent to the innate dignity of human persons, Matthew lifts a passage from the prophet Jeremiah that depicts Rachel wailing and mourning for her children from her grave:

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.(Mt. 2:18)

The proximity of the Nativity of the Lord and the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the liturgical calendar is a reminder that  Christmas was an event, is a mystery, and as Howard Thurman wrote so eloquently, a work yet to be done. For sadly, two millenniums later, our times are not so different from Jesus’. Dictators clutching tightly to their unwarranted power still terrorize and slaughter their own people, let alone designated enemies, in order to preserve at any cost their personal privilege and power. The deaths in the Syrian civil war alone have reached over 480,000 in a land where people cry out for the violence to stop. Weak, soulless, and insecure men, whether leaders of countries or cartels, still make decisions that materially benefit the few and afflict the many who are poor or in need. We still live in a world where too many of the haves have no personal contact with, no deep sympathy or compassion for the have-nots. The psalmist sings “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” and yet we still live in a world where too many of us act as if the earth is ours to do with what we want. We still live in a divinely-bequeathed world where humans have insisted on making borders and walls where once there were none  — visible or invisible, where our favorite refrain is “me, my, mine,” where there is no room in the inn of our hearts or home as we sing “O come, O come, Emmanuel” but disregard Hopkins telling us that “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” We still live in a world in which we have a propensity not to see ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves, where our differences are exaggerated and our similarities minimized, and where selfishness too often trumps the kinship of our humanity and the struggles and griefs, the dreams and joys that make siblings of us all.

Christmas is a season of joy gifted to us by God’s incarnated presence. That joy is a Divine oblation and a human obligation. We are obliged not by an external force but by virtue of our own humanity: to be human is to be grateful. To be human is to reciprocate. Our joy increases as we make possible greater joy for others. It is a joy that reminds us Mary of Nazareth gave her consent, made the world of her womb the safe haven for the Holy, went into labor, did her work, as did Jesus after her.

Now it is our turn. The physical birthing of Christ was Mary’s alone but it is for each and all of us to birth the Christ again in our day. The incarnation of the Divine in Jesus is unprecedented. But the incarnation of love which was the motive force of the Divine incarnation is an invocation to humans to participate in the Divine life through acts of love, constantly repeated. Living out the implications of the incarnation does not undermine the unprecedented nature of this event but rather emphasizes that it is not only a Divine mystery but also a human vocation, task, and responsibility by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God.