Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota

General Reflection on the Feast of the Holy Innocents:
by the Rev John Gibbs

The Church may have wanted us to emphasize the "Holy Innocents" in the texts for this day. But in fact the texts place them within the context of God’s sovereignty over the cosmic totality.

Isaiah 49:13-23 does not talk about "my personal Lord and Savior." Instead this prophet knows God as sovereign over the nations and the people (49:22). Here is not the God of private individualistic worship, but the God who is proclaimed out there in the wide world of heavens, earth, mountains, suffering ones (49:13). When he thinks of our sons and daughters, he thinks at the same time of the governmental structure under which they will live (49:22-23).

Has God comforted His people? Has God had compassion on them? The mountains, the earth, the heavens know whether God has. For that reason the cosmic totality joins together to sing for joy, exult, and break forth into singing (49:13). In other words, God’s compassion and comfort are objective realities that are known in the external world that surrounds the holy innocents. God’s work for the People of God is not subjective, a mere matter of fleeting feeling. That work exists in the world at large, and there it supports the holy innocents.

Again how unlike our privatistic Protestantism is this prophet! His vision is cosmic in scope. His God is "the God of the whole earth" (Isaiah 54:5). His concern is for real people who experience terror and oppression (54:14). They are the ones who need and receive God’s great compassion and everlasting love (54:7-8).

If we are really concerned about those who "afflicted, storm-tossed, and not comforted," then with prophetic perspective we will look to the social and economic conditions, and to the political structures that all oppress by their being the apparently immovable status quo. What is going on with our elderly, our children, our imprisoned? Not to care is to forsake the God of all comfort, and thus to be discomforted within.

Being a holy innocent does not mean being naïve about power structures and the immoral uses of morality. The task of holiness is, on the other hand, constructive in the literal sense no less than the metaphorical one: "Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back: lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; and your descendants will possess the nations and will settle the desolate towns" (54:2-3).

Mountains and hills are there as constant reminders of a steadfast love that shall never remove from us, and a covenant of Shalom that shall never be removed, or "so says the Lord, who has compassion on you" (54:10). The faith of the holy innocents is not, then, hidden in the Confessional. It echoes from the earth our home around us.
 

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