Deep in this season of love and joy we are confronted with an act of gruesome violence.  Small boys under the age of two years – infants and toddlers – have become the enemies of the political power structure on southern Israel.  The Magi from the east, seeking directions from their peers in this part of the world, the court of Herod and the Temple ask key questions about a new power, a power of Divine Presence – God with us – that has come at last to Israel as long foretold in the historical, wisdom and prophetic books of the Jews.  The scraps of information point to Bethlehem, David’s City, as the location of the birth and the heavens announced that the coming had been in time less than two years.  Not knowing which child was a danger to his hegemony, Herod killed all the boys born in the area over the last two years.

This chapter in Matthew’s Gospel is a familiar part of the Christmas lore that Christians have read year after year to give us a sense of what it was like for to God to enter the human community.  But all too often we miss the point of each of the wisdom points buried in the accounts of Matthew and Luke.  If the story were played out today (IF?  The meaning of the Incarnation tells us the story is real again and again in human life) who are the Holy Innocents today?  Those who Emmanuel has given participation in the mystery of salvation by reason of their death.

Who are the innocents today?  St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Spiritual Exercises asks us to ponder this question early in the second week of the Exercises.  In the First week we discovered that it is sin and death that enslave and destroy all creation – the sin of refusing to honor God as God, seeking to be God on our own terms.  Innocents lose their lives by the corruption of humans worshipping the false god of power and control; by those who grasp at or attempt to steal the absolute power of the One who creates out of no-thing.

Ignatius offers us an analogy to consider who and what the innocents of our day are – the meditation is one of his most famous and it invites us to consider two ways to be human under the banners of two opposing realities.  Those who stand under the banner of hatred and death; of power and security; of possession and destruction are those who are not innocent.  They choose lying and stealing, murder and mayhem, chaos, and violence over life itself.  For such persons there is only the power of “control over”  and they despise the “weakness of mercy and compassion.” 

But submission to the limits of being human – even to death itself – means to stand under the banner of the God who so loved us that He sent his only begotten Son into our company to show us how to be authentically human.  We are not secure in ourselves, our talents and our power or money, we are secure only in the hands and will of the One who Loves us more than we can possibly love ourselves.

Who are the innocents today?  Those who stand under the banner of God’s mercy and do not grasp for what is not ours, equality with God. “But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the Blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”   Innocents today will care for creation – even at the cost of our personal wealth.  Innocents today are those who see brothers and sisters in every voice and color of other humans.  Innocents today protect the vulnerable from the harm of those who hate innocents and are afraid of powerlessness.  Innocents speak the truth, live justly and simply.  For this, innocents today will die, under some Herod somewhere to lives in terror of the power of love.