Feast of the Holy Innocents

Christmas isn’t over, as I am being daily reminded on Facebook, but the initial fierce and frenzied pace of feasting has subsided and I am lapsing into the more reasonable way of just lying around praying silently for other people to feel like standing up to clean.

One year I was so overwhelmed by the Feast of our Lord, by the paper and toys and food and candy and cookie crumbs, that I shoved almost all the presents, and a bunch of other stuff, into our then Spare Oom and shut the door. The children were all babies and didn’t know anything bad or dysfunctional was happening to them or their mother so it didn’t scar them or anything. A couple of months later I gathered my courage in my throat and opened it up and slowly dug out.

The command to feast, to rejoice and celebrate, to eat rich food and give presents, is an interesting one. If you add up all the weeks of required feasting in the Old Testament, and I do know people have done this, you find the people of Israel regularly having to stop their ordinary work and truck off to Jerusalem to eat too much in the house of the Lord. It’s easy to stop and wonder when they are supposed to have time to do ordinary work. The feasts pile up and last for days and weeks. And then there is one little line, somewhere in the Pentateuch (don’t fuss at me, I couldn’t possibly remember where it is on a morning like this) that commands the person who lives far away to sell the stuff he would normally bring for the sacrifice, take the money, go to Jerusalem, buy all manner of delicious food and strong drink and whatever your his desires. I was a little bit shocked the first time I saw the line. I had to go back over it several times. I mean, everybody knows that following after God means being miserable and eating boiled potatoes lathered in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

It takes work, both mental and physical, to feast, to rejoice, to have a good time. The pressures of the feast are greater, for me anyway, than the strictures of the fast. For one thing, I usually manage to forget the fast and so am not encumbered by it (I’m not saying that’s a good thing). I am never allowed to forget about the feast. For another, so many feasts have multiple components. It’s not just a meal, or slewing a few presents about. It’s the meal and the pageant and the presents and the twinkle lights and the something nice for the piano teacher and the pageant and the Christmas clothes and the pageant. Gak, I seem to be falling into a loop.

You can’t take anything away, just to make it easier on yourself, or there is a hue and cry of anxious woe. The children remember and notice more and more. They anticipate that single 36 hour window all year. They rejoice. They are prepared Not To Be Disappointed. No amount of loving descriptions of the poverty of the manger throws them off their single minded delight.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the remembrance for the church of Herod killing the young, baby boys in Bethlehem in his raging desire to do away with Jesus. It’s called a feast. It’s not supposed to be a day of fasting. But like so many feasts, the sorrow of the remembrance is enough to turn each morsel of cake to ash in your mouth. And in the west, the knowledge that the young, the most innocent, are killed before even their first breath does not bring about any sense of rejoicing.

And yet, the infant Jesus being borne swiftly away to safety in Egypt is feasted over not because we have nothing to do in the middle of this spring like December. We have twelve whole days of rejoicing because he is the Savior, because every single baby whose blood falls to the ground unjustly is saved by him, gathered to him, and ultimately will be avenged by him. The day of reckoning seems slow, but when it gets here it will be sudden and overpowering. That the Lord, the God of Heaven and Earth so humbled himself to save us first, to rescue us from our closed off rooms of dysfunction, from our murderous ways, from our failures, from our sin, even on a day of sorrow, is worthy of rejoicing over.

So, weep over your sin and the sin of the world, but then have another slice of cake.