When I was a child, I questioned God about the event of today’s Gospel reading. As a child, it did not seem right to me that innocent children should die because Jesus was born. I remember puzzling over it for years. As a child, I had a child’s understanding of the Incarnation. My picture was one of a lovely Christmas card: a perfectly clean stable, beautiful stars in a clear sky, and well-dressed worshiping shepherds and kings. The death of children did not fit with that picture. Maturity and today’s first reading from 1 John give me a more complete and complex view of Christmas and the Incarnation it celebrates.
Incarnation
As a child, I did not know the word “incarnation.” As an occasional worshiper at a small not-Catholic Church I had never heard of “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father–” the words we say every Sunday and major feast in the Creed that speak of the Incarnation.
We say those words, but what do they mean? And what does the beginning of the Creed, “I believe…” mean? How could God be contained and grow in the womb of a woman—even an immaculate one? How could “the Word,” present from the beginning of time, through whom all things came to be, then be conceived and born as a human child in a poor family?
Death of the Holy Innocents
It is all beyond my ability to understand—a fascinating Mystery. The “why” of the Incarnation rivets me, too, and today’s first reading from 1 John creates some openings for understanding. 1 John says:
Beloved:
This is the message that we have heard from Jesus Christ
and proclaim to you:
God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
What does it mean, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all?” How does that fit with the death of the Holy Innocents described in today’s Gospel and with so much evil in the world today?
This is where it takes maturity to understand. Jesus was born, and the boy babies under age two in the vicinity of Bethlehem were killed. But it was not God who killed them. Today’s scripture says, “Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him” and “When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi.”
Herod’s choice to do evil killed the children.
Darkness and Light Today
Our world today is filled with bad things happening. But does God cause the evil? If God does not cause the evil, why doesn’t he stop it?
In our COVID-blanketed world, such questions loom large on our minds. In fact, a Pew Research study in the summer showed that 86% of Americans believe there are lessons to be learned from COVID. About 35% say these lessons were sent by God.
In his Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis urges us to take the opportunity of COVID to rethink much of our social, economic, and political lives—all across the world. He does not say God caused the evils of COVID. But he invites us to pause and consider what lessons God might want us to learn.
What do we do with all this?
It seems to me that the answer is “faith.” Do we choose to believe in God’s way and follow it or not?
Faith starts with saying and meaning, “I believe….” But faith is much more. Faith is a double gift God gives us. He first gives us the ability to believe in God’s goodness and in the goodness of God’s way of life. Faith is a gift of God that comes from his desire to overcome evil by inviting us to live in his love—both by building the Kingdom of God in the middle of the craziness of the world now and eventually in eternal life.
But then, God gives us ANOTHER gift: God gives us free choice. We can choose to accept God’s way or not. We have to be free to choose, because love itself must be free to be authentic love. The way of Love requires freedom.
The choice to choose love, even in the middle of evil, is a demanding choice. We must choose God’s way to live–all of it. Our church teaching is very clear about this. In the catechism it says:
143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God, the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith.”
The catechism goes on to refer to Hebrews, as it summarizes the story of faith beginning with Abraham-our first reading on Sunday. It speaks of Mary’s faith which was necessary to make the Incarnation possible. The catechism continues: “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparately, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.” (CCC 150)
If your faith needs shoring up, I encourage you to read paragraphs 142-165 in the catechism. It is exquisitely beautiful–though sobering.
And it gives an answer to the problem of the Holy Innocents and our world today:
164 Faith is often lived in darkness and can be put to the test. The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith. Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice, and death, seem to contradict the Good News; they can shake our faith and become a temptation against it.
This section of the catechism concludes with the admonition that we must then turn to the witnesses of faith. The New Catechetical Directory goes one step further: We must BE witnesses of faith.
Does God cause evil—or does God permit it and give us opportunities to use it to counter it with goodness? I take the second perspective because of my faith. God cannot be divided against himself—though “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; God’s ways are not our ways.”
Do we reject God because evil remains in the world? Do we reject God because we do not understand? If we accept God, how do we give a full assent of faith?
Those are very uncomfortable questions, but, more and more, they seem to me to be questions to face.
God is the Light. God is in the Word—the Word who was in the beginning, who made heaven and earth, who is God incarnate–Jesus Christ. Jesus, in who He is, in what He did 2000 years ago, and in what He does today, is the Light in the darkness. That is God revealed in the Incarnation and living now through the Holy Spirit.
As John tells us today, it lives through us:
If we say, “We have fellowship with him,”
while we continue to walk in darkness,
we lie and do not act in truth.
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.
Prayer:
Today, Lord, let me be Light. Let me be in fellowship with others who also walk in the Light. Strengthen my assent of faith to say clearly, “I choose God. I choose Light. I choose love. I choose to believe and to live my belief.” And then, Lord, give me patience with myself, because, though I want to be a great street light, too often I am a tiny candle. Let me not be discouraged today, even if my light flickers in the wind. Amen.
