The Holy InnocentsHerod’s murder of the youngsters in Bethlehem is one of the saddest parts of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative. Matthew spares us a description of the slaughter and simply uses a text from the prophet Jeremiah to recall the sobbing that surely took place:
“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.”
Bethlehem was a small town and the estimated number of boy’s two years old and under would have been about 20. Herold’s massacre is not recorded in historical documents, but the relatively small number makes the story all the more plausible.
Mary and Joseph would have known the families of these children. One can only guess at their feelings when they later heard about this.
The feast of the Holy Innocents is celebrated on December 28. The words of the Prayer After Communion are well written:
Lord, by a wordless profession of faith in your Son,
the innocents were crowned with life at his birth.”
Spend some quiet time with the Lord.
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Midnight Mass At the very beginnings of the Church, the Eucharist was normally celebrated on Saturday evening after sunset. The members of the early Church were almost entirely Jewish, and still practiced the Jewish religion. They still observed the Sabbath, which included going to the synagogue service.
The rules governing how far a person could walk on the Sabbath made it difficult to travel to the synagogue, and then walk to another place where Christians gathered for the Eucharist
The Sabbath began at sunset on Friday, and ended at sunset on Saturday. That is when the Eucharist was ordinarily celebrated in those earliest years – late Saturday evening. The Sabbath was over and there was no restriction on travel. And Sunday was a regular work day.
As time went on and fewer Christians were Jewish, it became more common to make Sunday the special day each week, in honor of the day the Lord rose from the dead. Thus the Eucharist was commonly celebrated on Sunday mornings.
Christmas, however, was different. Very early there developed the practice of celebrating a Mass at midnight, based on the tradition that Christ was born at midnight.
No one really knows the time of Jesus’ birth, but the origins of this tradition may lie in a passage from the Book of Wisdom: ”For when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven…(18:14-15)