December 28 – The Holy Innocents, Martyrs (Feastday)

Antiphons at Lauds - Sunday of 1st Week

1. The Lord says: They shall walk with me clothed in white, since they merit it.

2. These little ones have given praise to God: they have announced with their death that for which they were too little to announce with their mouths.

3. From the mouths of children and weaning babes you have prepared your own praise through your enemies.

Thus says the Lord: "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping! Rachel weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, for they had ceased to live."

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people: "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."

Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah: "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live."

Then Pharaoh commanded all his people: "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

The Feast of the Holy Innocents dates back to about the 5^th century. The massacre of these infants manifests the royal character because Herod believed the words of the Magi and those priests whom he consulted, that he sees a rival in the Infant of Bethlehem and jealously pursues Him that is born King of the Jews. But as the Church sings "Oh cruel Herod, why do you so fear, your King and God who comes below?. No earthly crown comes He to take; him whom heavenly kingdoms he came to bestow."

It is this regal God that, by dying, the Innocents confess.Their passion is the exaltatiom of Christ and the praise that they render to God is a subject of confusion in the enemies of Jesus for, far from attaining their object, they only served to fulfil the saying of the Prophet: "Out of Egypt have I called My Son", and that at Bethlehem would be heard the lamentations of the mothers mourning for their children. To picture their desolation in more vivid colours, Jeremiah recalls Rachel whose lamentations are heard in Rama, bewailing her children because they are not.

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