Feast of the Holy Innocents

As today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Fr Paul reads from the Gospel of Matthew (2: 13-18) about the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt after an angel tells Joseph in a dream to do so.

Fr Paul says this Feast remembers all the children who were slaughtered by Herod that we hear of in today’s Gospel.  Herod had all these children killed in the hope that if he killed all the newborn children in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth, he would also then have killed Jesus.

There was nothing about these children that deserved death. The Holy Innocents stand for the unimportant and unnecessary pawns, children and adults alike, who have been part of human history and who have been sacrificed for some greater cause.

This Feast reminds us that in God’s eyes no-one is unimportant or unnecessary, no matter how meaningless their lives may seem to others, they shine in heaven.  This is the thought on which we reflect today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.