Witnesses to Christ

Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 28)

Lest we get to watery-eyed about the meaning of Christmas, we should recall the words of the Prince of Peace Himself, "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism that I am to be baptized with, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished! Do you think I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division," (Lk 12:49-51). The message of Christmas is not peace on earth, not primarily at least; rather Jesus Christ himself is the message. Try telling people that in whatever words, and you will quickly learn what He meant speaking about causing division.

Two thousand years ago a cynical, petty tyrant named Herod ordered the slaughter of dozens, scores of innocent babes in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. He did so in the vain hope of stopping God's will, in hope of stopping the advent of the Messiah-king. To this date, including now as we sit here at our computers, hundreds and thousands of Christians are murdered each year in the vain hope of stopping the spread of the gospel, of stopping the spread of the Messiah's Kingdom. National governments collaborate to reduce the population of the developing world to "sustainable" levels. One feels that this language is a cover for a lie. Who ro what is being "sustained" by the programs of birth control, sterilization, and abortion in the developing world? Are they being built up? Or are we in the West being permitted to continue our lavish lifestyle by keeping them in firmly controllable numbers?

We in the formerly Christian West now indulge every appetite and repudiate whatever doctrines interfere with our desires. A gospel of wealth and prosperity, or a gospel of environmental stewarship, or a gospel of multiculturalism, or a gospel of nice all wrestle against and threaten now more than ever to subdue the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ. Moreover, we exploit and slaughter our own children in a horrifying orgy of debauchery and bloodletting, subjecting them to pornography, sexual abuse, neglect, and even outright death.

We must wonder in all the warring against children that the ages have seen, who is Satan attempting to strike? Perhaps he fears the second advent of the Messiah, and so is doing everything in his power to frustrate it.

If we reduce the meaning of Christmas to being kind, being calm, not worrying about what goes on around us, far from living in Faith, we will have abandoned it. The blood of the Darfur Christians, the blood of the Indian and Pakistani martyrs, the blood of Chinese Catholics, all these call out to us that the meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to stand for Christ necessarily entails receiving resistance. If nobody is concerned about what we are saying as a Church, we must not be saying anything very Christian, or even very interesting. Happily, this increasingly is not the case.