The Feast of the Holy Innocents | Saturday 28 December 2024

Welcome to the Saturday Examen.


This week we have celebrated feasts of birth and death: Christmas Day, the martyrdom of Stephen, the feast of the Beloved Disciple, and today the massacre of the Holy Innocents. Our readings have brought us face to face with the brightest light and the deepest darkness.

Elizabeth and Zechariah have aged beyond any hope of bearing a child – Mary and Joseph have their own challenges in that respect, yet God makes both couples fruitful.

When we ponder the words of Scripture with care, it is not we who interrogate Scripture, but Scripture which interrogates and challenges us. Have you had any sense during this week of the Christmas readings interrogating you?

St. Irenaeus wrote that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and human life consists in beholding God’. As the angels proclaim God’s glory to the world in God’s incarnate Son, what do you find the birth of Jesus meaning in your life and the life of the world?

This week has also given us feasts about death: we’ve heard about the death of Jesus himself, the death of Stephen, the first to die willingly for his faith in Jesus. Today we remember the story of the massacre of the Holy Innocents, babies and children who, like so many today, die as collateral damage in the murderous conflicts raging about them.

What needs to die in you or in the world for Christ’s reign to come to birth? What do you find yourself asking God to bring to life within you and the world?

Our week ends with the reading of the finding of young Jesus in the Temple. Losing a child is every parent’s dread. Do you have any sense of having ‘lost’ God, or lost your way in any sense? Or perhaps you have a sense of having been found? If you have any memory of having been lost or found, what do you want to say to God about that? Jesus tells his parents that he must be ‘in his Father’s house’. How at home do you feel with God? Is there any way that you would like to feel more at home? Now is the time to speak to God about that.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.