Feast of the Holy Innocents
December 28, 2021
Daily Reading from the USCCB: Psalm 124:2-3, 4-5, 7cd-8
On this Feast of the Holy Innocents we commemorate King Herod’s decision to kill the children of Bethlehem two years old and under.
But the Gospel reading and the Responsorial Psalm deal with the rescue of Jesus and his family. In the Gospel Joseph is directed to flee to Egypt for safety from Herod. The psalm says that without God’s help his loved ones would have been utterly destroyed.
What the psalm says about rescue applies to us, too. We are so vulnerable, so subject to attack from within and from without, that if God isn’t with us to defend us we simply cannot survive. But God rescues us as a hunter rescues a bird taken in a trap. We offer him our thanks.
