"THOU LITTLE TINY CHILD" ^_[1]

BRILLIANT MADNESS

1.   King Herod ruled greater Palestine at the time of Jesus' birth. He was a brilliant man who eventually descended into madness, a final decay not uncommon to old and desperate rulers. Weary from a lifetime of battling to stay on top, in power, and alive, the aging king's reign was marked by concurrent phenomena associated with stagnancy. 

2.  The signs were obvious: the slowing of important decisions, the stoppage of great engineering projects, and ratcheting-up of general discontent among his subjects. In this twilight of sterile equilibrium, the impact of Herod's angst (Ger. dread, anguish) made itself felt among his ministers and family members.

3.  Plots and counterplots, perceived and real, weaved themselves like smoke about his head. Executions and exiles, palace intrigues and poisonings became common. Violence, a chronic lesion disfiguring humanity's face, had been the norm in Palestine throughout Herod's regime. The old king was called the great because he had been an accomplished and ruthless soldier whose daring victories impressed even imperial Rome: appointed as governor over Judea by Julius Caesar and king by Marc Anthony. The Idumean cum Israelite was the devoted friend of the Roman general Marc Anthony and his Egyptian lover Cleopatra.

HEAT OF HIS RAGING

4.  Nevertheless the shrewd Herod admired Octavian, the brilliant young general who would defeat Marc Anthony politically and militarily. By a fortuitous turn of events--political and social unrest in Judea--Herod was freed from having to fight with Anthony against Octavian at Actium in 41 BC. Simultaneously negotiating with Octavian, as well as clandestinely supporting him, Herod positioned himself to remain as a client king in Octavian's unified empire. The new emperor took the name Caesar Augustus and would, near the end of his reign, issue the census decree that compelled Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, the land of their ancestral tribe in the kingdom of his old friend.

5.  Herod possessed a keen appreciation of imperial architecture and directed the building of a great harbor, gymnasia, public buildings, palaces and fortifications. As a concession to religious leaders, he lavishly embellished the Jerusalem temple for the sake of his national prestige. Herod's fear and paranoia of being deposed or murdered while king overshadowed his great accomplishments. Spying, gossip and intrigue weighed heavily on his mind. Believing himself betrayed and encircled, he struck back at his immediate family and  palace courtiers--but at the cost of his cherished dream. In the closing years of his reign, all hope of building a family dynasty dissolved in the heat of his raging. The fire of the old king's paranoia was not confined to palaces; periodically it leaped through the parched populace consuming the lives of both innocent and guilty alike.

AUSPICIOUS AND OMINOUS

6.  Fueled by the fever of absolute power, Herod vents his fury on Bethlehem's infants--all male children two years old and younger. The fate of these children is sealed by the arrival in Jerusalem of three royal gentiles from Persia who publicly announce their intention of visiting a child, a newborn boy destined to become King of the Jews. Jerusalem's inhabitants, weak and powerful alike, consider the arrival of the eastern magi as auspicious and ominous.

7.  Situated in Persia is the infamous Babylon, symbolizing Judah's ancient nemesis which destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple and drove its people into exile. Apart from the golden age of the Davidic kingdom, Israel was a doormat for the armies of its powerful regional neighbors; entanglement with foreign nations consistently worked against the nation's vital interests. Hence, the Roman Empire is merely another manifestation of Babylon whose historic mission is to sever Israel from its nationalist destiny.  

8.  The Persian princes support their quest by significant astronomical and textual evidence: a star pointing to Bethlehem and the  prophecy of Micah taken from the sacred Jewish texts:  "But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days."  [Mic 5:2]  They intend to worship the child and give him gifts. Matthew's gospel would later report that the news ignited a firestorm of controversy: Herod and all Jerusalem were troubled.  [cf. Mt 2:3] 

EPICENTER OF DISINTEGRATION

9.  Markedly impressed by auguries and portents like everyone else, the king called a plenary gathering of chief priests and scribes to debate whether the royal visitors were credible interpreters of signs. A number of factors pressed upon the debate: the people's growing expectation of a messiah (Heb. anointed, deliverer), the religious leaders' refusal to consider Herod as such, the king's declining health, and the apprehensive yet spirited reaction of Jerusalem's residents. Unacknowledged at the conference, of course, was the recent surge in royalty-watching and the informal market gossip which weighted and sifted the future impact of other variables--ruthless oppression, violent factions, grinding poverty, heavy taxation, and the people's burning hatred of Roman imperialism.

10.  Both Jerusalem and Rome viewed Herod's increasing instability as a credible indicator of approaching tumult. The Judean throne had become a reliquary and Herod its relic. The throne which once symbolized the kingdom's vitality and outward expansion would become the epicenter of its disintegration, a gravitational hole into which its constituent parts would be dragged and extinguished. The modern Herodian is an ordinary person tantalized by the prospect of his own autonomy and suspicious of the autonomy of others. I do it my way is the pervasive theme of his life and its pursuit is his religion. He is concerned about issues insofar as they affect his personal autonomy but abhors being drawn into a principled discussion of their own merits.

CONTENTIOUS VASSEL

11.  Truth, for the Herodian, perches on a wire strung between what is and what I want. To break from reality, in his view, would be to impose moral and ethical truth over what is or what one wants. The contemporary Herodian sees himself as a contentious vassal in relation to the foreign power of the larger community. Though benefiting from its protection, he only reluctantly offers allegiance and service to his community. Eyeing the community and its officials as a suzerain, he shuns the good of the many as a euphemism for the sell-out of his personal interests. Yet he praises as a model public servant the moral sloven who fuses cold, emotionless mediocrity with personal influence. To hold other vassals at bay, he has trained in the art of war on the judicial battlefield. If forced to admit defeat, he will recruit sympathizers from the ancient order of victimhood. The moment he can betray his community, he will. Notwithstanding his formidable appearance, however, the Herodian of this generation is like the king of old. He is fearful and apprehensive. He cannot comprehend the violence encircling him and knows he is powerless to stop it. 

12.  Thinking himself to be clever, the contemporary Herodian fails to grasp that human violence and slaughter begins with the death of truth: the society that refuses to make moral judgments is unable to conserve its cherished values and entrust them to succeeding generations. Moreover, the culture that does not confront the horror of death will die by glorifying it. That violence is pervasive and entrenched in this stiff-necked generation comes as no surprise. What should seize the Herodian's attention, however, is this: the United States has earned the sobriquet culture of death but not because the tragic coefficients of randomized violence--saturation and savagery--are elevated and their shock effect inversely lessened.

SEMANTIC SLEIGHT-OF-HAND

13.  The U.S. has been cited a culture of death because for decades, sanctimonious politicians and judges have piously enacted and sustained human kill programs to serve the imperial self.^[2]  Capital punishment, abortion, birth control and euthanasia are being applied on an ever-widening scale with devastating consequences. Legalized abortion is the premier killing program. Consider that tens of millions of unborn infants have been aborted over the past thirty years; the semantic legerdemain befogging the moral issues paralyzes this nation's will to act for the sake of its long-term interests. Abortionist partisans argue that, in all cases, a mother's right to choose abortion surpasses in value the life of her unborn.

14.  To counteract the obvious syllogistic ectopia--that is, ideas and power are more important than human life--abortionists aver that the subject aborted is not a human person; rather, it is fetal tissue subjected to therapeutic extraction. The moral issues multiply with every semantic sleight-of-hand. Consider that mothers traditionally name their children following successful birth. Abortionists claim that pregnant women have the right and power to name their unborn as a person or as tissue. If the unborn is a person, it is a baby to be born; if tissue, then a growth to be extracted. Does naming actually determine whether a fetus is a person or tissue any more than naming decides the child's gender? Only a fool would argue that it does.

PATHOLOGY OF DEATH 

15.  The tissue theory--a fetus is always tissue if it can be extracted from conception to induced birth--produces monstrous corollaries: Pregnancy poses a health risk to the mother's lifestyle. A mother who attacks her unborn is acting in self-defense. Over fifty million aborted unborn children were enemies of their mothers. If tissue successfully defends itself against its mother, it can attain the holy grail--called a human being, named a person and possess humanity--as long as it is stronger than its enemies. If fifty million unborn children did not pose a medical threat to their mothers' lives, they were aborted for lifestyle reasons. These children were aborted because they were perceived as a threat to their parents' existing state of personal affairs or as a hindrance to their future plans. Incredibly, abortion is perceived as beneficial by grown men and women who survived their own parents' arbitrary abortion practices. Not infrequently claims are made to the effect that the unborn imperil a nation's future use of limited resources. This argument becomes horrifyingly monstrous when one considers the preponderance of abortuaries located in the impoverished barrios, ghettos and wards of our nation's largest cities.

16.  Without question, abortion is used as a weapon against the unborn to preserve the autonomy of their mothers and fathers. The link between self-agrandizing vanity and abortion is therefore incontestable. Put another way, the inhuman human is intimately associated with death by his very denial of death. It can be strongly argued that the persistent and inescapable preoccupation with self-esteem is a pathology of death, the compulsive pursuit of trivial things at the expense of what truly matters. That a child must die for the sake of its parents' autonomy and convenience is abhorrent. A mother who kills her unborn will not escape unscathed. Before the decision to abort can occur, she will have despoiled love and trust and mortally wounded her own humanity. It is to say that she aborts at the price of her womanhood. No appeal to autonomy can reverse this breakdown of the self. Moreover, the light-minded view that chastity and motherhood are passé cannot wave away the consequences of resorting to death as a solution for one's personal concerns.

IN DEFENSE OF TRUTH

17.  It is axiomatic that, without the vital application of morality and ethics, people presume that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and attempt to live as though morality is senseless and useless. In the society which has severed itself from the moral law, proselytizers of death flourish. To countenance a national policy of abortion is to pay fealty and homage to death. It is to argue that the pursuit of comfort justifies aggression--the strong may undertake predatory raids against the weak, even the most innocent and helpless of human beings: the unborn. Hence, the autonomous self is a vassal to the power of disorder and death. In defense of Gospel truth and the values that represent it, the Catholic Church absolutely opposes attacks against human life. She opposes any notion that the common good is served by sanctioning predatory raids against human beings for the sake of maintaining social stasis and the interests of the powerful. Nor can she consent to any definition proposing the common good as merely an aggregate of persons whose self-centered values coincide.

18.  The Church offers reconciliation with Christ as the only remedy for sins against life. Over and against this, a society in which offenses against life are pandemic cannot defend its continuance morally or philosophically apart from reconciliation with God. Unless a nation is able and willing to argue coherently for the cause of human life, the fact of its existence carries little or no weight as a claim against the future. Absent comprehensive repentance for sins against life and dramatic conversion by the institutions which proselytize death, a society cannot rebut the charge that it has become so degraded as to render its existence impossible to justify for its own sake.

ARTIFICIAL SOCIOSPHERE

19.  No constructive program or secure future exists for the society that excludes the defense of its weak and innocent members. To counter that positive values are not inherent to the larger society--they are mere odd and whimsical markers of local entities and individuals--sounds plausible but it argues to deception. A society cannot afford to divest itself of its comprehensive values, that is to say, the rejection of commonly held principles substantiated in the natural law and divine revelation by which it is united to all other nations and men and women of good will. To assert otherwise would be to emasculate the meaning of family, society, nation and mankind, rendering them fugitive and delusory.

20.  The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ witnesses that divine and natural law are revealed to mankind as the universal truth by which all societies may order themselves to the good, specifically the respect of all human life and meaningful opportunities for every person to pursue the fulfillment of his or her humanity, a universal body of truth and values that cannot be ignored or voted away at the risk of self-extinction. From all that has been said, the contemporary Herodian is impotent and double-dealing. He cannot distinguish between the trappings of his autonomy and the reality of his being steeped in an artificially maintained sociosphere:  "Lully, lulla/ thou little tiny child/ By by, lully lullay/ Herod the king/ In his raging/ Charged he hath this day/ His men of might/ In his own sight/ All young children to slay."^[3] 

MESSIAH OF ETERNITY

21.  Let us turn now to the little tiny child and to his magnificent and incomparable Kingdom. Jesus Christ gives life and wills liberty for everyone. He is the eternal Word through whom the Father "formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being".  [Gen 2:7]  Because he is the just judge of every man, Christ is the messiah of the world, messiah of all its nations and messiah for all its people. He is not anointed by attrition, that is to say, he is not merely the saviour of those who seek and find him after escaping into adulthood with scarcely their lives. He is the messiah of eternity, the chosen one "ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead".  [Acts 10:41] 

22.  He  entrusts his sovereignty over life to no one.  [cf. Jn 2:24-25]  The new covenant offers life unto eternity and the perfection to the human person. Reason augmented by a modicum of wisdom teaches man that greater opportunities are afforded to one who proves his diligence. A person acts in his best interest when he cares for what he earns. He proves his maturity by caring for that which he is given. Hence, Christ's rhetorical question concerning the gift of light: "Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand?"  [Mk 4:21]  To shutter a burning lamp is to lose all opportunities afforded by its light; more glaring is the foolish waste of the gift of human faith and reason. 

SHOCKINGLY SIGNIFICANT

23.  The act of extinguishing a lamp is comparatively unimportant by anyone's reckoning. The waste of human sight, however, is devastating to any human being. Thus what is perceived or assumed to be trivial is often discovered to be shockingly significant. Whether accidents are minor or major, their consequences tend to expand in all directions. Only a moment is needed to drop a drinking glass; recovering the pieces of shattered glass from the floor, however, takes considerably longer. And if the pieces are not retrieved, the simple act of dropping a glass may cause the fearful consequence of permanently injuring an innocent person. Actions and consequences are ordered to one another by kind and degree, tending from the lesser to the greater--ask a recovering alcoholic how he compares opening a bottle, pouring a glass and drinking a shot of liquor to the rigors of regaining his health and the lifelong commitment required to maintain sobriety. Try to repair the shattered drinking glass.  

24.  In speaking about a lamp, to be sure, Christ was not impelled by ecological issues or the prudent use of limited resources. The reference to light is a reference to the divinely revealed Truth by which all man's actions are to be judged: "For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light."  [Mk 4:22]  The light of God's truth reveals that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God".  [Rom 3:23]  Rarely are human astonishment and grief more overwhelming than when a person confronts sin and its murderous effects. And never is human desolation greater than for men and women who confront the shattering consequences of their offenses against human life and the inescapable reality of their own condemnation before God: 

FOR YOUR lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man's brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.  [Gen 9:5-6] 

Who, with a modicum of wisdom, can believe that by attacking human life, he is not making war on God?  Who, with a shred of right reason, can believe that by destroying another human being, he himself can escape the second death?:  "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death."  [Rev 21:8] 

WHAT MORE IS NEEDED?

25.  The person who seeks and causes the destruction of a human life in the temporal order has forfeited the opportunity of eternal life in the spiritual order. He is spiritually blind as surely as if he had stared long and hard into the sun with unprotected eyes. Never is the death of a human being in the best interest of any individual or society. A society does not prove its maturity by  fine-tuning human kill programs or inventing more sophisticated methods to accomplish the unchangeable brutal fact of human killing. "You shall not kill", commands the Lord your God.  [Exo 20:13]  The sum of abortions in the Western world comprises an anthropological disaster of inconceivable magnitude; if not the merest modicum of wisdom, what more is needed for man to grasp that the human havoc of wars, genocide, famine, executions, and the murder of his most weak and innocent brothers and sisters is indissolubly linked to his ruinous stewardship of the earth's ecologies?

AND (JESUS) said to them, "Take heed what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."  [Mk 4:23-25] 

26.  Deliberate systematic measures in pursuit of the former make reconciliation with the latter impossible. As the Jerusalem conference ground on, Herod drew his own conclusions. The peasant child in Bethlehem was a provocation. As to whether the little varlet would or would not become king one day was less than laughable. Not humorous was the fact that the child was an unwitting catalyst today, a flash point for organized political opposition, even revolution. Everyone would want to wash their filthy hands in his innocence. No, the child would die because the crafty Herod had no desire to confront the rise of a new faction--one with international appeal--whose engine was ethics.

GAMBLING ON GULLIBILITY

27.  Regulating religion issues animated Herod, not spiritual truth. A confirmed secularist, Herod understood the practice of religion as merely one of many expedient political utilities. Having gathered the needed intelligence, the king dismissed the plenary council and set out to intercept the menace before it coalesced. Gambling that the Persians were as gullible in politics as they were proficient in the sciences, "Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared; and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, 'Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.'"  [Mt. 2:7-8] 

28.  But the magi were not to be deceived. When they failed to return--having been warned in a dream to bypass Jerusalem  [cf. Mt 2:12]--the sullen ruler resorted to an approximate rather than strictly accurate method of eliminating the newborn Bethlehemite: he ordered a pogrom  (Yidd. massacre sponsored by officials), the mass murder of all the infant boys two years and younger in Bethlehem and vicinity. Herod was afraid, perhaps, that one day his own subjects would taunt him with a variation of the song that haunted his tormented predecessor Saul: Herod has killed his thousands, but this Jesus has saved his tens of thousands.  [cf. 1Sam 29:5] 

COMMON APPOINTMENT

29.  Herein is the point. Tyranny is not defined as the power to heal what ills, nor can its power protect any human being from the inevitability and finality of death. Still less is a tyrant capable of leading any mortal from the temporal domain into the peace of eternity. Not any of these, tyranny is the usurpation of God's sovereignty authority. To perpetuate its illegitimate existence, it assumes to itself the power to exploit human life. There is no greater breach among men than that which separates the Christian who reverences human life from the tyrant who destroys it. Both must keep a common appointment--personal judgment before God at the moment of death--but, absent a genuine conversion, the tyrant has condemned himself to everlasting punishment.

30.  To the disciples who persevere in his Gospel, the Son of God promises this:  "I am coming soon; hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. He who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God; never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name."  [Rev 3:11-12]  Jesus is coming soon because he is the messiah. Although a Hebrew word, its meaning is clear: Jesus is the Son of God, the anointed one, the Christ. He is the Alpha and Omega, the one "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty".  [Rev 1:8] 

HEART OF STONE OR FLESH?

31.  Jesus Christ the Omega is coming soon to set things right in the world as only the messiah can do. He will appear in his glory, joined by the whole company of angels. Seated on his glorious throne  [cf. Mt 19:28], he will scythe the harvest and judge the yield of the nations. The nations which loathed him as the enemy and whose deeds are the works of death, he will pluck as one would gather weeds or withered branches for the fire.  [cf. Mt 13:30; Jn 15:6]  For the nations which have abided in Christ and his Gospel and produced a great yield, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords reserves a great inheritance:  a kingdom made ready for them from the foundation of the world.  [cf. Mt 25:34] 

32.  Without exception, each and every human soul will appear before the Lord that his heart and his works may be judged. Christ will judge the hearts of all souls, that is to say, the goodness of the human person's immortal intellect and will. To discern the truth of one's innermost heart, the Lord will judge the works for which that soul is responsible. If the soul in judgment  possesses a heart of flesh and is a new spirit in Christ, he will offer as proof his obedience to the new covenant in Christ's name. If, however, the soul stands before God with a heart of stone, his life's pursuit of detestable things and their abominations will condemn him.

FAITH PROVEN BY OBEDIENCE

33.  For the Church received these words as if Christ Jesus had spoken:  "You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone"  [Jas 2:24]  and again, "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead."  [Jas 2:26]  Therefore, the soul which appears before God, appealing to faith apart from the good works which God himself has willed, invokes a dead witness. His empty hands condemn his empty heart. For faith is proven by obedience to the divine revelation of the Father--the absolute, eternal and unchanging truth entrusted to the prophets and made known by the Son who established the new covenant of grace in his blood. 

34.  The  death of any human being is a grief to God, for the Lord saw Adam and Eve subject themselves to death, and he witnessed Cain's murder of his brother Abel.  [cf. Gen 4:1-16]  The  killing of a human being is an  anguish to the Father, for he stayed the hand of his servant Abraham and spared the life of Isaac, the child of promise.  [cf. Heb 11:9,17]  The murder of any human being is an  abomination in the sight of the Father, who suffered the passion and death of his only begotten son, our Lord Jesus Christ, so that the  power of death would be destroyed forever. Have you sinned against life? Have you loved yourself and despised the innocent? Has your heart condemned you? 

BECOME WHO YOU SERVE

35.  If you closed your eyes to the suffering of the helpless, if you profaned the Lord's prayer by revenge, if you were the aggressor at his table, you need not surrender to hopelessness or despair. Your anguish proves that your eyes of faith are not yet blind. Your life depends on hope, and you must believe that God is love. Be grateful for the grief that overwhelms you. Though your sorrow cannot restore your victim to life, it can help save your life. God gives you suffering to heal your spiritual sight. Lift up your eyes to Christ on the cross. See how he safely shelters the innocent souls in his Sacred Heart! Prostrate yourself before the King of Kings in remorse. Confess God's sovereign authority over all human life.

36.  Love Christ, and believe that he will care for you in this difficult time. Let Christ use your suffering in his own way. Entrust your wounded heart entirely to him. A vessel takes time to mend; take care to protect your heart from further harm. Seek help from strong persons of faith who will pray with you. In the meantime, God will offer grace sufficient to your strength. Your conscience, under the sentence of death, longs to be freed. Examine it thoroughly before the Spirit of Truth. Humble it in the light of right reason. If you sincerely repent, if you yearn to be absolved, if you resolve to champion the weak and helpless, the Lord Jesus will honor you at his banquet table. Your eyes of faith will behold the splendor of eternal life and love, and you will stand confident before the throne of heaven. God's love fills the hearts of his servants. Offer the love of your heart as a ransom for the innocent. Become who you serve.