Christmas reveals both divine love and human evil. The Feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us that love’s arrival always provokes a moral reckoning.
Newsroom (30/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) Christmas presents us with an image that stretches our understanding to its limits: the Almighty made small, eternity contained in the infant named Jesus—Saviour. The sight of the baby in the manger is not a sentimental emblem but a reality before which thought falters. The Creator of all matter, time, and space enters the world not in splendour but in helplessness. It is this conjunction of omnipotence and vulnerability that forms the astonishment of Christmas, the moment when divine mind and human flesh meet.
This vision, for all its familiarity, invites reflection far beyond the nativity scene. The mind must stretch to conceive how the Intelligence that holds the universe in being can make himself subject to time and decay. Yet the impact of Christmas does not end with wonder; it begins there. For the coming of divine love into the world does not only evoke joy but summons a moral counterforce. Birth and death, nativity and massacre, are entangled. The Feast of the Holy Innocents reminds us that holiness, when it enters history, always provokes horror in return.
The story of Herod belongs not only to politics but to metaphysics. His paranoia and cruelty are not accidental but represent the first reaction of evil to the incursion of holiness. The moment perfect goodness takes on flesh, the world’s darkness convulses. Herod’s record of bloodshed—his murdered sons, his slain wife, his drowned brother-in-law—prepares the ground for Bethlehem’s slaughter. The massacre of the children is both political and spiritual: evil’s instinctive answer to the birth of unguarded love.
Here, moral equivalence takes on a terrible symmetry. The nearer sanctity draws, the more violently perversity responds. The greater the love, the deeper the hate it calls forth. In the infant Christ, divine compassion exposes the corrosion of pride. As light draws out infection, so the presence of Jesus exposes corruption in the world and within the Church itself. This should not surprise us. The Incarnation, by its very nature, is a confrontation: it unveils what lies hidden, forcing every soul to choose between repentance and rebellion.
The Feast of the Holy Innocents, set amid Christmas joy, becomes a lens through which we grasp the true cost of divine love. The Incarnation was never meant to charm; it was meant to redeem. God’s self-offering enters a universe bent by free will and moral conflict. Evil clings to its power; love enters only by consent. To welcome the Christ child is to accept the inevitable struggle that follows. The Cross, foreshadowed in Bethlehem, reveals what holiness costs in a fallen world.
And yet the story ends in hope. The Holy Innocents, as the first martyrs, bear witness to victory achieved not by domination but by love. The Incarnation guarantees that no suffering is wasted, no death final. The life of God, wherever it is welcomed, continues to draw the same violent opposition—and yet continues to renew. As we move into the new year, the Church remembers not a tragedy only, but a promise: that love’s triumph is certain, even when shadowed by loss.
Christmas, then, is the beginning of a cosmic struggle. It sets before us a choice between the God who enters history in humility and the powers that seek to destroy him. To receive the child in the manger is to accept that this life of faith will be one of conflict. But it is also to know that victory is already given. In the end, the innocent will have their consolation, and love—fragile, vulnerable, divine—will have the last word.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Catholic Herald
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