DECEMBER 28 – THE HOLY INNOCENTS.

HEROD, who was reigning in Judea at the time of the birth of Our Saviour, having heard that the Wisemen had come from the East to Jerusalem in search of the king of the Jews, was troubled. He called together the chief priests, and learning that Christ was to be born in Bethlehem, he told the Wisemen: “When you have found him, bring me word again, that I also may come and adore him.” But God having warned them in a dream not to return, they went back to their homes another way. St. Joseph, too, was ordered in his sleep to “take the Child and His mother and fly into Egypt.” When Herod found that the Wisemen did not return, he was furious, and ordered that every male child in Bethlehem and its vicinity of the age of two and under should be slain. These innocent victims were the flowers and the first-fruits of His martyrs, and triumphed over the world, without having ever known it or experienced its dangers.

REFLECTION: How few perhaps of these children, if they had lived, would have escaped the dangers of the world! What snares, what sins, what miseries were they preserved from! So we often lament as misfortunes many accidents which in the designs of heaven are the greatest mercies.

WORD OF THE DAY

HYPOSTATIC UNION. The union of the human and divine natures in the one divine person of Christ. At the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) the Church declared that the two natures of Christ are joined “in one person and one hypostasis” (Denzinger 302), where hypostasis means one substance. It was used to answer the Nestorian error of a merely accidental union of the two natures in Christ. The phrase “hypostatic union” was adopted a century later, at the fifth general council at Constantinople (A.D. 533). It is an adequate expression of Catholic doctrine about Jesus Christ that in him are two perfect natures, divine and human; that the divine person takes to himself, includes in his person a human nature; that the incarnate Son of God is an individual, complete substance; and that the union of the two natures is real (against Arius), no mere indwelling of God in a man (against Nestorius), with a rational soul (against Apollinaris), and the divinity remains unchanged (against Eutyches).

Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. John Hardon SJ (Get the real one at Eternal Life — don’t accept an abridged or edited version of this masterpiece!)

DAILY CHRISTMAS MEDITATIONS

Deepen your appreciation of the Incarnation and our salvation with The Great Truths Series by Fr. Richard Clarke S.J. Read today’s “The Foster-father & The Music of Heaven” but consider this:

The voice of Jesus Christ will be heaven’s sweetest melody; if on earth men hung on His lips, if never man spake like that Man, what will be the divine attraction of every word, every sound that will proceed from his lips in heaven! 

This article, DECEMBER 28 – THE HOLY INNOCENTS. is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/december-28-the-holy-innocents/
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