Better to speak of the Massacre of the Innocents. For that, all the evidence suggests, is what it was. A powerful man ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent people to further his own ends, just as King Herod did after the Christ child was born.
The Catholic faith is oriented around the notion that death ultimately makes sense. Death is not the end of life. Death is the way each of us shares the experience of God, the way God shared our experience in dying for us. Death for the sake of another is the most complete self-sacrifice this life has to offer.
That seems to me to be a reason why the deaths of several hundred firefighters and police officers brought such an outpouring of emotion in the days after the catastrophe. Those deaths conformed to the Christian pattern of supreme self-sacrifice. The firefighters, as they hastened toward the flames, were ready to give their lives for others.
But what of the thousands of ordinary people who died in the explosions, the flames, the abrupt collapsing of the towers? No religious person, it seems to me, would presume to say that those deaths made sense or served any higher purpose.
Better to speak of the massacre of the innocents. The Gospels, biblical scholars say, communicate through the arrangement and juxtaposition of texts as much as through the texts themselves. So it is in this episode. On page two of the New Testament we encounter swift and pointless mass death. No sooner is a child born than a thousand others are murdered. One has only to imagine the pain of those first-born male children as they were killed or the anguish their families felt to know that there is no way to say such deaths make sense.
Matthew’s Gospel, thankfully, does not ascribe the massacre to any divine plan. Rather, it places those deaths in a kind of counterpoint with Christ’s death. The implication, theologically, is that only through a death like Christ’s can such deaths be avenged, such wrongs set right. But the implication for our lives, it seems to me, is that only through a life like Christ’s can such wrongs be righted, such senseless deaths set in counterpoint.
The biblical massacre of the innocents now has a new set of references. Last month, the innocents were office workers in Manhattan; this month, they are people ruled by despots in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The character of the “war on terrorism” will likely depend on how far our president is allowed to stretch the notions of “combatants” and “intention” and “collateral damage,” indeed of “innocent” and “guilty,” so as to avoid having to bear responsibility for the taking of innocent lives. Will he, will we, be more like Christ, or more like Herod? He, and we, will have to decide. The fate of the innocents, those still alive and those already dead, depends on it.