Instruction for the Sunday After the Nativity of Christ

A voice in Ramah was heard—weeping, and lamentation, and much wailing: Rachel weeping over her children, and did not want to be comforted, because they are no longer (Mt 2:18; Jer 31:15).

The holy Church today honors the memory of the fourteen thousand infants slain by King Herod in Bethlehem and its surrounding country. This bloody event was foretold five hundred years earlier by God’s prophet Jeremiah, in these words: a voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted, because they are no more. By Ramah, or Arimathea, is meant the whole region soaked with the blood of the infant martyrs, and by Rachel, who was the wife of the patriarch Jacob, grandson of Abraham, are meant all the mothers whose infants were torn from them by Herod’s executioners and put to the sword. A terrible, inhuman sight! To this a man’s unbridled passions lead him—his self-love, pride, ambition, lust for power, malice, envy! And, generally speaking, with what evil deeds is the earth not filled, this dwelling place of the human race, throughout nearly eight thousand years of its existence! History unfolds before us terrible pictures of dreadful evil deeds in ancient and modern times. In our own day the atrocities of the Turkish Muslims against Christian children, fathers, and mothers are still fresh in all our memories. O earth, earth, soaked with human blood, filled with indescribable evil deeds, how long will you refrain from crying out to God for vengeance against evildoers? How long will you still stand, and not be subjected to the cleansing fire? How long will the justice of God delay its final recompense against the evildoers who have stained their hands with the blood of so many, and such, victims of inhumanity? But the justice of God assures us that soon the blood of all the righteous will be required, beginning with the blood of Abel, and it entreats us, impatient as we are, to wait yet a little while (Apok 6:11). But when I speak of Herod’s murder, and of murders in general, which have filled the whole earth with horrors, I call to mind the spiritual murder in which all of us are more or less guilty—this is the murder, by each of us, of his own soul, and often of his own body too, through his own sins—or the murder of the souls of our neighbors through temptation, or by teaching others to sin. Who among us is not guilty of this spiritual murder? Who among us is free from passions, from sinful habits and inclinations? Who has not killed his own soul, or the soul of his neighbor, through self-love, or pride, or cunning, lying, or envy, or gluttony, overindulgence, drunkenness, or love of money and avarice, or hardness of heart, or fleshly impurity, or anger, or suspicion, or partiality, or laziness and carelessness about salvation, unbelief, and so on? Thus, my brothers, we kill, again and again, our own souls, or the souls of our neighbors, through countless sins and our carelessness about correcting our own hearts, our own life, our own manners. And this spiritual or soul-murder, by which we kill souls created in the image of God, is even more guilty than bodily murder, because here it is the soul that is killed, a soul destined to live for endless ages, while there it is only the body, which will rise again at the general resurrection. The souls of the infant martyrs slain by Herod all rest in the bosom of Abraham, are comforted in the Kingdom of Heaven, and in their own time their bodies too will rise; but the soul of Herod is in eternal torment, and Herod, in slaying the innocent infants, had already, before their slaughter, killed his own soul with his shameful passions, and soon after, his body too, which endured fearsome torments before his death. And so let us not be murderers of our own souls, these priceless souls, redeemed at the infinitely costly price of the blood of the Son of God—let us revive them and preserve them, let us adorn them with repentance and virtue. But what shall be said of the murderers and suicides of our own time? This is a fearsome sign of the age, a fearsome time of unbelief, depravity, and falling away from God. Murders and suicides are frequent everywhere, and human life is counted as nothing; so trivial, so empty, so worthless, so aimless has it become! But what shall be said of regicides, who in their madness make an attempt on the most precious lives of the very kings of the earth? If it is fearsome and inhuman to kill an ordinary man, how much more to kill a king, the head of a state, the father of millions of subjects, the protector of the Church of God, for whom she, with the greatest love and motherly solicitude, ever prays, day and night, that the Lord would prosper him in everything and subdue under his feet every enemy and adversary—to make an attempt on the life of a king is the most abominable of crimes, and whoever touches him touches the apple of God’s eye. Our Russian forefathers always revered their tsars as the anointed of God, and would rather have endured every calamity than raise a bold and sacrilegious hand against their own tsar. And rightly so. The king’s heart, according to Scripture, is in the hand of God, and He turns it wherever He will (Prov 21:1). Touch not My anointed ones (Ps 104:15), says God.

And so let us not kill our own souls by our own sins—let us revive them through fervent repentance, if we have killed them, while we still have time for repentance—and let us always hold in abhorrence the very thought of murder and suicide; let us hold in abhorrence those who make attempts at regicide. God alone is the Master of life and death; He alone has power both to slay and to give life. The Sovereign is our shield, the guardian of our safety, both of the whole Russian land, of the faith and the Orthodox Church, and, in particular, the guardian of the safety and peace of each one of us. Amen.