By Fr. George Dorbarakis
The principal problem posed by the present day — the commemoration of the infants slaughtered by Herod — is the blatant injustice that was committed then, a fact that leads to the ever-relevant and never fully acceptable to human reason problem of theodicy: why did infants and young children, before they even began their lives, lose them — and in such a tragic manner? And where is the justice of God? How did the just God tolerate such an injustice? Does it not then appear that God is absent, or at least hidden, while the devil, with his instruments such as Herod, appears to be sovereign? And on the basis of reflection on the injustice that occurred then, human thought extends across the entire course of human history, recording similar — and perhaps even harsher — events: the enslavement of entire peoples, famines, wars, the degradation of human beings, destitution, unemployment, poverty. In all these cases, the dominant question is: why? And how does God tolerate such conditions?
These are not easy questions. One cannot, using human reasoning, provide a convincing answer. This is a permanent thorn in human thought. That is why this question — the problem of theodicy, of God’s justice in a world of inhumanity and absurdity — has preoccupied humanity from ancient times and certainly will always do so. The first theological approach to the problem already appears in the Old Testament, in the Book of Job. Job suffers — the most righteous man of his time — and in a way so severe that it is not easy even to hear of his sufferings without one’s mental balance being shaken: all his children die tragically, he loses all his possessions, he himself is afflicted with every kind of infectious disease and therefore cannot remain in inhabited areas, his wife reproaches him, his friends treat him harshly. The question “Why are all these things happening to me, when I am a righteous man?” even comes to the lips of Job himself, who nevertheless said of all that happened to him: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The answer ultimately comes from God Himself, who tells Job not to scrutinize the “why” excessively, but only to trust in His love, and He rewards him by restoring him to a condition better than before. In other words, the answer to the problem of theodicy is not found in human reasoning or logic. The answer is given on the level of faith in God: trust in My love, even if you do not understand it. If one does not rise to this level, one will always collide with a dead end and with the recognition of life’s absurdity. And if in the Old Testament the answer was given to Job in this manner, the fullness of the answer is found in the New Testament with the coming of Christ. In the person of Christ, the incarnate God, we see that whatever trials of life there may be, whatever afflictions, whatever tragedies, they constitute a path of life which — if one faces them with faith and obedience to God — leads to the Kingdom of God. The incarnate God Himself is the answer: His life, from beginning to end, is a Passion. The Passion of Christ is not related only to the Cross, but to His entire life. Proof of this is the present day: no sooner is He born than He confronts the murderous rage of the deranged Herod. The same is true in the later years of His life. His Cross is the culmination of His Passion. And what does this show us? That there is no other path leading to the Kingdom of God, to the Resurrection, except through the suffering of this life.
And why is this so? Because, unfortunately, this world has fallen, due to human sin. While in the beginning things were different — since God created the world and man in order for man to partake of His joy — man, by the rebellion he declared against his Creator and by his persistence in disobedience toward Him, brought all evils into the world. And the coming of Christ was precisely for this reason: to take away the sin of the world and the consequences of that sin, in order to restore humanity. Yet this world will always be and will remain the arena in which faith is measured against unbelief, with the given fact that the afflictions and trials of this present life will always have their recompense in what follows, in the life to come. “For the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us,” as the Apostle Paul notes. What we endure in this life — the afflictions, the trials, the pains — do not equal the glory that will be revealed to us in the future.
Within the logic of this faith, grounded in the very life of the Lord, belongs also the hymnography of today’s feast. The infants who were slaughtered — fourteen thousand, or simply fourteen; the number does not matter, whether literal or symbolic — indeed lost their lives before they had even begun them, yet they found them fulfilled by the grace of God in the bosom of Abraham. God willed, by judgments known only to Him, that these little children should be His first martyrs in the world, the first offering to Him; for this reason they are regarded as saints with great boldness of intercession before Him. They are, in the strict sense, the first newly planted shoots of the Church, who nourished the tree of the Church with their virginal and pure blood (“From newly planted shoots the Church of Christ today, like flourishing flowers, joyfully gathers the blood and is gladdened and beautified by it”); they are, as we said, the first mystical sacrifice to the incarnate God (“A divinely inspired choir of infants was offered to the Creator born in the flesh as a mystical sacrifice”); they are the true new martyrs of the Lord (“As clusters of grapes they were offered to Christ, the new martyrs, though torn from their mothers’ breasts, striking Herod”); they are those infants who, through their slaughter, now reign together with Christ (“For having been slain for Him, they reign with Him”).
The overturning of human expectations and conventional logic does not come only with the incarnation of God, but also with everything that surrounds it — then, in the very years of His earthly presence, and afterward throughout all the ages. The Church and her saints, through all that they endure in the world, will always proclaim the other logic: through the sufferings of this world, the path that leads to the fullness of the Kingdom of God is revealed. “Through many tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.