The celebration of the Sto. Niño is a needful event in that it acknowledges one of the most painful events in the life of Jesus. I refer to the massacre of the niños inocentes. I say this not in a spirit of recrimination or blaming. I say it rather in a spirit of obituary. In this connection, or better yet in this context, the first few paragraphs of Fr. Rolando De La Rosa’s
9 December 2018 article in the Phil. Daily Bulletin, are patently unsubstantiable: How can Jesus possibly indulge in what can only be called extravagant laughter when the memory of Herod’s monstrous directive in attempting to search and destroy the Infant Jesus must still rankle in our fond’s memory? For it was on His account that the massacre was under taken. Think of the mass wailing of those children’s mothers and you’ll see how silly and heartless is our ever-thinking of a laughing Jesus.
But the Sto. Niño Feast puts on a brave face on that barbarity of Herod’s and as good as the faithful’s locking a snook at him. Those children’s martyrdom he’s not gone unacknowledge and least of all by our fond’s mournful aspect throughout his adult life. I may have gone a little too far here in ascribing his changelessly unhumorous countenance, but it would be a turning blind eye on the historicity, the actual happening of Herod’s hitherto unexampled monstrous vanity in trying to pre-empt the ford’s assumption of the title King Of Kings if me should insist on the thusness of a “laughing Jesus.” But what a price to pay, you say? Yes, it surely looks super-exorbitant and yet God’s ways are not our ways. So what do we do to turn Herod’s barbarity on it’s head? We celebrate the Holy Innocents martyrdom by instituting the Sto. Niño Feast as a regular in our liturgical calendar: as much as to say, whatever the cost, His will be done.
By the way of postcript, I append this afterthought: the concept of Original Sin somewhate insinuates itself into the discourse in as much as it ”legitimates“ the awful massacre, in obedience to God’s will, to counteract the disobedience of our First Parents, Adam and Eve.
I hope i’ve not gone very far off the mark if you look at it from my viewpoint.
