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Good morning. Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents – when we recollect that Herod, ‘in his fury’ as the carol has it, did away with the children in and around Bethlehem in a bid to do away with Jesus. The scene has been depicted by many great painters, but I think the most striking version is one in the possession of the Queen, Breughel’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’. It doesn’t show an imagined Bethlehem, but an ordinary Netherlandish village of Brueghel’s own time on an ordinary bright, crisp, snowy, northern winter’s day, with everyone dressed in regular sixteenth century clothes. The soldiers, some on horseback and some on foot, are busy accomplishing their cruel mission. But the picture is not quite as Breughel intended it to be. Before it came to the Royal Collection someone must have thought that the Massacre of the Innocents was just not the sort of thing you’d want hanging in the dining room or wherever, and that it needed toning down. So in a rather inept fashion, the doomed, dying or dead children have been painted over, concealed by a variety of other objects. The result is rather curious to say the least. In the foreground, a father is on his knees pleading for what looks like a goat. Slightly to the left, a woman weeps bitterly over her baking. In the middle ground, another woman is sitting on the snow, blankly distraught with a parcel on her lap. I could go on, but you see the point. When Breughel depicted the Massacre of the Innocents as a contemporary scene in an everyday town in Flanders – and the town even has a church in the background - he was making a rather pointed moral. Not just in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, but perhaps in a town not so very far from you or me, the massacre recurs, as untimely deaths are visited on the innocent as a result of violence, poverty, war, and disease, themselves caused or exacerbated by greed, selfishness or simple indifference. And Brueghel obviously made the point all too well – which is why someone had the picture toned down from an unpalatable massacre, to the somewhat more bearable plundering of a village. The one time owner of this picture had the unpleasantness of the death of the innocent overpainted; most of us would certainly like to overlook it. We are always in danger of making the Christmas story into a lovely snowy fairy tale; but the massacre of the innocents is, in fact, where the story was leading. For Christ was himself born not to overlook the world’s suffering, but to address it and to challenge those who are its perpetrators. His birth disturbs and threatens our everyday world. So, Holy Innocents naturally follows hot on the heals of Christmas. It is not a mere interruption in the celebration of the Christmas story, but a sign of its deepest implications and meaning.