As the song says, there isn’t only one day of Christmas. There are 12. Christmastide lasts from December 25 through January 5, from the day we mark Christ’s birth until the eve of Epiphany, when we remember the visit of the Magi. These bookends are familiar, but in between, lesser-known events and people are celebrated in the liturgical calendar observed by many Christian traditions.
Some are obviously fitting, like the Feast of the Holy Family. Some are feast days like any other—say, John the apostle on December 27 or Pope Sylvester I on December 31.
A few days, though, might strike us as odd. December 26 is the Feast of Saint Stephen, the first martyr who was stoned for the faith. December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the babies of Bethlehem slaughtered by Herod in his attempt to kill a potential rival to the throne. And January 1, the eighth day of Christmas, celebrates the circumcision of Jesus.
Each of these ties bloodshed to Christmas—even the last one. This is not, however, how we usually mark the Christmas season, which is festive because it is a festival: a great party in honor of the birth of the King. Advent is for penitence; Christmas is for merriment (Matt. 9:15).
Yet there is a reason for the timing of these altogether bloody memorials. They are a stark reminder of the world into which Jesus was born, the world he was born to save. Even as we make merry, we will be less likely to trivialize the nativity of Christ when we remember that this child was born to die.
“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” of sins: so says Hebrews 9:22. Christmas may seem a long way from Calvary, but in truth it isn’t far at all. The Cross is already in view, whether for God (from eternity), for Scripture (as a narrative), or for us (who know the end of the story). Mary’s son is born to shed his blood for us. Even from the womb, this baby is bound for Joseph’s tomb. The circumstances of his birth and the saints honored during this season testify to that sobering truth.
Work backward with me through these three events: the stoning of Stephen (December 26), the slaughter of Bethlehem’s boys (December 28), and the circumcision of Jesus (January 1). I say “backward” because, although we are moving forward through the calendar, we are reversing the flow of the narrative: from Acts 7 (after Pentecost) to Matthew 2 (after Jesus turned two) to Luke 2 (when Jesus was just eight days old). By the end I hope the rationale will be clear.
The Blood of the Martyrs
The day after Christmas memorializes the first Christian martyr. His name and story may be familiar to many of us, but they are worth recalling to mind.
Quite soon after Pentecost the 12 apostles realize that they could not by themselves fulfill every duty necessary to maintain the growing Christian community. So they appoint Stephen and six other men to serve the nascent but growing assembly of faith in Jesus (Acts 6:1–6).
Already the young church has suffered opposition from without and within. Yet the number of Jesus’ disciples is “increasing,” expanding the circle of the young church (2:41–47; 4:4; 5:12–16; 6:7). Peter, John, and the other apostles have been placed in custody, thrown in prison, and beaten (4:3–7; 5:17–42), but no follower of the Way has yet been forced to follow it, as Jesus did, “to the end” (John 13:1). Until Stephen.
Stephen is a great debater. Wise and full of the Spirit, he engages in public disputations with fellow Jewish leaders and scholars (Acts 6:8–10). Angered by his speeches, false witnesses stir up trouble with rumor and gossip, and the high priest asks Stephen whether what they say is true (6:11–7:1). His answer is a sermon, and it proves to be his last. When he is finished, the mob is seething with rage. They drag him out of the city and stone him to death (7:54–60). A young man named Saul nods along in tacit approval (8:1).
Stephen is the first martyr for Christ, the proto-martyr and paradigm for all who would come after him. Why? And why remember him on the second day of Christmas?
We believers are meant to imitate Stephen because, in his life and death, Stephen imitates Christ. He boldly proclaims the word of God. He performs signs and wonders (6:8). His face shines with heavenly light (v. 15). Like Jesus, Stephen entrusts his soul to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (7:32), confident that he is the God not of the dead but of the living (Luke 20:37–38). Confident, that is, in the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16)—which is only another word for resurrection (2 Tim. 1:10).
Finally, like Jesus, Stephen consents to his own death. He doesn’t will it, but he allows it to happen. He does not fight back; he turns the other cheek (Matt. 5:38–48). He even petitions the Lord for this sin—the lynching of an innocent man—to be forgiven (Acts 7:60). Having learned this prayer from Jesus’ own lips (Luke 23:34), he takes another as his dying breath: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59; Luke 23:46). As Jesus prayed to the Father, so martyrs and disciples pray to Jesus, reigning in glory at the Father’s right hand.
A martyr is not only, as Stephen was, a believer who dies for the faith. A martyr is a witness to Christ. That is what the Greek word martys means, and it is why every Christian is called to it. Following the apostles, who were eyewitnesses to the Resurrection, all of us continue to testify to the risen Lord in word and deed, in life and death (Acts 1:8, 22; 2:32). Fittingly, Luke notes the presence of certain “witnesses” at Stephen’s stoning (7:58).
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Understood in this larger way, martyrdom makes sense at Christmastide. We celebrate Christ’s coming not because he saves us from death but because he shows us how to die—how to have true life in this dying life. He is born to give us life abundant, which is eternal life (John 10:10). Yet even as we grasp hold of this life here and now, in our mortal bodies, we know we will not possess it in full until we are, like Jesus, beyond death. “For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him” (Rom. 6:9).
So when we remember Stephen’s death on the day after we remember Jesus’ birth, we are, in effect, remembering our baptism: our death day and birth day at once. “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (vv. 3–4). For “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5).
Every birth calls forth death; the two are inseparable. Birth is bloody, and what is birthed is mortal. The birth of Jesus at Christmas thus points simultaneously to the death he will die to give us life; to the baptism that is our second birth, through union in his death; and to the final end of the whole fallen cycle in his resurrection, ascension, and return.
Stephen is the first of Christ’s innumerable seeds sown in the earth. In the words of Tertullian, born about a century after the deaths of Peter and Paul, “The blood of Christians is seed.” Or as the expression is more commonly known, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” In the economy of Christ, death begets life. Christmas cannot help but remind us of both.
The Blood of the Innocents
If at first glance Stephen is difficult to place in relation to Christmas, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents is far less so.
The story is straightforward: When men from the East tell Herod about the child “born king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2), Herod conspires to murder Jesus before he can become a threat. Enraged that the Magi then “outwitted” him to conceal the baby’s location, Herod orders “all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old or under” to be killed (v. 16).
Through angelic intervention, Jesus escapes to Egypt with Joseph and Mary (vv. 13–15), but the lament of Rachel for her children cries out to God without consolation (v. 18). Only when Herod is himself dead does the holy family return from Egypt and settle in Nazareth (vv. 19–23), hometown of Mary (Luke 1:26–27) and now of the Messiah (Mark 6:1; John 1:46; 7:40–42).
Just as Stephen’s death replayed Jesus’ death, so Jesus’ birth replays Israel’s birth. Like Moses, he must be delivered from a tyrant’s mass infanticide (Ex. 1:8–2:10). Like Joseph, Rachel’s son (Gen. 30:22–24), he must seek protection from his own kin in the foreign land of Egypt (39:1–6). Like all the sons of Jacob, he must come out of Egypt and enter the land of Israel promised to Abraham (12:7; Hos. 11:1).
Every step is beset by danger, violence, and bloodshed, and nothing less than divine intervention is required to fulfill the Lord’s plan for his people’s salvation.
We remember the holy innocents, then, because they are the all-too-typical price that evil exacts when faced with the good purposes of God. We remember them because a world that murders children remains, somehow, the world that God loves—a world that does not lie beyond redemption, that needs the gospel of the child Christ more than ever. And we remember them in conjunction with Christ’s birth because, as believers’ prayers and songs have honored their sacrifice across the centuries, the holy innocents anticipate the once-for-all sacrifice on the cross. In the words of Ephrem the Syrian, composing hymns in the fourth century:
The babes were slain because of Your all-reviving birth.
But since the King, our Lord the Lord of the kingdom, was a slain [king],
slain hostages were given by that cunning tyrant.
The heavenly ranks received, clothed in the mysteries of His slaying,
the hostages whom earthly beings offered. Blessed is the King Who magnified them!
The Blood of Abraham’s Seed
On the eighth day of Christmas the church celebrates the circumcision of Christ. For Gentiles this is an odd thing to do; for moderns who relegate such procedures to the sterile corridors of hospitals and professionals, it is even odder.
Because so much of Christian history is weighed down by latent prejudice against the Jews, it is a wonder that, buried deep in the church’s memory, we have never forgotten the significance of this day. It is set on the eighth day of Christmas because God’s covenant with Abraham commands the circumcision of every Jewish male on the eighth day following his birth (Gen. 17:12). This is just what the Gospel of Luke records: “On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived” (2:21).
Circumcision anticipates baptism. Just as baptism is a new birth through death to the old self—a mortifying entrance into God’s covenant family—so circumcision wounds the flesh for the sake of covenant life with the Lord. It takes the symbolic measure of a man, his virility and power to beget earthly life, and cuts. It does not ask permission. It proclaims, through blood, that this child belongs to God because he is a child of Abraham, and he will be expected to live as one all the days of his life.
Thus God to Abraham: “My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Gen. 17:13–14).
Jesus is circumcised because he is Mary’s son, and Mary is a daughter of Abraham. Jesus is a Jew, subject to Jewish law. But Jesus, we confess, is not just a Jew but the God of the Jews. He is the Jewish God made flesh. He is the author of the Law. He is the friend of Moses. He is the voice who called Abram out of Ur and made extravagant promises to him. He is the source of the command to circumcise.
In Jesus, therefore, Abraham’s God submits to his own covenant. The circumcising God is himself circumcised. As Ephrem puts it in another nativity hymn:
Behold on the eighth day as a babe
The Circumciser of all came to circumcision. …
The sign of Abraham was on His flesh.
This is a great mystery. It is one reason the church does not pass over the eighth day of Christmas as an uneventful episode in Jesus’ infancy but honors it with a feast.
A further reason is that this is the first drop of blood shed by the Savior. In the same way that Stephen and the holy innocents bookend the story of Jesus with martyrdom, so in his own flesh Jesus begins and ends his life by shedding his blood. It opens with a Jewish blade and closes with Roman nails. Jesus is scarred from the beginning—and as we learn from Thomas, his scars are healed but not erased in the Resurrection (John 20:19–29).
Paul teaches us that the offspring (or “seed”) of Abraham is singular, not plural, because the promises of God come to their head in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the nations (Gal. 3:1–4:7). This is the gospel proclaimed at Christmas in hymns like “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”:
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.
As we sing with joy this Christmastide, let’s not forget the cost of this second birth. If we have ears to hear, the story of Jesus won’t let us forget it. Nor will the church’s calendar.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
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