Today’s reflection will be on the readings for the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children.
“When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Luke 1:41-42
The readings for today are intentionally selected to bring our attention to the life of the child in the womb. Today, we are asked to especially pray for an end to the legalization of abortion and the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.
I want to begin in the Old Testament. Mankind’s journey to the advent of the Messiah was tumultuous, to say the least. Of the many offenses that mankind committed against God, one sticks out to my mind. During the time of the divided kingdom, many of the kings fall into grave sin and the people follow them. In chapter 7 of the second book of Kings, we get a detailed explanation of what sends the people into exile:
“Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and seer, saying, ‘Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets.’ But they would not listen, but were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They despised his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and the warnings which he gave them. They went after false idols, and became false, and they followed the nations that were round about them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them. And they forsook all the commandments of the Lord their God and made for themselves molten images of two calves; and they made an Asherah, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. And they burned their sons and daughters as offerings, and used divination and sorcery, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. Therefore, the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah only.” 2 Kings 17:13-18.
One of the major commands that God gives to His people is to stay away from the Gentile nations. The motivation for this is that God knows that when the Israelite people come into contact with the Gentiles, then they will be influenced by them to do evil. What we need to understand about the Gentiles is that they are pagan in their belief systems. They set up altars in the ‘high places’ to offer sacrifice to their pagan gods. What is worse is that Psalm 96 tells us just who these pagan gods are:
“For all the gods of the gentiles are demons; but the Lord made the heavens.” Psalm 96:5, LXX
What the Gentiles are sacrificing to pagan gods they are actually sacrificing to demons. This is why the Lord warned His people over and over to stay away from the Gentile nations so that they would not be tainted by their false worship.
Unfortunately, the history of the Books of Kings is mired by the Israelites falling into paganism and offering sacrifices to other gods. What is worse is that the sacrifice that is offered is their sons and daughters as detailed in the passage above. This is what causes God the most anger, seeing His children sacrifice their own sons and daughters to the demons Asherah, Baal, and Molech.
It is these offenses that cause God to give up the Israelites into exile. A lesson can be learned here. For every people who continues to slaughter their children, God will give them up to exile and remove them out of His sight. This is where we find ourselves as a society today. The immense evil we are encountering in the world is a result of our own stubbornness and giving ourselves over to the grave evil of sacrificing our children to pagan gods.
But there is hope. Our Lord comes as a child and sanctifies the world from the womb of His mother. We hear in the Gospel today, quoted above, that as the greeting of Mary reached the ears of St. Elizabeth, the child in her woman leapt! This quickening of the Baptist is a result of the immense grace that is before him. It should cause us to pause to hear that a child in the womb could recognize the Messiah coming to him. Far more than a clump of cells, the Baptist gives worship to the Word Made Flesh who dwells in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
On this day of prayer for the protection of the unborn, let us consider these two circumstances:
The Israelites reap the reward of their evil in sacrificing their children and are cast from the sight of God.
The Son of God chose to come and dwell with us, first as a child in the womb, so that He could sanctify us from that womb and bear witness to the sacredness of life therein.
Nothing required Christ to take flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. He could have simply appeared as man on earth as an adult and went about His business. But to truly be human, to truly enter into mankind’s state, He begins life in the womb of the Virgin, not as a clump of cells but as God made man. The child in the womb is sacred, Our Blessed Lord bears witness to this truth.
Let us continue to pray and labor for the protection of the most innocent among us.