It would be nice if we could say it
was an honest mistake. It might let them
off the hook. Maybe us too.
But it's a mistake we have made for
too long. And too often.
It's a mistake that usually has tragic
consequences that we as a species don’t seem to have learned from yet.
Why did the magi go to Herod to find
God's newborn king? Why did they assume the
king of God’s people would be in a courtly palace of an empire? The magi were wise, but sadly not wise enough
yet really to grasp the way of God and God’s kingdom in the world. And because of it they very nearly ruined
everything – as Bruce Cockburn puts it in the song “Cry of a Tiny Baby”, the
magi who “come to pay their respects to the fragile little king, get pretty
close to wrecking everything.”
The magi are the height of human
evolution so far. They are smart,
rational, far-seeing, imaginative and scientific. They are able to see great signs, amass and integrate
great knowledge, and travel far distances to be able to put their own mark on anything
new and momentous taking place in the world.
They then and we today are a lot alike
– in control, powerful, analytical, able to cover the face of the Earth with
relative ease, able to bend and move the world – and other people, to our desires,
master of the food chain, lord of the jungle.
We have come a long way. But by and large we still lack that one more
essential step – that one further necessary stage of evolution and transformation
that will help us become fully human as God intends us to be, to be human finally
in the image of God – that one essential step not farther up, but down – down from
power and privilege to powerlessness and vulnerability, down from control to
service, down from relationship-against and relationship-over that have got us
where we are, to relationship-with and relationship-for that will get us where
we are meant, and where we need to be.
God tries to lead us there. God’s journey has been in that direction all
along – down rather than up, and God has called us over and again to follow.
Like Good King Wenceslas calling us to
notice a poor peasant in a far-off corner in need, then leading the way himself
down from the tower and out from the castle, into “the rude wind’s wild lament/
and the bitter weather.” The king himself
leads the way through the snow and the storm, and as we begin to falter and
fail in the cold of the night, he turns and says:
“Mark
my footsteps, good my page
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shall find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shall find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”
It’s all through the Bible and in
other world religions as well – the journey downward into humility, into honest
and open mutuality with others – especially the poor and powerless, into
groundedness in the Earth, away from control, self-protection and domination,
towards compassion, openness and commitment to the common and shared good of
all life on Earth.
But we resist in so many ways, little
and big. We obsess about power and fear
powerlessness. We worship success and
punish failure. We idolize celebrity and
cannot imagine letting go of privilege.
We seek control. We are in love
with being on top, and do all we can not to fall or have to let go.
And we suffer the consequences. Others do too. And sometimes we let others – even make others,
suffer the consequences for us.
I blame Herod, not God, for the
massacre.
It was God’s intention to be born in
Bethlehem among and as one of the poor of the day, maybe even God’s plan to be
born in a stable. But it was not God’s
intention for Herod to go and kill every child under the age of two to try to
protect himself against God’s reversal of the order of the day. There are some things done in God’s world for
which we have to accept responsibility.
I blame the magi, too, for not knowing
better than to look for God's new king in the palaces of the old way, instead
of following the star all the way to a stable and a humble house among the
poor. Even with all they knew, they were
still bound in critical ways to the old ways of doing kingdom.
But there is hope – some light, some
good news.
Jesus survives the massacre. This is good news – although it doesn’t start
to undo the horror of the massacre that took so many others, does it? It doesn’t begin to touch the suffering of those
who do not escape – whose children are killed by soldiers of their own kingdom
at the order of their own king.
Another piece of good news is that
Herod dies soon after. There is hope in
the knowledge that every tyrant at some point falls, and every unjust kingdom and
government at some point comes undone.
And yet – we also know there will then be another just as unjust, also
to be feared, also to be avoided if at all possible.
I wonder if the greatest good news and
the real light in the story are in the ability and willingness of the magi to
be changed? Once the magi leave the
palace of Herod and once again follow the star God has given, and they find
Jesus and God’s kingdom in vulnerability, poverty and powerlessness, they are
changed. Seeing what God is really like
in the world, hearing God as Bruce Cockburn says “in the cry of a tiny baby,”
they awake from the nightmare of power in which they have been living, to a
dream of a different way of being and of being themselves in the world.
They don't go back to Herod. They travel home “by a different road.”
Like Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas
Carol, we sometimes fear – or use the excuse that we’re too old to change, that
it’s too late to change either ourselves or the world around us. But Ebenezer, once his heart is truly
touched, and once he sees how truly poor and empty and broken and hurt his own
life has been, he also learns that in God’s time it’s never too late to change –
that we’re never too old or too far gone to take a step in a different
direction and start going home on a different road.
When Scrooge’s Christmas finally comes
– Christmas morning in his apartments, waking up to bells, feeling giddy as a
schoolboy, knowing now that all along he’s not yet known anything … Christmas
day sending a goose to the Cratchits and sending himself all gussied up to his
nephew’s Christmas party … and the day after back at work suddenly seeing and
knowing the joy of using what he has to make the world a better place for
others … when Scrooge’s Christmas
finally comes, it never fails to make me cry.
Because isn’t that what we’re really
looking for in Christmas – in the birth of the baby in Bethlehem and in our coming to pay him
honour, aren’t we really looking for a chance and a way to be reborn to living
in a different direction ourselves?
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