Matthew 2:1-12
Matthew
is the only gospel that talks about wise men visiting the baby Jesus, and he
doesn’t say much about them, including how many there were. Over the centuries, of course, the Eastern
Orthodox churches decided that there were twelve of them and the Western church
decided that there were three. The three
were named Melchior, Balthasar, and Casper.
It seems that after returning to their own land in the East, and even
after death, they could not stop traveling because their relics had made their
way to Constantinople by the fifth century and then to Cologne, Germany during
the Crusades. Somewhere along the way
they became not only wise, but also royal.
Matthew
just calls them “magi”. Those were part
priest/part astrologer leaders of an ancient people who lived in what is now
Iran. They may or may not have been
Zoroastrians, a Persian religion that flourished at that time. They were known for interpreting dreams and
for casting horoscopes; in fact, from them we get the word “magic”. When they spotted a new star and identified
its meaning, they were just doing their jobs.
That may be why Matthew describes their arrival in Jerusalem as being,
for them, almost matter-of-fact.
“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of
Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is
the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its
rising, and have come to pay him homage.’” [Matthew 2:1-2]
Of course, what they do find once
they get to Bethlehem is not the one they expected, but they are certain enough
of their own skill and the evidence before them that when they arrive at the
right place,
“…they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house,
they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him
homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold,
frankincense, and myrrh.” [Matthew 2:10-11]
These
are strange people to be seeking and finding the Messiah. They don’t fit any of the usual
categories. In Luke, the baby is
recognized immediately by two people.
One is Simeon, who is an old, pious priest. The other is Anna, an old, pious woman who
spends her time praying in the temple.
Those figures make sense. But the
magi aren’t even Jewish. They don’t have
any idea who they’re looking for.
They’re politically naïve enough to go to Herod, of all people, to ask
where to find the king of the Jews, which implies it is not him and eventually
leads to his massacre of all the male children in that region younger than two.
Yet that all just goes
to emphasize what can happen when people follow whatever leading the Lord sends
them that brings them near to him. That
is a constant across the ages.
Francis
Collins is a doctor who led the Human Genome Project that the National
Institute of Health describes as “the international, collaborative research program whose goal
was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings.”[1] Dr. Collins describes himself as “a believer
in a God who is unlimited by time and space, and who takes a personal interest
in human beings.”[2] That puts him right in the thick of things
between people who believe only in science and deny God’s existence and people
who have faith in God but who deny science when it doesn’t fit their view of
the Bible. So, in his book The Language of God he talks about his
own experience and his own faith and how his work, first as a doctor and later
as a research geneticist, brought him to faith in God and trust in Jesus.
It
was, for him, a long and round-about path and I won’t try to summarize it
here. I would just repeat his own
summary:
“The need to find my own harmony of the worldviews ultimately came as
the study of genomes – our own and that of many other organisms on the planet –
began to take off, providing an incredibly rich and detailed view of how
descent by modification from a common ancestor has occurred. Rather than finding this unsettling, I found
this elegant evidence of the relatedness of all living things an occasion of
awe, and came to see this as the master plan of the same Almighty who caused
the universe to come into being and set its physical parameters just precisely
right to allow the creation of stars, planets, heavy elements, and life
itself.”[3]
God
finds all sorts of ways to guide people to himself. Right now I’m reading a book called The Year of Living Biblically in which A.J.
Jacobs, a writer for Esquire decides
that he’s going to try to obey all the rules in the Bible for a year, and then
turn it into a book. Like Dr. Collins,
he is starting from the point of being totally secular, although he does admit
that he has a young son and is wondering how to raise him right and that this
has something at least tangentially to do with his project. Still, his main point is to explore and
describe the religious landscape to people who will find it amusing when he
gets into an argument with an adulterer when he asks his permission to stone
him. Like the magi, like Francis
Collins, he is just doing his job. I
haven’t finished the book yet, so I cannot say how the search changes him, but
even halfway through he is already describing how the practice of prayer makes
him more aware of the needs of others and more thankful for things that he
hadn’t generally noticed before.
Whatever
light shines on us, God can use it to point us toward himself.
I
wonder if there isn’t somewhere in this world a glassblower who starts thinking
about how, if she can pull together the broken shards of an old Coke bottle and
turn them into a lampshade or a snow globe, there must be someone who can take
a shattered life and turn it into beauty.
I
wonder if there isn’t a toll collector who doesn’t absent-mindedly think about
what it means for there to be a bridge across a wide river that nobody could
cross on their own, but that bridge takes thousands and thousands every day
safely from here to there, from this shore to the other.
I
wonder if there isn’t somebody nodding off right now, troubled and worn-out, too
tired to hold an eyelid open from being caught up in ways of life that are not
those of God, who may not in their dreams, hear him say, as he said to the wise
men “The road you’ve taken isn’t safe; take another instead,” and waking,
return home safely by another route.
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