“Remember the moment forever began” reads the advertisement promoting DeBeers and the diamond industry at the bus stop on 6th Avenue and 57th Street: “Remember the moment forever began.” I like it. It hints of the time and place where people are transformed by love.
What a wonderful caption, as well, to summarize Christmastide, which ends today, twelve days after the Feast of the Incarnation, on this the Feast of the Epiphany. Another season on the Church calendar begins. And, it is a short Epiphany-tide this year, because of the unusually early arrival of Lent one month from now on February 6th. But, before Christmas is packed away for another year, let us pause for one last time to remember, to remember the moment forever began.
Matthew, the author of today’s Gospel, wants us to do just that. And, to help us, to guide us into deepening faithfulness and to strengthen our devotion, he gives us a story, a chestnut of a tale, familiar to each of us from our earliest days. It needs no retelling; the visit of the three kings/the magi to the crib of the infant Christ (2.1-12).
It is an improbable account at best, yet it is recalled by believers down through the centuries as the stuff of great devotion in prayer, music, visual art, and literature. The story tells of a wondrous and epic journey in pursuit of the True and Living God; the God who makes impossible things possible in the lives of men and women of faith.
Today’s Gospel, which begins the Evangelist’s second chapter, is not a story meant to stand alone. It is integrally part of the nativity account begun in chapter one. So, let’s revisit what Matthew has to say about that moment long ago when forever began; what we through the teaching and witness of the Church know as the Incarnation.
Matthew starts his Gospel with a unique way of remembering; a genealogy of Jesus (1.1-17). Outlined, are the forty-two generational fathers of Our Lord; the Evangelist telling us particularly, that Jesus is descended from both the Patriarch Abraham and King David.
Is this genealogy true; a scientific or verbatim factual statement and proof, or, is it fabrication? That, I think, is not really the question. Matthew, a Jew, writing in the ninth decade of the Common Era, some sixty years after the birth of Christ, is writing a Jewish document probably intended for a Jewish audience. He is keenly aware of the ancient prophecy of Isaiah that the Messiah must come from the Davidic line, specifically from David’s town of Bethlehem. Thus, the Evangelist from the get-go is telling us to remember that the Jewish nation as the People of God is to be the matrix of the coming of salvation and deliverance, and that the babe of Bethlehem, the longed for messianic one of God, and his kingdom, shall be greater than that of his legendary forefather King David.
Mentioned also in this genealogy are four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Mary is added to this list by Matthew, making the number of women a total of five.
Why does Matthew include these five women? What about them is worth remembering? To answer, we need to put on a Jewish thinking cap and ask, what do they have in common? My answer is that they have two things in common: 1) they each conceive a child by unusual means; and, 2) they are “outsiders.”
Matthew, therefore, in his first chapter presents a story to his Jewish audience in which he states the conception of Jesus is not by normal human means and that his messianic status goes beyond the boundaries of the Hebrew people: both are of Divine origin, and, furthermore, his messiah-ship includes “outsiders;” which is to say, is intended for both Jew and gentile, equally, alike; what the Apostle Paul in this morning’s Epistle to Ephesians advocates when he says that “the Gentiles should be fellow heirs…and partakers of … [God’s] promise in Jesus Christ” (3.6). Inclusiveness of this sort, whether spoken by Matthew or by Paul, would be a radical proposition to any Jewish audience of the time, as it asks one to think outside the box of religious expectation, mindful that God in Christ has expanded the understanding and purpose of Messiah-ship as well as the definition of who are the Chosen People/the People of God.
Salvation, therefore, as set forth in Matthew’s imaginative story is a blessing/mitzvah given for all peoples and nations. Once again, keep in mind that Matthew is not an eye witness to the events he reports in his early Gospel verses. And, remember more importantly, as well, he is not writing a literal historical account as we would expect, for example, in a report from someone like the ancient Herodotus. Matthew, instead, writes to us as the spirit and fulfillment of a new Isaiah, with the purpose in mind that “…the gentiles shall come to…[God’s] light, and kings to the brightness of…[God’s] rising” (60.3); hence, also, the relevance of today’s story of the three kings and the iconic image of the star which lights the pilgrim way. Matthew, in creating this story, wants us to see that with this miraculous birth of a long awaited Davidic King, who brings justice, salvation, and peace, transforming light from heaven now shines on our familiar terrestrial landscape of daily life. With the Incarnation, a new day is dawning; an eternal one; the moment, in other words, when forever began. God has acted, and with that intervention, there is now the light of God’s eternal presence in the world to guide us; hence the importance of light in the Church’s iconography of the Epiphany season.
Just before Christmas, during a television commercial, I heard this time of year referred to “as a magical time.” Matthew, I think, would probably agree with that statement, because he is employing a magical story to tell a theological truth. This pronouncement may upset some of us as bordering on heresy. But, it may, however, relieve and encourage others. Permit me to explain.
To do so, let’s return to Matthew’s magical birth narrative for a re-examination of the account. Mary is not simply a young woman. She is a virgin. Conception occurs by means of the Holy Spirit. Joseph is given the details of all this by an angel during a dream, a vision in which he is told to set aside his self-righteousness and marry his pregnant betrothed. Like the story of the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the Blessed Mother in Luke (1.26ff.), Matthew is operating in an ancient Jewish teaching and preaching tradition known as the midrash.
The midrash is a Jewish genre that has no equal in western, modern literature. As such, it is a unique oriental style the Jews perfected probably during their centuries of captivity in Egypt. Here they learned the art and craft of story telling from their ancient captors, creating tales, often laced with such literary devices as magic, to suit the details of their identity, needs, and purposes.
Matthew’s sacred text of the nativity of our Lord, which includes today’s Gospel, I am saying, requires more sensitivity from us than the expectation of it being the literal record of a proven historical event translated from Biblical Greek into modern English. In fairness to the style employed in the text, many details, including today’s visit of the magi and appearance of the guiding star over Bethlehem, can neither be proved or disproved.
But, in order to understand the text more fully, as I think the Evangelist intends, we need the sophistication of what Matthew’s early audience had, that being the capacity for a suspended state of reason, so that the story teller can fashion, impart or disclose Truth. Magic, I am saying, in the tradition of the midrash, is a tool intended to reveal the Eternal, not fool the listener. Do not, therefore, hear my remarks as saying Matthew’s magical birth narrative diminishes or obliterates truth. What the Evangelist tells us is not a lie or deception. Nor, is it simply an allegorical mythology. Instead, the use of magic within the Evangelist’s interpretation of the birth of Christ reveals Truth; truth about God, truth about us, and truth about the world. And, this Truth is transformative, transfiguring, resurrecting!
This is the kind of magic that is intended to strengthen our devotion and faith. It is not the literal magic of Hogwarts, for example, and the pulling of a rabbit out of a hat. Instead, it is magic intended to speak to one’s heart, inspiring it and connecting our hearts and minds and wills to our essential Jewish-ness as believers.
One more word about magic - as we all know, the use of magic is also about the use of power – but I’ll say more about what this power in the Gospels is later on.
Whether or not we believe the story that Matthew is conveying early in his Gospel to be literal fact, as some do (like the present Pope) and some do not (like the present Archbishop of Canterbury) – putting us in good company on either side of this debate - let us commonly agree with the Evangelist that Jesus’ birth is of Divine origin and part of the divine plan for creation from the very beginning; something once again that Matthew associates intimately with the prophecy of Isaiah; the foretelling of a Messiah who strangely would be “…bruised for our iniquities: [and] the chastisement of our peace…[would be] upon him; and with his stripes we…[would be] healed (53.5). This, too, we need to remember. It is the truth and reason for our Lord’s birth; that he should suffer and die for all in the world. This is the belief, as well as the orthodox doctrine of the Church Universal. There is, I think, no magic about it, because it is all a sign of God’s grace in a world that all too often in its literal pursuit of Truth says “That this was all folly” (ln 20, “Journey of the Magi”, T S Eliot).
But, folly, remember, is also God’s unlikely Wisdom and way of moving and living with us in the world. For example, Meister Ekhart, the thirteenth century Christian mystic, said of God, that God cannot give a little: [God] must give either everything or nothing. [God’s] giving is entirely simple and perfect, undivided, and not in time but all in eternity” (Sermons and Treatises, vol 1, sermon 13;109). The Incarnation, I am saying, is God’s great foolishness; not a joke, mind you, but an all or nothing giving of God’s own Self, once and for all, and for all time, the moment that forever began!
This Truth, of one amongst us who is both God and Man, and born to suffer for all in a redemptive and saving way, moves us then from how to who; the difference in the Gospels and spiritual life between mechanics and relationship; the literal and our participation in mystery. And, this movement into the mystery of the Divine puts us in the context of God’s Grace.
About this Grace, let us simply agree with Matthew, and the Doctrine of our faith, that Jesus is fully human and fully divine: Son of Man and Son of God is the way Scripture puts it. Matthew attempts to pin point this unity to the time of Christ’s birth. Some argue this truth arises at Jesus’ baptism, where the heavens open and his divine Son-ship is declared by heavenly voice (more magic from the midrash). The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, sees his divinity arising at the Resurrection. And, the Evangelist John, makes no reference at all to the nativity, but equates Jesus to the Word of God spoken at creation; Christ now the Word made flesh.
The flexible tradition of the midrash, I am saying, permits us these multiple interpretations, in which, at best, this side of heaven, we have only hints and glimpses of God’s saving Truth and Grace, what Flannery O’Conner, the modern novelist, calls “images and shadows of divine things” (Mystery and Manners, p. 118).
For Matthew, God in Christ has entered the history of the world in a new way, with the express purpose of bringing you, me, and all that has been, is and will be into an eternal relationship broken long ago by Adam in that magical story set in the primordial garden of our first disobedience. The Evangelist wants us to see and to remember that with the coming of the Holy One of God in the Incarnation, whatever that event really is or may be, history and the world are forever different through the action and intervention of a God who became like us, that we might become like God; a God who is and brings mercy and forgiveness; a God who saves and delivers; and, a God who is and brings a long-awaited kingdom of Peace; One in whom we at best gleam only images and shadows of God’s holiness, the temporal now revealing the eternal.
So, part of the magic of what Matthew is spinning is the birth of hope to a world laboring under captivity to fear, violence, and death. Matthew is telling us in other words that God in Christ brings the light of eternity to the darkness of this world. This is “…glad tidings of good things” as the Apostle Paul termed it (Ro 10.15); God “…beyond in the midst of our life” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated it in Letters and Papers from Prison (p. 361). It is the good news of Emmanuel, the grace and wonder of God dwelling in flesh with us; eternity begun.
But, the world, the Evangelist, reminds us today is hostile to God’s’ goodness. Like Satan afoot in the Garden of Eden, enter Herod, whose evil machinations willfully seek his own power and destiny, symbolizing what the poet Hopkins termed, “the death dance that is in our blood.” All, as today’s Gospel intends us to see, is not as it should be, and Matthew asks us to remember that as well, foreshadowing in today’s text a great struggle between good and evil destined also from the beginning.
“…Were we led all that way for/Birth or Death?” asks Eliot in his poem “Journey of the Magi” (lns35-36). The answer to which we know is both, because when we encounter and experience the moment when forever began, like the magi of today’s Gospel do, something dies within that something, or more correctly, someone, may bring us to life, for that is the story of love. And, love for us is God’s story in our heart; God’s power; forever’s beginning in a world without end.
No matter what we believe about today’s Gospel, about those ancient searchers, pilgrim kings from afar; whether we believe the account in our estimation to be real or not, I urge you to view it in yet another context, a picture of the grace that precedes God’s judgment; what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has in mind when he writes in A Testament to Freedom, that “the coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for every one who has a conscience” (cf., A Year with DB, p. 380).
In this same sense of impending judgment, Isn’t, I would ask you, the Incarnation also meant to be remembered as God’s verdict upon the world, our kingdoms, power, and glory? Is it not judgment from a different perspective than what we would anticipate or expect; a silent word to the soul of each and all, a word spoken not from a kingly throne but from the unlikelihood of God’s poverty and divine anonymity, wherein and in whom eternity lives and is revealed through both the sacred and the secular; there being little difference between the two in the sight and power of God to transform/transfigure this world and its people, places, things, and events into the kingdom of heaven?
Before the humility and goodness of the Almighty; before the babe of Bethlehem, where God is little, yet is also everyone and every thing; before the radiance and loveliness of divinity shrouded in ordinariness; an eternity of possibility has been opened to all who pass by or to all who surrender through the ages to the magic and mystery of the Divine life which subverts our understanding of earthly power, success, and goodness with Truth that God alone is love. Love is both the poverty and power of God; the fullness as well as the foolishness of God’s grace and God’s relationship to each and all of us. And, to live out or to en-flesh these images and shadows of the Divine, I think, is the great joy of existence. It is to let our lives also become light, the eternal light of love; love become flesh, yours as well as mine, so that others might live in fullness and hope. Love is the moment forever begins!
Blessing and Praise, Christ is born! Our light is come! Let us forever adore!
