From poverty to riches

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 2: 1-12) gives us the only narrative in the gospels of the extraordinary visit to Bethlehem of wise men from the east. At first, they alight in Jerusalem, inquiring logically at Herod’s court for the whereabouts of the promised child king of the Jews. Informed by the scribes that the king of the Jews is to be born in Bethlehem, Herod sends the wise men on to the town where they indeed discover the child with His mother Mary and fall down to adore Him with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they avoid Jerusalem on their return journey home.

In this gospel we have a model of two ways of engaging with God: the way of the rich and the way of the poor, although I do not mean this in a financial sense. Herod is the personification of the rich pursuer of God. He is rich but only according to his own self-deceit. First of all, he is inattentive to any spiritual signs; these, after all, have to be brought to his attention which is fixed most likely on the things of this earth. Herod hopes for nothing in life, for he lacks nothing, at least in his own eyes. Therefore, when the star is pointed out, it is not an occasion of wonder but of worry: what does it mean, what is its significance? These questions are not asked in a spirit of open, honest inquiry, but of fearful, grasping anxiety. He does not ask what he stands to gain by this heavenly mystery but what risk it poses to a life that is all too material.

But, you might ask, is it not a good thing that he asks the chief priests and scribes for an answer? Yes, and no. I am not a praying man, says the drunken George Bailey in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is precisely because of this failure that George cannot at first take in the lessons that he needs to learn. Herod likewise is not a praying man. Of course, he should ask the priests and scribes about the star and the king of the Jews, but he should first ask God; he should first turn his attention to the Most High. He should not consult the priests like soothsayers, but only as ministers of God, his Creator. It is possible to pursue knowledge only to conquer but that is not how God wishes us to be enlightened. Receiving the knowledge of the prophecies without first bowing in humility to God, Herod can only then bend that knowledge into a devious plot the design of which is only made apparent by the dream the wise men have in Bethlehem. Those, like Herod, who treat the pursuit of spiritual knowledge like a conquest, the outcome of some endeavour of untrammelled curiosity, are likely to abuse its fruits. Such was Herod’s intention, and we remembered its bloody outcome on the feast of the Holy Innocents.  

This then is how the rich pursue God: self-sufficiently, driven on by the conquest of curiosity, inevitably instrumentalizing the knowledge they seem to acquire for their own self-satisfaction.

The poor of the Lord, the anawim, must take another path, the path of the wise men. We saw His star when it rose and have come to worship Him, they say to Herod in words that tell us much about the differences between them and their royal interlocutor. They began by looking up, not to their own needs but to the wonder that God had placed in the heavens to be noticed. We do not know how they prayed, but the quest they set out on has as its final objective an act of worship to the One who was to come.

Not that their journey was an easy one. How high their hearts must have been when they reached Jerusalem and the royal court: the end of a long and wearisome journey in winter must have seemed in sight. And yet, they had to go on, their minds full of doubt after the secret questioning of Herod. How very like the searches of the poor ones of the Lord! For God does not intend for us to take the journey we envisage but the journey He knows we need, the one that is not only for our good but for the good of others also. Perhaps then the wise men needed to pass through Jerusalem, not only to see the corruption of the seat of Jewish power, but as a sign to the increasingly purblind scribes and keepers of the Scriptures that history was accelerating, that events were unfolding beyond their ken, and that the Lord of History had finally come, although not in the way they had anticipated.

On the wise men go to their final destination where they offered that act of worship they had longed to give and handed to the mother of the king of the Jews the gifts they had transported, doubtless with some anxiety. Opening their treasures, says St Matthew: normally, it is the recipient of a gift who opens it. In this scene, God had made Himself so helpless in His incarnate form that these poor ones were obliged to do this for Him, for God does not want those who seek Him merely to be passive but to be cooperators or, better still, communicants in this wonderful encounter. No doubt as they opened their gifts to Him, they found themselves immeasurably repaid for all their troubles…   

…troubles that were not yet ended. For those who have come closest to the Lord are not thereby spared trials; they undergo them in a different way. We, the disciples of the Lord, are called to follow His example, becoming figures of His life and suffering after the fact, but in the Christmas and Epiphany narratives, it is the participants who become figures of the life of Christ to come. Thus, just as the Holy Innocents shed their blood in advance of Jesus, in this gospel the wise men fled the country, foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family from the murderous intent of the tinsel-crowned power monger in Jerusalem. Blood will have blood, says Shakespeare’s homicidal tyrant Macbeth, and yet in the end, even these intentions are made to work against the kingdom of evil. The shedding of innocent blood thus betokens the arrival of a kingly conqueror whose priesthood will remake the earth with its suffering. The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are thus not only gifts but signs of Him who was to come.

Thus are the poor ones of the Lord made rich in a mystery hedged about with the significance of the Lord’s desires and His irresistible purposes.