Month: January 2012

“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the things of humanity.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then effects how we think about education, about the teaching. T.S. Eliot’s marvelous poem, The Journey of the Magi, begins with an arresting quote from the 17^th century preacher and divine, Lancelot Andrewes.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long  journey;
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Eliot goes on to reflect on the nature of the journey, talking about the hardships of the way, “the camels galled, sore-footed and refractory,” though the biblical account makes no mention of any camels, about the recalcitrance and uncertainty of the servants, and about the unfriendly reception in the towns and cities along the way; in short, “a hard time we had of it,” referring to the journey. About that journey, he says,

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…

He reflects on the ambiguities of life and death that somehow belong to the uncertainties of the journey. Birth and Death. Our lives, too, are often described and spoken about as being a kind of journey. But what kind of journey? Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But, again, what kind of journey?

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“They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”

The tradition of giving gifts at Christmas time originates with the coming of the Magi to the Child Christ in Bethlehem. From the three gifts comes the idea of the three magi from the East, from Anatolia. They are the proverbial come-from-aways. They are the original truth-seekers. They come having followed a star. They have come seeking the light of truth and led by that light they have come to Christ.

But they have not come empty-handed. They have come bearing gifts to the one who is the greatest gift of all. Love, suggests Aquinas, is in the nature of a first gift through which all other gifts are given. But what about the gifts of the Magi?

These are gifts which teach us about the nature of gift-giving. They are not exactly useful gifts – like socks and mittens, scarves and mufflers or like the useful gifts at a baby shower, diapers and wipes, soft blankets and towels. Beyond the useful gifts that we give to one another there are the useless gifts, the gifts that honour the one to whom they are given. In a way, the three gifts of the Magi are really useless gifts, gifts that essentially teach us about the meaning of the One to whom they are given.

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“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.

The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.

This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

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