Month: January 2013

“They departed into their own country another way”

With Matthew’s account of the coming of the Anatolian “Μαγοι,” “wise men from the east,” the Christmas scene is now complete. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally completed. The crèche, itself an image, is now a crowded place of images, images derived at once from holy scripture and holy imagination. The rich fullness belonging to the story of the birth of Jesus reaches its climax with the adoration of the magi. Christmas is now complete.

And over. Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different kind of consideration. The journey of the magi impels another journey, yet one that conveys a sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” it seems, as T. S. Eliot suggests, having been profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and begins to have its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. The question is whether we have been changed by what we have seen.

T.S. Eliot’s puts it this way in his poem, Journey of the Magi:

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

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

It is, I have to admit, one of my favourite Scriptural passages. It captures in a phrase the essential meaning and activity of the Church. The Church is, if nothing else, Marian, precisely in this attitude of mind and activity of soul presented in this passage. It is all part of the wonder and mystery of Christmas and how that wonder and mystery is meant to stay with us. How so? By keeping all these things, and pondering them in our hearts. In a way, it is as simple as that. We are what we contemplate.

Christmas is more than a one-day, a three-day or even a nine-day wonder. There are the twelve days of Christmas that keep us at that holy scene, that bid us abide at Bethlehem and contemplate the great mystery of God with us. Today is The Octave Day of Christmas, the eighth day, which like the musical scale, takes us home again but with an heightened sensibility and higher understanding. This morning we are presented with Luke’s poignant account of the Shepherds’ Christmas: their coming “with haste” by acting upon the Angelic message; their “[finding] Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”; their “see[ing] this thing which has come to pass”, literally, “this saying that has happened,” and, perhaps, above all else, their “ma[king] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”. Luke as always is wonderfully restrained and yet precise.

The effect of the Shepherds “ma[king] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child” is especially noteworthy. It goes to the heart of the mystery of Christmas. (more…)

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