Christ Church

“They saw … they came … and worshipped him”

Unlike Caesar who proverbially came, saw and conquered, the Magi-Kings saw, came, and adored. They were conquered by what they saw. They “fell down and worshipped.” They beheld, through the leading of a star, the child-King of Bethlehem. In their adoration, they “opened their treasures and presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” ‘sacred gifts of mystic meaning,’ as one of our hymns wonderfully puts it. Such really is the real origin of gift-giving, the giving of gifts in honour of the gift that is given in Christ’s holy Nativity.

Epiphany marks the completion of Christmas. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally gathered together. The imaginary of Bethlehem is now a crowded place of images derived at once from holy scripture and from holy imagination. With “the adoration of the magi”, the pageant of Christmas is now wonderfully complete.

And over. At least, the account of what we have come to call Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different consideration. The Journey of the Magi impels, in fact, another journey, one that conveys a profound 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,” T.S. Eliot suggests, because they are profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and has its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. As Eliot’s poem, the Journey of the Magi, puts it:

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.

The awareness of our limitations, of which death is the greatest and ultimate limitation, is the birth of philosophy. It is an ancient theme, constantly reworked and replayed in myriad ways. The death of Enkidu gives birth to Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom in The Epic of Gilgamesh and launches him on a journey through the realms of the deep darkness of death, the home of the sun which in the ancient understanding arises out of the darkness and sets into the darkness. The death of Patroclus occasions a philosophical crisis for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. And so for Plato, for Augustine, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Descartes, the list goes on and on, but in one way or another, the awareness of human limitations gives birth to reflection and wisdom.

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And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were
told them by the shepherds.

I hope that we are among those who having heard it, wonder at those things told to us by the shepherds. Even more, I hope and pray that we will be like Mary and “keep all these things, and ponder them in [our] hearts.” Such is, I think, the radical meaning of the Christmas of the Shepherds.

Things told to them by angels set them in motion to “see this thing which is come to pass,” they say, and with a proper theological sophistication of the kind which belongs to the little ones of the world, they know that this is something “which the Lord hath made known unto us.” They come and find it so. Splendid. Good on them but even better, even a greater good is that they do not keep this to themselves. It is not “good tidings of great joy”, just for themselves. No, it concerns us all. “They made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” We know that saying. We heard it on Christmas morn. The “good tidings of great joy” is that “unto you is born this day in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord.” And as a sign of this truth, “ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

All this has remained with them and belongs to their conversation among themselves. It sets them in motion, moved by more than what they or we can possibly conceive. They come and see and it is as they had been told. They wonder at what they behold and made it known abroad and others wonder too. But how many keep all these things and ponder them in their hearts? The shepherds “returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” There is the constant emphasis upon the idea of what has been told and seen and then told to others.

All of this belongs to the sweet wonder of the Christmas mystery. On The Octave Day of Christmas it all comes to a kind of crescendo, paradoxically enough not with the Angels nor with insight of John but with the lowliness and humility of the shepherds. They have the kind of rural honesty that used to be part of our communities. A way of simple directness and humble honesty. It is much needed in our age of smug arrogance and ignorant assertions. The Octave Day gathers up the fullness of images that Christmas presents and concentrates them on our thinking about Jesus, especially about his being named Jesus by angels, by Joseph, and now, wonderfully by Mary.

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