January 6, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 60:1-6, 9 Camels, gold, frankincense
Psalm 72 Deus, judicium
Ephesians 3:1-12 Mystery, Mystery, Mystery
Matthew 2:1-12 They saw the child with Mary
"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."
These lines always seemed so appropriate to me as an epigraph for my annual Christmas visit, from Chicago to the upper peninsula of Michigan--"God's country" in the deepfreeze of January. I no longer do that--but stay cozy in my tropical redoubt in Managua. T. S. Eliot used them for the opening lines of his poem, "The Journey of the Magi," but it seems he cribbed them from Sermon Number 15, "Of the Nativity," preached by Lancelot Andrewes before King James at Christmas 1622. Eliot graphically describes the search of the Magi, "the camel men cursing and grumbling, and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, and the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, and the cities hostile and towns unfriendly and the villages dirty and charging high prices. A hard time we had of it." Eliot's Wise Man, at the end of the poem says, "All this was a long time ago, I remember. . . 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. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death."
Eliot sees the coming of Jesus Christ, the coming of Christianity, as seen by the Wisdom of the East, the religion and culture of the Orient, as a disaster. They are an "alien people clutching their gods," and the Birth is one also of their own demise. He has the old Astrologer, remembering years later, as actually wishing for the death of the Infant he had seen at the end of his journey so long ago. Is there an inkling here of the blood libel of Christ-killers? A whiff of cinders from Auschwitz?
But Matthew's story has always been read in Church much more positively, as The Epiphany story, of good news and Glory first presented to the non-Jewish world, the Gentiles, "the nations." It was not bad news but good news. Eliot reads the coming of Jesus through the lenses of anti-Western spectacles, like an old Jewish rabbi or professor of Islam might read the arrival of fundamentalist Christian missionaries in Hebron or Tel Aviv, with their Playtex Living Bibles.
In Matthew's mysterious story (the letter to the Ephesisans uses the word "mystery" repeatedly today), in which there is no birth narrative as in Luke, no angels, no shepherds, no feeding trough, but there is a Star, and astrologers. We do not find enmity between the gospel that is being born, being "given light", and the ancient faiths of the Eastern sages. They come to welcome the new religion, bringing the treasured gifts of their own culture, unpacking the heritage of their venerable belief systems. In them, Paul would write one day, God had not left godself without a witness, had not vanished without a trace. For it was in God as in the womb of a pregnant Mother that those wise men (like all the rest of us, wrote Paul) lived and moved and had their being. They arrived with respect for the new "dispensation"--and were not menaced by the gospel, as Eliot would have it. The threat to them, and to the the Birth, came from the political leaders, the agents of the new Emperor, Augustus, who named himself divine. These Persian priests and wizards acted instead in solidarity with the Infant Revolution, and connived to avoid, conspired to thwart the political oppression of it. In Matthew's telling, they were shown hospitality by the Mother of God, in her rented apartment, and were full of rejoicing with exceeding great joy. Eliot's cultural imperialism will have none of that: he has one of the Magi say, "we arrived at evening, not a moment too soon, finding the place, it was (you may say) satisfactory." Wonder what such a Magus would have made of the hospitality offered at a hospedaje in Managua. But Matthew tells us that these old wise ones receive direct revelation from God on how to avoid cooperating with the oppression of the Empire, and its Bush league emperor. Everything in this story would have made it clear that the gospel of Jesus was to be no threat to other cultures or religious faiths, if it were faithfully read. It arrived amongst the poor of a dispossesed people, and was welcomed by the wisdom of all lands, sharing their wealth, enabling their impoverished and their oppressed peoples. We have for too long read this story as Eliot read it--we have in Western culture used the gospel indeed as a tool of western imperialism. In the middle ages, the Crusades (the cross-bearers) went off to find the Wise Ones of the East and murder them and steal their gifts, and smash the Star and Crescent from the Sky, and dishonor the Prophet of the desert peoples, and blaspheme Allah, the name for God in the Book of Common Prayer in Arabic. Only a few, like Francis of Assisi, went in peace. In the 19th century, Western Churches went off to the East again, with the British Raj, and to Africa, with rifle and cannon, to bring Jesus to these ancient cultures and older faiths, as if they had never heard of God, or of Wisdom, or of Magi, and never knew what time the star appeareth.
We are only now just learning how to come to other faiths with the respect with which the Magi came to our own faith in its infancy--for the gospel calls us to that kind of solidarity and sympathy with the spiritual aspirations of all people, and their hope for liberation, and their projects of deliverance. Curiously, in Lancelot Andrewe's sermon from which Eliot took his lines, the judgment is on his listeners, perhaps even on King James who heard the preaching, but the judgment is not upon the ancient Magi. Andrewes says, "it was vidimus, venimus with them: they saw and they came. No sooner saw, but they set out presently. So as upon the first appearing of the star, as it might be last night. They knew it was Balaam's star, it called them away, they made straight to begin their journey this morning."
But of us, of his Christian listeners, Andrewes says, "To Christ we cannot travel, but weather and way and all must be fair. If not, no journey. But when we do it, we must be allowed leisure. Ever veniemus, never venimus. Ever 'coming', but never come."
"Sure these wise men of the East shall rise in judgment aginst the men of the West that is us," he says.
We of the western church have always been far more willing to journey to Africa, or India, or the Persian Gulf, or the Gulf of Sidra, to force some Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist to see things our way, and to pay the upkeep of our gods--and to shoot them if they won't--we run to teach Khadafy or Sadam Hussein, we run to bludgeon Palestine into submission for Israel's apartheid "democracy", but not to learn the gospel from the Wise Ones of the East.
But it is the message of Wisdom to be in solidarity with the revolution that Jesus brings, and that the Prophet brings as well. It is the message of all our ancient faiths that enables the gospel that is always being born again--a message of the world-wide people of God coming into one house, to an honored Mary (more about her in the Koran than in the New Testament!) and sharing their gifts and rejoicing before the Theotokos and her Child, who have come to bring us all to Wisdom.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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