Is Jesus the fulfillment, the end point of our human longing, or is he a threat to all that we hold dear?
Epiphany poses this question for us implicitly in the story of the magi and Herod. For these wise men from the East, the signs of creation point, through their long study, to a question, the answer to which can be found only here in this person they hope to be the Messiah of Israel. But for Herod, even the possibility of such a Messiah is unsettling.
We often gloss over that next line, which tells us that not only Herod was troubled, but “all Jerusalem with him.” Perhaps this is merely the nervousness of a people who know the fragility of their ruler’s ego, or the fear of what he will do when faced with a challenge. Though it is likely that many of them also knew how unimportant Herod really was in the big picture; he was a puppet for Rome, a way for the Empire to deal with a troublesome province. They might understand that to upset Herod is also to upset the balance with Rome, the balance that keeps them safe from the full force of Roman brutality.
It is easy to convince ourselves that we would not possibly be so crass as to prefer an uneasy political compromise to the threat of the Son of God, but I wonder. One of the ways that we tend in this direction is in the way we resist the absolute contrast between these two choices. Large portions of modern Christianity, after all, seem to think it is possible to have a certain set of abstractions that the Messiah points to, things like justice, freedom, dignity. Good things, to be sure, and indeed the kingdom of God includes them. But if we can summarize the whole complex history of the last millennium, we might suggest that the most characteristically modern failure is the attempt to have all the benefits of Christianity—of Christendom, perhaps—without the person of Jesus Christ.
An adept politician can coopt the ideals. It is the person who threatens. And so many people think of Christianity as innocuous because they think it concerns merely private matters—idiosyncratic preferences for otherwise unimportant personal behaviors. In a way, the more vocal haters of the faith—those who want us to see Christianity as a threat to freedom, justice, and truth—are closer to the truth, because they understand something more of that stark choice we see in today’s Gospel. We can be either Herod or the wise men. That is the choice.
The magi, further, illustrate the limits of the attempt to quest on our own power. As the Catholic tradition has long affirmed, the book of nature, and the innate powers of human reason, allow a certain knowledge of divine things even apart from revelation. I love the poet George Herbert’s metaphor of the “pulley” embedded in the human heart: “Let him be rich and weary, that at least, / If goodness lead him not, yet weariness / May toss him to my breast.” We can in fact follow that pulley, that star, like the magi, in the right direction.
But the star did not lead them to Bethlehem! It led them to Israel, where the powers of their natural knowledge failed; it required further illumination by Scripture, by the divine revelation known only to Israel.
We celebrate today, among other things, the inclusion of the Gentiles in God’s kingdom, but it is important to insist that salvation remains from the Jews. By the example of the magi, the peoples of the nations must seek the light of revelation, the mysteries revealed finally and fully to the apostles. This is less some kind of judgment whereby God declares the nations to be all okay as they are than it is a reminder that Israel can at last, in Christ, fulfill her true purpose prophesied most recently by Simeon in the Temple: “to be a light to lighten the Gentiles.”
Even without feeling politically threatened by this message, we may feel an intellectual threat in that persistent question: why not make the revelation more clear and more universal? Why go through this complicated and messy history of a chosen people, why allow the divine purposes to be obscured by the whims of petty monarchs and imperfect men?
We must say that the divine will is inscrutable, but surely it is helpful to remember that part of why it is inscrutable is that the story here is one about us, and in some ways the story is us. We are God’s work, and one theme that runs through the whole of salvation history is that God does not wish to save us without us, that his ultimate glory in creation isn’t the angels, or the perfection of the material world, but in the glory of the human person, body and soul, heart and will. We exist in time, and so we must grow in time. And the Son of God was born of a virgin in time.
A threat, or a promise. Though they choose the right way in the end—indeed, the Church traditionally reveres them as saints—the magi faced this question again after Herod. How would they use this knowledge? St. Josemaria Escriva suggests that we face a certain choice like this whenever the “star” of our interior life disappears. Then we must intentionally seek the path of the wise men rather than Herod, seeking the wisdom of the Church and her doctrine rather than the priorities of the world.
For in this Church is the fulfillment of that deep human quest so beautifully symbolized by the journey of the magi. The human heart longs for God its true king. It longs for true worship. It longs to transform suffering into sacrifice. Gold, frankincense, myrrh. So we pray today over the offerings, “Look upon the oblations of thy Church: wherein no longer offering gold and frankincense and myrrh, we sacrifice and receive him who by those gifts was mystically signified, even Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.”