Not as pretty as you think.
In our churches today, the feast of the Epiphany, the three magi show up around our sanctuary crèche scenes to offer their gifts to the Christ child. It is delicately done – a pleasant scene, the statues in pretty robes, wearing crowns, one a turban – approaching the infant Jesus still in a manger, the shepherds giving way to these visitors right out of a fairy tale.
If you read St. Matthew’s Gospel account of the magi – and read it well – it’s not so pleasant a story at all. It’s ominous. These fellows make the mistake of going directly to the tyrant King Herod (a paranoid puppet of the Roman Empire) who is known to have killed a wife and two sons among others, maintained a secret police and a body guard whose future task would be to wipe out every child under two years old in Bethlehem in hopes of catching Jesus in the lot.
He’s a shrewd fellow, too. He feigns interest in the magi’s news of a newborn king of the Jews but only to relay their information to his priests and scribes, to his experts, his think tanks, to track down the location of this new king for ulterior reasons. The magi find Jesus but become wiser than they were by avoiding a return to Herod with the information he wanted. The holy family slips out of Herod’s domain in time to cross a desert to Egypt. I mean, what’s so cute, so romantic, so comforting about that? Violent death and homelessness are waiting in the wings.
Actually, while the story forecasts the influence of this new child spreading well beyond the limits of little Judea and even the Roman Empire as the founder of a new civilization built upon his almost impossible ethic of mutual grace and love, it clearly reminds us that the world doesn’t really want the Gospel of Jesus to disturb its usually violent, vindictive, “me-or-us first” normality – something the Catholic poet known as Brother Antoninus (William Everson) perceived very well when contemplating the flight of the holy family into Egypt: . . . They crossed coyote country: / Mesquite, sage . . . / And there the prairie dog yapped in the valley; / . . . beyond that the desert, / . . . where the dim trail / Died ahead . . . God knows where. // And there the failures: the skull of the ox, / Where the animal terror trembled on in the hollowed eyes; / The . . . wheel, split, sandbedded; / And the sad jawbone of a horse. / . . . the retributive tribes, fiercer than pestilence, / Whose scrupulous realm this was.
No, the birth story in Matthew is no fairy tale – but a preview of the difficulty Jesus and his Gospel will have to face (including crucifixion) before not only the Herods of this world but we ourselves become willing to trust stargazers like the magi.
That is, when we learn to trust like Mary and Joseph, of whom the poem says: But they, the man and the anxious woman, / Who stared pinch-eyed into the settling sun, / They went forward into its denseness / All apprehensive, and would many a time have turned / But for what they carried. That brought them on. / In the gritty blanket they bore the world’s great risk. / And knew it . . . – – – And so must we.