January 6, 2005
Show & Tell
As the story goes, they were very wise, even smart enough to be kings. On top of that, they must have had an unlimited personal line of credit. Surely they spent a bundle on the gifts they brought and then left in hardly the kind of place where they usually stayed overnight. In addition, they read stars and altogether well enough to find their way across a perilous desert and all the way home again.
It’s when they got home that makes me wonder what on earth they must have said.
That they found the one who made the very star they followed, the Ruler of the Cosmos, helpless on a bed of straw in a manger? When they began telling something like that around the courtyard, being a king and having executive privilege and all must have come in mighty handy.
No offense. But somehow, the record carefully neglects letting us know how it all came out back in their own precincts, save that history shows the Orient waited a lot of centuries before it ever heard the Good News.
You and I go to the manger every year and don’t seem to find it all that hard to locate. Just now, we’ve been once again. We’ve seen the star and borne the gifts, even if we do have a way of giving them to everybody but the one whose birthday we claim to be celebrating. We’ve made a lot of the usual fuss, often with considerable inconvenience and at great distances, and, heaven knows, we’ve spent a wad ourselves.
Like the three kings, we’re back on familiar ground again, settling down pretty much to normal. Yet if we will, we, too, have a whale of a story to tell all about what we found in a manger.
But unlike those royal magicians, we don’t have executive privilege. We can’t expect people to believe what we say all just because we say it. We learned long ago — or should have — that nobody believes much of anything until they are shown.
We’ve found the King of the Universe at Christmas, we tell them, and he’s that baby in the cow stall. He’s the Word, the Prince of Peace, and he became flesh and moved in. But nobody much listens. Nobody pays attention. Nobody, that is, until all our talk and song and tinsel and light itself becomes flesh. That’s when God’s peace and justice and good will and joy to the world comes alive in our time.
Very nice. I love your imagining these wise seekers back on their home turf, the insertion of reality back into the myth- and story-telling; and meditating on how we go to the manger every year as well.
In my mind I added one incomplete sentence at the end, which is the sense I got — hope you intended it: “In us.”
Thank you. You should write books.
Comment by R Newton — January 6, 2005 @ 11:15 am