The Magi,
“having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod returned home by
another way.” Thus does the story of this mysterious visit of the Magi
to the Christ child come to an end. But I think that there is a sense in
which the Magi never returned home at all, or maybe it would be better
to say that, when they got there, “home” was quite a different place.
After all they had seen and heard, how could it ever have been the same?
“Home is where the heart is”, it is often said. But what happens when
the heart has changed…?
In a poem called
“The Journey of the Magi,” the great twentieth-century poet, T. S.
Eliot, makes this point more eloquently than I ever could, so I’m going
to read it for you. But let me warn you in advance that Eliot didn’t see
the Magi in the way we often do: exotic figures draped in the brocaded
elegance of expensive Christmas cards. Eliot saw them differently, much
differently. A Christmas card his poem is not, and if there is even a
glimmer of joy in the poem, it’s not easy to find. But there is this
humorous note: Eliot claimed, long years after writing it, that he did
so after church one Sunday with the help of a half bottle of gin! I’m
not sure whether that explains the brilliance of the poem or the
darkness. Maybe both!
It’s written in the form of a soliloquy - a
reflection, and a rather wistful one, that Eliot puts in the mouth of
one of the Magi long years after the journey that had taken him and his
companions so very far from home.
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.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down
in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer
palaces on slopes; the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing
sherbet.
Then 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 shelter,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard
time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying –
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a
temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And
three trees on the low sky
And an old white horse galloped away in
the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the
lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And
feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and
so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this
was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set
down
This set down
This: 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.
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.
Following the Bethlehem star was costly for the Magi. Finding the child,
the divine child, though awesome, changed everything for them. The birth
they encountered, for all its wonder, had hints of death. The wood of
the manger wasn’t far removed from the wood of the cross, as the early
Church Fathers were fond of saying. That’s why I began by saying that
the Magi never really returned home after they found the child. They
were too changed by what they saw for home ever to be home again.
And you and I? We, too, journey in search of the child. Once again this
year we have followed the star, made our trek to the Christmas manger.
If we have opened our eyes at all and let down the bars of our hearts,
we have seen the child, the Christ. Can we ever be the same? I think
not. I hope not. Because Christmas doesn’t stop with just seeing the
child. Children are demanding, and this is a child who makes some
incredible demands. This child will tell us to leave home and family and
all the trappings of comfort and security. This child, surrounded by the
Magi’s lavish gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, will tell us to go
and sell whatever treasure it is we have and then to come and follow
him.
My friends, the story of the Magi has
many levels of meaning and I have preached on them in other years. More
than anything, the story is meant to remind us of just how wide is God’s
embrace: it is broad enough to include all peoples, including the most
foreign of foreigners, however you may choose to define “foreigner.” No
one — absolutely no one – is excluded from God’s embrace.
Today, however, I have chosen to take a slightly more personal and even
more literal look at the story. If, like the Magi, we set out on the
great search, there is indeed a prize to be found. A wondrous prize. But
there is also a price to be paid. At the end of the star is a child like
no other. And this child will make demands like no other. This child
will change the way we look at everything.
As T.S. Eliot put it, we will no longer quite be at ease here in “the
old dispensation.” Certain things about this world of ours will begin to
be alien to us, we will be drawn in directions we’d never dreamed of,
and we may never quite go “home” again…
Father Michael G. Ryan
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