A Homily for Christmas 2 

January 5, 2014

From the words of the Gospel: 

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.

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God, will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end? 

What a great question to go with today’s Gospel Reading.  You probably recognize that question as one of the “one-question-I-would-like-to-ask-God” questions that was sent to me last spring, and which I promised to address in the homily time this year.  So let’s see what we can do with it.

   

As usual, the starting point is the Gospel Reading itself, which is from our Gospel storyteller for the year - St Matthew.  The truth is that this Gospel, like all our other Gospels, circulated anonymously until sometime in the second century when Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, assigned names and authorship to them. This one, he attributed to Matthew. 

  

One of the unique characteristics of this Gospel is that it is so Jewish. It is the most Jewish Gospel of any of the gospels in our Bible. For Matthew, the events in the life and ministry and death of Jesus are always fulfillments of some prophecy or expectation of the Jews.  Keeping the Torah is crucial to the Jesus movement, as Matthew understood it.  In Matthew, Jesus himself says, “I did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” 

    

The story for today about the wise men and Jesus, is nowhere to be found, other than in this one particular Gospel. And every detail is connected in some way to Matthew’s Jewish heritage. The references to the East, to Jerusalem, to Bethlehem of Judea, and to “their own country” are all related to symbolic Jewish landmarks. 

  

Bethlehem was an unlikely but predicted site for the birth of the Messiah. Jerusalem was the power base for the Jewish authorities who continually rejected God, and the East is the land of the Gentiles, the “nations,” who God had on his heart from the beginning when he promised Abraham that he would be a blessing “to all nations.” 

  

So the story of Jesus, as Matthew sets it up in the very beginning of his Gospel, is that Jesus is the Messiah prophesied by the Jewish scriptures. Not the Messiah the Jewish authorities wanted or expected, but the one that is most truly predicted by the scriptures. 

  

According to this story, if Jesus is the new Moses, Herod is like the new Pharaoh, killing all the first born in the next chapter while Jesus, Joseph, and Mary flee to the symbolic land of Egypt. And since the Jews were not willing or able to recognize or accept Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, God led the Gentiles to him, represented by the three wise men.  

  

That’s one of the major themes we will see again and again this year as we follow the Gospel of Matthew - the Gentiles will take the place forfeited by the Jews, and the Church will become the true Israel of the last days, destined to share in the joys of the new age. 

  

The bottom line: Jesus, not Herod, is the true King. He is the true Messiah, and the Church (increasingly made up of Gentile converts to Judaism) is the true Israel. That’s the main point Matthew is making in this story. 

  

The one extra twist in the story is that the Gentiles, as willing as they may be, are nevertheless unable to discover Jesus without consulting the Jewish authorities who consult the Jewish teachers.  That’s Matthew’s redemption of the Judaism he continues to believe in. 

  

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Many a sermon and commentary has focused on the mysterious wise men or the mysterious star as the main point. A great deal of interesting speculation has been written about these unknown figures, some of which has been enlightening, but not really the point of Matthew’s story. 

  

Although…. we are now on the other side of some phenomenal archeological digs and other discoveries that have revealed the significance of these wise men, even for Matthew, and, I think, even for us. 

  

The term Magi comes from the old Iranian word, magi, meaning “priest,” and referring to a priestly tribe or cast in Zoroastrian Iran who had to be present for any ritual of the ancient Iranian religion to be valid, who were the guardians of the spiritual knowledge and of the ritual procedures of Zoroastrianism. They would have been well known to Matthew, and deeply respected, sort of like the Pope or the Dalai Lama. The translators of our Bible have translated them away with the unoffensive term “wise men.” 

  

The Jewish legends of the Magi, which were likely known to Matthew, included the legend that prophetic knowledge concealed on the Mount of Triumph by Seth, the son of Adam, predicted the birth of the Messiah (the Christ) at the end of the age, and were found by the ancestors of the ancient Magi. 

   

For centuries, the Magi made pilgrimages to the mountain, expecting that a star would one day descend from the skies, enter the holy cave on the mountain top,  and take the form of a royal child. 

  

What finally happened, according to legend, was that the Magi eventually saw a great star descend to the mountain peak, but it did not enter the cave. Instead it led the Magi on their long pilgrimage to Bethlehem, where they found the child born in a cave and gave him their gifts.  

This was the Jewish version of the original Iranian legends which predicted a reincarnation of Zoroaster at the end of the age.  

  

And as odd as it now sounds to us, this Jewish-Iranian mysticism in Matthew preserves, in rather startling clarity, the identity of the oriental priests who travelled so far to see the birth of the one “born to be king.” 

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So the question for the day is: God, will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end?  And what have we got to work with? 

   

What we’ve got is a very Jewish author of a gospel attributed to Matthew, who alone tells this fascinating story, using symbolic references to the Jewish scriptures, to say that Jesus (a Jewish teacher and healer rejected by his fellow Jews), is the true Messiah, and that the Church (a movement made up of increasingly Gentile converts who DO accept Jesus) is the true Israel.  

  

And furthermore, we have an author, well acquainted with Jewish-Iranian mysticism, who uses references to combined mystical traditions to say that the most sacred and revered priests of the Gentile world, guardians of true spiritual knowledge, have followed the heart wisdom of generations to the discover that the prince of the new age, is none other than Jesus. 

  

So where does that leave you? Where does this touch you? What message does it have for you? How would you answer a question like: Will all people, regardless of faith and beliefs, or lack thereof, be re-united with you when our lives on earth end? 

Let’s take a minute to share whatever is on your mind or heart. 

[DISCUSS] 

To me, the key word in the question is “re-united,” or as we sometimes put it “at-one-ment,” which is actually the goal of all religions - the re-union, the “comm-union” of the Creator and the creation, of heaven and earth, of Divine nature and human nature. 

• The two triangles that come together to form the star of David, 
• the yin and yang of Taoism which represents dynamic unity, 
• the Buddhist Wheel of Life which represents the Eight Noble Paths that lead to the center where all things are one,
• the symbol of Islam, which is not the Crescent and Star but the Arabic script for Allah, meaning “The One” - 
• the cross which was a symbol of the intersection of the horizontal and vertical axes of reality at the point of union even before Jesus died on one - 

all the symbols of the major wisdom traditions speak of their ultimate vision of unity.  

For me, Jesus is the Teacher, Guide and Friend who I follow. But I am perfectly ready to go with the Gospel of John, in which Jesus is the manifestation of Logos, the Word, the Wisdom, the Self-Manifestation of God, and to allow for other manifestations, at least to other degrees, of the One God at the center of all things. 

    

So in the end, the bottom line for me is that the sooner we all stop being so fundamentalist about who is right and who is wrong, and the sooner we can commit ourselves to the re union of all people, religions, and things, and the better we can set boundaries on the behavior of extremists without demonizing other religions, the sooner we will all reach our vision, which, to me, is the dream of God himself. 

As a thirteenth century Suffi put it, 

“Beyond our ideas of right and wrong, 

there is a field.  

I’ll meet you there.”

Unto Him be worship and power, dominion and splendor, for ever and ever.  Amen.