THE TWO WAYS: HEROD AND THE MAGI
Herod receives the wise men. Public domain.
An earlier form of this article was preached as a sermon at Yale Divinity School.
The magi have always been mysterious to me, ciphers of Orientalism, of foreignness, of difference. Black-faced Balthasar, unfamiliar perfumes, astrological portents. What did these have to do with the ontological mystagogy and the ethical imperatives of Jesus? A first pass explanation often goes like this: even kings and wise men from foreign countries in their own awkward ways recognized the Glory of the Word made flesh, ergo, apologetically, it’s all true. All the sensory detail — gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh — provides color and veracity. And this is in fulfillment of prophecy from the Old Testament (and I use the term advisedly). Hence, Jesus must be the real Messiah.
I now think almost all of the above is a typological reading imposed on the Matthean account, with early Christian commentaries being much more pluralistic. I’d like instead to suggest a way to see the magi as the first of many subsequent marginalized peoples to hesitantly approach Jesus and have their lives transformed by him, working against systems of political oppression, secular logic and worldly power.
In the best Anglican homiletic tradition, W. B. Yeats’ 1916 poem “The Magi” might help us re-imagine them:
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
Yeats repeats the word “unsatisfied” — the magi did not function in the narrative as symbols of earthly power and wisdom, whose approval proved the reality of the incarnation. They were searchers, asking questions to Herod, not providing answers, bumbling along from Jerusalem to Bethlehem based on Herod’s suggestion derived from past prophecy, requiring a star’s guidance to find the precise place where Jesus was.
Matthew's narrative has an imaginary centered around the image of two ways: the way of the world, and the way to Christ. The wide road and the narrow road. The way of Herodian double-mindedness, and the way of hope in the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.” The dense narrative contrasts Roman power and Hebrew scribes against despised Eastern court servants. According to Cyprian, writing maybe 150 years later, “the Magi have the power to cause dangers and mockeries,” and with whom (as with Roman rulers, Greek philosophers such as Socrates, and poets) “there is a principle of misleading and deceiving and leading the foolish and wasteful people astray by tricks that becloud the truth.” (1) Magi were not respected kings and wise men. They did not start off knowing any better. Yet in this story, they are the honest ones who come in sincerity and humility; it was Herod who tried to trick the magi by pretending he wanted to worship Christ when what he wanted to do was kill him; the account of the Massacre of the Innocents follows after this narrative. Narratively, we are presented with two approaches to the Christ child: first, a manipulative imperial dominion, marked by deceit and soon to engage in wholesale slaughter to paranoiacally preserve power. Second, strangers who travel from afar, who bring precious gifts, who bow down are now raised to the position of those who first recognized divinity. Ephrem stresses the lessons to be learnt from such seekers for the self-satisfied citizens of a Herodian polity, a situation not dissimilar from much of the West today. He also calls to mind Balaam, a Gentile prophet, famously rebuked by an ass:
As it is written in the scripture, distant people saw the star
that the near People might be put to shame. O the learned and
proud People who by the peoples have been retaught how and where they saw
that rising of which Balaam spoke! A stranger declared it;
strangers were those who saw it. Blessed is He who made His kinspeople jealous! (2)
Ambrose emphasizes this “two ways” image in his commentary on Luke: “The Magi came by one way, but leave by another; for those who had seen Christ, had recognized Christ, surely return better than they had come. For there are two ways, one which leads to destruction, another which leads to the Kingdom. The one is the way of sinners which leads to Herod, the other is Christ which goes back to the Homeland, for here is a temporal dwelling, as it is written: ‘My soul hath long been a sojourner.’ Then, let us beware of Herod, possessor of worldly power for a time, that we may attain the eternal habitation of our Heavenly Homeland. For those rewards are not intended only for the elect, but for all, since Christ is all and in all.” (3) I hear in these words the universalism of salvation, the immanence of the incarnation, our eternal hope, ever more crucial in our context where Herod’s brutality, decapitations, infanticide and so on seem more and more realities of today. I recall the injunction of being in the world but not of the world, understanding the two ways but not living in fantasy; rather, actually setting out to attend to living children with gifts, but mostly crucially, with ourselves.
Staying in the early Christian West, I’d like to end with an extended excerpt from Sedulius, a fifth century Latin poet, part of the long alphabetical acrostic A solis ortus cardine. The traditional selection for Vespers of Epiphany as printed in the New English Hymnal #46 skips a verse, losing the structure where, in a similar vein, verses alternate between worldly power and divinely-inspired faith, between flesh and the Word, between necessary entanglement in the messiness we live in and symbols that point us towards an eschatological hope. The Latin is beautifully terse and resonant, my partially rhymed translation, based on many that have come before, hopefully gives a little idea of its poetry:
This is often sung to a melody based on Veni Redemptor Gentium (e.g. “Redeemer of the Nations, Come” from The Hymnal 1982, #55). I invite you to experience the interplay of words and melody for yourselves.