It often seems as if we are woken abruptly from the momentary calmness of Christmas with some terrible news. Two years ago, of course, it was the devastating tsunami in south east Asia. This year we have had the terrible assassination of Benazir Bhutto in whom so many had put their hopes for a more stable, democratic Pakistan. Christmas perhaps represents for us a number of ideals about how we want the world to be which cannot, of course, last much beyond Boxing Day morning. The world does not stop for the remembrance of the Christ child. Beneath the angel strain, two thousand years of wrong roles on into the third millennium.
But of course this sudden juxtaposition was true of the first Christmas too. In a flash we make the transition from the cosy stable scene that is the stuff of a thousand children’s nativity plays to a rather more adult-rated nightmare world of mass infanticide and fight for survival. The holy family are on the run to save the life of their child from a genocidal dictator. We move from the birth of a baby to the deaths of many more “holy innocents”.
And the thing that is often overlooked about this appalling turn of events is that it has actually been brought about by the actions of men who purport to be wise.
Those of you who were at the 10 o’clock on Christmas morning will remember that I explored the ironic contrasting of rich and poor in St Luke’s presentation of the nativity story. The big irony in St Matthew’s account is that the wise men are not wise! Next Sunday is the feast of the Epiphany when we shall celebrate the arrival of the wise men at the stable. But for this Sunday I want to reflect on how today’s Gospel reveals two aspects of the unwisdom of the wise men so we can see if we might learn, as it were, from their mistakes.
Their first big mistake was, of course, in allowing their search for the Christ child to come to the attention of King Herod in the first place. When I learnt the story as a child it was always presented as the most natural thing to do for them to arrive in Jerusalem and say “where is this new king?” but in fact it betrays an extraordinary naivety about power. Rather like Bhutto’s return to Pakistan in October, the heralding of a new king or a potentially new prime minister is not going to be greeted warmly by those who have an investment in the power structures of the status quo.
And more than that, these wise men knew that this new king was of cosmic significance and therefore, in some sense, was a ruler to be brought about by the providence of God. So this naivety about power is also a naivety about how the will of God for the world would fit with how the world is currently ordered. They seemed to think that the world would gladly receive the gift of God’s Kingdom, that it wouldn’t rock the boat and present difficult challenges. But the world is not like that.
And this is perhaps where we need to reflect on our naiveties about power and the ease with which we think the will of God can be slotted into the order of things. It’s a great Anglican temptation to rest complacent in the belief that a Christian nation (if we ever were that) is in harmony with the will of God. And we’re not very good at thinking about how the Kingdom of God might upset or challenge present systems of power.
Let’s take, for example, the issue brought to our attention this morning by the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt: that of asylum and immigration. Over the decades ahead, as global warming makes an impact on the poorer parts of the world and opportunities for travel are more widely available, the pressures on sharing the quality of life that we in the Western world enjoy are going to be greater and greater. And as the Archbishop of Westminster pointed out in his Christmas Day sermon, there is certainly going to be a growing gulf between the Christian response of hospitality and acceptance of the stranger with the preservation of the vested interest of those of us who already live with such comforts. There is no easy answer to that but let’s not be naive about where that collision of power between worldly forces and gospel values is going to come about and is indeed already very live.
But we can also, of course, be naive about power in our own lives and hearts. Do we believe that the will of God slots in well with our priorities and our objectives as we currently set them? Or is there a King Herod within us who responds to God with jealousy and fear? Do we see Jesus as one who has come to take something away from us, one who we need to control, even subtly eliminate?
So the first unwisdom of the wise men is that they are naive about worldly power. The second is that they’re not very good at theology. In fact they break the first rule of theology which is to view the ways of God in the same terms as the ways of human beings. God is to bring about a king, so they assume that this king will be a king as we know them, to rule in the ways that we are used to.
Well the wise men were wrong. This was to be a king who would be crowned with thorns, a king who would gather the whole world to himself from the throne of his cross.
The text that always serves as a corrective when we come to simplistic conclusions about how God is comes from Isaiah, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts; just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts”. That is a constant reminder to us that God should not be domesticated, God’s actions should not be pre-empted and God’s nature should not be made intelligible to us through our own simplifications. The wise men wanted to understand the actions of God on their own terms, through their own ways of reasoning. And they missed the mark wildly.
Does that mean then that we can’t use our own reason to think about God? No it doesn’t; we have to reason about God. But that is with one important caveat from how we often think about reasoning: God is not the object of our reasoning but must be the force who shapes our reasoning. That is what we call revelation. And revelation requires that the activities of prayer and worship, of listening to God in the silence of our hearts, in the words of scripture, and in the holiness of others is as important as any kind of rational thought about God.
If we shut revelation out of our reasoning what we always end up with is a kind of God-in-our-own-image. God as he would be if we were God! It is perhaps no wonder then that the wise men are often depicted as secular kings since this is how they themselves seem to understand the kingship of God.
Let’s hope that our own naiveties about power and our own failure to think about God as God, will not have the same devastating consequences as they did for the children of Judea in today’s gospel. But it seems to me that the way to avoid such pitfalls is by beginning from the utter unfathomable strangeness of God. A God who can be born in a cattle shed; a God who has achieved our salvation through his sufferings; and a God who is with us now in our world of violence and division, calling us to participate in God’s own purposes.
Such strangeness – otherness – cannot be slotted into our systems of power or controlled through our reasoning. It can only be received as a gift – a gift that is symbolised in our receiving the Eucharist. It is the strange gift of “God with us” and it will transform us because it draws us closer to God who made us and makes us whole.
So there we have the unwisdom of the wise men: naive about power and bad at theology. Perhaps next week’s preacher will give them a better press!