And so it is with many stories from the Bible.
They start out one way—which is usually their written form—but end up as something very different.
And I think the best example of this odd game of scripture telephone
is the story at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew’s gospel.
It’s a story that really catches our fancy,
but the story we tell ourselves
isn’t necessarily the story that’s in the Bible.
For example, there’s nothing in the story
that refers to the men who visited Jesus as kings.
They were seeking a King. And they visited another king.
But they themselves were not kings. Matthew calls them μάγοι, or magi ( if you read as much fantasy literature as I do, you’re probably more comfortable calling them mages), which might be translated as wise men.
But they themselves were not kings. Matthew calls them μάγοι, or magi ( if you read as much fantasy literature as I do, you’re probably more comfortable calling them mages), which might be translated as wise men.
And then there’s the number of them.
It’s almost impossible for us to comprehend this—so deeply ingrained is the number three in our picture of the story—but Matthew never tells us how many there were.
It could’ve been two or it could’ve been a hundred.
All we know is that the Bible tells us of 3 gifts they brought with them.
Three people can bring three gifts.
But so can two… Or ten…. We have no idea.
Those are a couple of the things we get wrong about the story.
There are also several things that confuse us.
Like, what exactly was that star?
We don’t think it was a comet—Halley’s Comet
didn’t appear anywhere around the time that Jesus might’ve been born
(which was probably actually a few years before the year 0 AD),
and there’s no historical record
of any other great comets in the night sky around that time.
But at some point around that time,
the planets Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction,
and that’s the sort of thing mages from the east might’ve noticed.
And since Jupiter is thought of as the royal planet,
and Saturn was often associated with the Hebrew nation,
it makes sense that this led these mages
to seek One who was destined to be King of the Jews. [1]
And then there’s the time and place of their arrival.
How old was Jesus at that point?
He was still in Bethlehem
and not Nazareth where his parents actually lived,
so he must’ve been quite young.
But there’s no mention of a stable or a manger.
And those are just some of the more obvious things.
There’s a lot of subtlety as well,
and one of things about the story I like best
are the very last words of the passage as it was read earlier:
They left for their own country by another road.
Going back by a different way than the one we came
is shorthand for something.
It means something changed.
Perhaps we’re in more of a hurry.
Or perhaps we have more time on our hands.
Or perhaps we learned something we didn’t know before.
Think of it this way. Say you live in a huge city with a subway system,
and that’s how you commute back and forth to work.
You live in one neighborhood
and your work in another clear on the other side of the city.
You know the area you live in.
It’s where you walk and shop and play and visit.
And you know the area where you work—you also shop there, and you go to lunch and run errands.
But the land in between?
It’s just names of stations and dots on a transit map—you’ve almost never explored those neighborhoods.
The map may be an excellent representation
of how to get from one place to another underground,
but it’s a very poor representation
of how things actually look aboveground.
Which can lead to some interesting exercises
like this one described by Bill Bryson
in his book about Britain, Notes from a Small Island:
Go with somebody who doesn’t know a certain part of London
to Bank Station
and tell them to take the Tube (aka the London Underground)
to the Mansion House station, while you walk there.
Using the standard underground map, which is very easy to read,
they will take a Central Line train…
change to a Circle Line train heading east and travel five more stops.
This might take quite a while, depending on how long
they have to wait for their connection at Liverpool Street.
When they finally arrive at their destination
and emerge from underground,
what they’ll discover is that they’re in fact
only 200 feet down the street from Bank Station,
where they started their journey,
and that by hoofing it, you’ve had enough time to eat breakfast
and do some shopping while waiting for them. [3]
Once we get to know something or somebody, our perception of it—or them—changes. The way I get around Huntsville, for example, is very different now than it was last year when I first arrived. Back then, Huntsville was simply a series of destinations and right and left turns. I had no real picture of the overall reality. Now I feel a lot less hassled getting where I’m going because I know more than just what Google Maps tells me.
And so it is with people.
Once we get to know someone, we understand them a lot better.
We know a bit more about what makes them tip.
Sometimes we are even privileged to know why they’re like they are
(but not always).
Being a Christian
is a lot like getting to know a place and getting to know a Person.
We have roadmaps
such as the Bible and creeds and the order of worship.
And of course the reason we have those things
is so we can better find Jesus—encounter Jesus.
And ours is a church that believes that no two people find Jesus in exactly the same way and in exactly the same place. In fact, sometimes we don’t find Jesus at all. Instead, Jesus finds us.
We believe this is true, because the Bible teaches us this.
Just look at how Jesus appeared in the first place:
- Mary gave birth to him.
- Joseph dreamed of him.
- The shepherds were sent there by the angels.
- And the wise men were led by a star.
- Martha and Mary encountered them in their home.
- The Samaritan woman met him at a well.
- Zacchaeus spied him from a sycamore tree.
- Peter and Andrew met him on the lakeshore.
- The woman caught in the act of adultery in a place of execution.
The real litmus test
for whether or not an encounter with Jesus is genuine or complete
should not be, “Was it like mine?” but rather did it transform?
Did the person who met Jesus
go about their life as they always had before,
or did they follow a different path after meeting Jesus
than the one they were following on their way into the encounter?
I read an article recently by someone
who observed apes who’d learned sign language.
It’s an amazing accomplishment
that demonstrated great intelligence on the part of non-human animals.
But one interesting fact stands out:
Though apes can use sign language to state facts or to make requests—some even used sign language to mislead
in order to get something they want—they never use it to ask questions.
It never occurs to any of them that another living entity
might possess knowledge that they didn’t have.
One of the most important and unique things about being human, then,
is our ability to ask questions—to acknowledge that another knows something we don’t,
and that our encounter with another person might result in learning.
To learn from another is to be changed,
and I think that’s what happened to the magi at Jesus’ cradle.
We’ll never know what questions they asked,
and we’ll never know what answers they received.
But something happened in that meeting that changed the world,
that opened up possibilities that hadn’t existed before.
And the main thing Christians have celebrated in that meeting—in the theological and historical sense—is that the visit of the wise men to the Baby Jesus
was the origin of the idea
that Jesus did not just come for one chosen people,
but that in him, all people were chosen by God.
God used astrology of all things to lead these men
to a King who wasn’t supposed to be their king—and it transformed the way they looked at the world.
—©2018 Sam L. Greening, jr
NOTES
- N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p. 10.
- Matthew 2:12b.
- Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 18.
