We normally would think that any Christmas challenge would be about Christmas shopping and navigating the stresses of the season, whilst remaining sane. Interestingly, the poet T.S. Elliot, in his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, understood the challenge differently.
In this poem the three wise men set off on a journey to find something special but they don’t know quite what that will be! Basically, they will know it when they see it! They follow a star but it isn’t an easy journey at ‘just the worst time of year’, ‘with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly’. Finally when they find what they are seeking there is no trumpet fanfare, rather, ‘Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.’ That word ‘satisfactory’ is so unexpected, so anticlimactic, that we recoil as if at the sounding of a death bell. Indeed in the next stanza, the poet has the wise men asking ‘were we lead all that way for Birth or Death?’ Others, wiser than I, have commented that in every joy there is a shadow portending sorrow and in every sorrow there exists a promise of joy! The wise men certainly recognized a birth had taken place but the poet writes on their behalf, ‘I have seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’ I am reminded of Henry Ward Beecher in his Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, saying ‘In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.’
The birth of the Christ Child, their seeing the baby Jesus, proverbially took the rug from under them! Their preconceived view of how life is meant to be, turned to dust. Their rational view and accepted assumptions were swept away. Their sense of themselves as adults, humans in control of their world and life, was clearly nonsense! They suddenly realized that they had got it all wrong and such a paradigm shift confronted them with the knowledge that their world could never be the same again. They were changed, hence, they were ‘no longer at home here, in the old dispensation’. They understood at the very core of their being what the birth of this child meant; they had ‘seen God and lived’. and just as Jacob was changed utterly by his experience so are all who come face to face with God. Mother Theresa of Calcutta experienced this when she looked out the window of a train in India and recognized Christ in the face of a beggar on a railway platform; she went from teaching the children of the wealth as a Loreto sister to founding her own order and living her life dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor. ‘Be it done unto me according to Your Word’ may soon sweet, but Death to ‘self’ means Life subject to God’s Will, and we aren’t in control of where that will lead!!!
The experience of the wise men is the Christmas Challenge for us. By seeing the Christmas manger scene as cute, something for the children to enjoy, we tame it. We rob it of its life or death significance. If it is a cute religious decoration, then we are in control. We can safely continue our lives keeping God at arm’s length and don’t have to answer the hard questions. Understandable really! Who wants to meet God and nothing ever be the same again? Who wants to live their life as an outsider among their own family, in their own home, in their own culture? Once we realize that we were never created to be self-sufficient but rather were designed to be sufficient in God’s sufficiency (2Cor3:5, Phil 4:19, Col 2:2-3) then truly we are part of the Body of Christ. If you want to live the life God meant you to live then you have to accept that ‘What you want is profoundly expensive’ as the Indian mystic Lalla told us. It will cost you the life you wanted for yourself and put you into the hands of the living God. To ‘Trust in God, and rely not your own understanding’ as Proverbs 3:5 tells us is the true Challenge of Christmas, but the cost is high, as T.S. Elliot tells us in the last line of ‘The Journey of the Magi’, it will leave us saying ‘I should be glad of another death’.
