Ephesians 3.1-12, Matthew 2.1-12
Back in December, quite a few of you followed the
Advent reflection series I produced, looking at a picture from the National
Gallery which depicted – sort of – the story we have heard today, Jan
Brueghel’s “Adoration of the Kings”. The reflections are still available on the
church blog, if you missed them first time round.
It's a wonderful picture, but packed with detail. Brueghel
sets the story in a typical late Medieval Flemish landscape– the landscape he
knew - rather than in 1st century Judea. In the background there is
a town, with narrow streets and imposing churches, but it seems eerily still,
dark and deserted, because all the action is happening in the foreground, across
the river from the town, in a muddy field, around an extremely dilapidated
stable.
What’s drawn everyone to this out of the way spot? A
small baby, enthroned on his mother’s lap, reaching out his pudgy hands to
bless some fine visitors who are kneeling in the mud in front of him.
The picture is packed with detail. There are all sorts
of people in it. Some are concentrating on the child, some seem to have other
agendas – looking to make a profit from these fine visitors and their retinue
or just having a day out - but they are all there, in some sense, because of
him. And it’s not just the human population that has noticed that something important
is happening. There are ducks and chickens, dogs and wild birds, and a cat,
surveying the scene from a high spot in the stable, a bit aloof, as all proper
cats are, but watchful nonetheless.
Brueghel takes all sorts of liberties with the
Biblical story, of course. He crams the shepherds into his scene, though they
aren’t found in Matthew’s account. And Matthew never calls his protagonists
kings – they are Magi, astrologer priests. But in a way, this doesn’t matter. The point is clear – Jesus’ birth has turned
normal expectations upside down. Important, finely dressed, mature men
shouldn’t be kneeling before peasant women and their babies. Significant events
shouldn’t happen in tumbledown buildings on the wrong side of the tracks – or
the river in this case. Foreigners from a different culture, with what would
have seemed like dodgy religious beliefs to good Jewish people, shouldn’t be
the ones taking the lead in recognising and worshipping a Jewish Messiah.
The biblical nativity stories and Brueghel in his
depiction of them are all designed to tell us that in Jesus, God is doing
something new, something unexpected, unforeseen, which overturns the patterns we
expect, our lazy assumptions about how the world works.
It’s impossible to know how much, if any historical
reality there is in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ birth, but Matthew and Luke
tell us truths about Jesus– a story doesn’t have to have to be real in order to
be true. They may not have actually known much about Jesus’ birth – how much do
we know about anyone elses, or even our own, often – but they do know things
about the adult Jesus. Well-attested stories circulated freely in the Christian
community in the decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, told by people who were his
closest friends. Matthew and Luke are pointing us towards those real-life
memories, signalling in the stories of Jesus’ birth what to expect from this
baby when he grows up, a man in whom God was at work, a man who welcomed all
and loved all, a man to whom worldly power and glory were irrelevant; a beggar
or a small child were just as important to him as any of the King Herods of this
world. The nativity stories tell us to expect the unexpected if we follow Jesus,
to expect things to change, and know that we are safe in God’s hands when they
do.
That was the experience of Jesus’ first disciples, and
it was the experience of St Paul, too, although he hadn’t known or followed
Jesus during his earthly life. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul talks
repeatedly about the mystery of God’s kingdom, the mystery of the
way God works in the world. The Greek word he uses, musterion, doesn’t
mean what we often mean by “mystery” though; it’s not like a murder mystery, where
we can work out whodunnit if we are clever enough and pay close enough
attention. The mysteries Paul talks about are things which are beyond our
understanding. We can only know them if they are revealed to us.
Paul is playing with his readers a bit in using this
word “mystery”. In his time many people followed what were called “mystery”
religions, cults to which you only gained admission to through taking part in
secret rituals. They attracted people with the promise of hidden knowledge, but
they were only for the initiated, those who had committed themselves, and once
you were in, there were dire penalties if you told anyone else the secrets
you’d been made privy to. But the point Paul is making is that the “mystery”
that has been revealed to him is quite different, because there is nothing
secret about it.
There is plenty that’s surprising, astonishing even,
about the message of God’s love in Jesus, but it’s open to everyone, wherever
they come from, whatever their background.
That was the revelation that came to Paul on the road
to Damascus, and it changed his life completely. He thought he knew all about
God – a God who was accessible only to those who kept the Jewish law, like him,
and most certainly not to those who
followed Jesus, who he thought was a disgraced, dead heretic. But on that
Damascus road, he heard Jesus’ voice calling to him from heaven, from the right
hand of God, the last place Paul expected Jesus to be, and that broke his
vision of the world to pieces and threw him into total confusion. Blinded, he
was led into Damascus, where he was healed physically through the prayers of a
Christian called Ananias, but more importantly healed spiritually by the
courageous welcome Ananias gave him. No ifs, no buts, no maybes – Paul was
loved and forgiven and made part of the Christian family. Through Ananias’s
love Paul discovered, as one hymn puts it, that “the love of God is broader
than the scope of human mind”.
It has sometimes been said that there are only two
things we need to know to have a healthy Christian faith; first, that there is
a God, and, second, that it isn’t us. That’s really hard for most of us to get
our heads around, though. We like to be in control, to feel we have worked things
out for ourselves. But often it isn’t like that, and actually, Paul has
discovered, it is far better that way, because, knowing we don’t have it all
sorted out, we are set free to receive the “wisdom of God in its rich variety”
as Paul puts it, wisdom which may come to us in unexpected people, people who
aren’t like us, wisdom which may come to us in unexpected situations and places
– places we might have thought were god-forsaken.
Every Epiphany Sunday here at Seal, I give out little
pieces of blessed chalk, and we mark the doors of our church and our homes with
the number of the year, and the initials C, M and B – Caspar, Melchior and
Balthazar, the traditional names of the magi. It’s a reminder to us to keep our
doors are open to any wandering wise men who might pass by, to the “wisdom of
God in its rich variety”. Life is full of mysteries, but the greatest and most
marvellous mystery, a mystery we can treasure but never understand,is that we
are loved unshakeably by the God who keeps turning up and making his home with
us where we are, even if we have nothing to offer him but a stable.
Amen
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