After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” . . . Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. (Matthew 2:1 – 2, 7 – 12)
In the landscape of the biblical narrative, the Magi were foreigners, outsiders, and strangers. They were auslanders in terms of their people group (the vividly descriptive word "auslander" in German literally means "outside the land") and auslanders in terms of their relationship to biblical faith. By most all historical accounts, the Magi were gentiles and not God-followers. They likely would have been regarded as pagans by the Gospel writers.
Apart from their religious orientation, they were scientists and astrologers, who believed that movements on earth and in the sky signaled some happening of significance. They were observant ("seers") and inquisitive, carefully searching out the earthly world and the celestial world for signs and wonders. They searched, not merely out of curiosity, but because they believed that the entire cosmos was connected and interrelated. In that sense, they were mystics in the best sense of the word, attentive to the world around them, noticing signs and movements that connected with real-world happenings. Something in the sky pointed them to important shifts on earth. They believed in a coherent world, a world held together as a whole, a world in which one thing, happening in one place, had implications and meaning in other parts of the world.
The world is coherent. Paul wrote of Jesus, “In him, all things were created . . . and in him, all things are held together” (Col. 1:15, 16).
Thomas Merton said that a hidden wholeness unifies everything.
So they were trained to be observant, to be watchful, to notice shifts, and then to make connections between the observed world and the more numinous personal world or inner world.
For the Magi, the presence of a new celestial light signaled a shift in their inner world. We don’t know how this happened, or why they came to this particular conclusion about a new star in the sky. We only know that they were compelled to chase it. Something within them drew them to follow the star, though they did not know where the journey would lead, though they did not have all the facts beforehand, though they had no guarantee of the outcome. They set out on a journey, trusting . . . going, yet not knowing where they were going.
They set out on pilgrimage, very much in the spirit of Celtic peregrinatio . . . that is, a journey or quest in which the pilgrim does not know the outcome. The Celtic saints would set out in a coracle, or small dingy, without a destination, trusting that the shore on which they landed -- if they landed at all -- would be the place God wanted them to be.
So the spirit of the Magi is the spirit of exploration, adventure, and wonder, a heart of openness to the mystery of the larger world, and the belief that the entire world is held together as a whole -- events in one place have meaning in all places.
I believe that Magi live within each of us. No matter how well-ordered or structured our lives, there is a something within us that longs to press out to the edges of life, that yearns to go beyond the little that we know and believe, and that truly does hunger for a spiritual journey that can shift life. Something within us wants to believe the world is coherent, that amidst the world's chaos, all things are held together.
For consideration:
Think about your own life experiences . . . even if you have to go back decades, consider a time when you followed an inner impulse -- you followed a star -- even when it seemed irrational or crazy to do so. Why did you take that particular path? Did you find it difficult to trust this path that you could not see? What kept you on that part of the journey?
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