Matthew 2:1-12
I once visited a dying hospice
patient. He belonged to no religion and never had. He was married
to a Catholic lady and his children had all been raised in the
Church. In the course of my getting to know him he revealed that in
his younger days he had done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, and
had hurt his wife and family over and over again by his actions. And
although he had very little in the way of a spiritual life, he knew
he was going to hell. And he meant it; he was extremely saddened by
this.
In separate conversations with his
wife and one of his daughters, it seemed as though allthough they
corraborated his history of alcoholism, abuse and abandonment, over
the past fifteen years he had been an exempliary father and husband.
They couldn't figure out why he was so despondent, or why he believed
he was going to hell. He soon passed away, still unconverted, still
in despair.
Today we hear about two kinds of
people. The Magi, of course. They are restless – they know
something is missing – or they would never leave their homes and
their place in society to travel to a little backwater capital of an
insignificant people to seek out their king. They knew nothing of
the Hebrew scriptures, but somehow their studies back in their pagan
land led them to believe their restlessness would be relieved if they
could come into the presence of the newborn King of the Jews. They
traveled probably for at least a few weeks braving various dangers
and discomforts. They followed a star, whatever that means, and
whenever we see this re-enacted in movies, the star stops leading
them when they hit Jerusalem. The GPS fails and they have to look at
a map; they have to consult with the locals. And eventually they
find what they are looking for, they do him homage, they give him
gold because he is a king, incense because he is holy, and myrrh
because he will have to suffer and die. And they are finally
satisfied; they do not continue to search, they go home, having
accomplished what they set out to do, having found a savior.
The other group of people include King
Herod and his advisors. When asked, the advisors reply that the king
will be born in Bethlehem, its right there in the prophecies. And in
fact, if they were to spend a little more time with their scriptures,
and who is to say they didn't, they could have told you that right
now was about the right time for this to happen. And they go back to
their scrolls and prayer books and continue to study how far you
could walk on the Sabbath day and how you could tell whether an
animal was unblemished enough to be used in a sacrifice. The
momentous event was to take place 8 miles away, but for them it was
too much trouble. And Herod's reaction is worse. He does not deny
that the baby will be the King of the Jews; he does all in his power
to make sure that it doesn't happen. And later he will murder all
the boys under two years of age, as we know. Herod and his advisors
all know something predicted by the prophets, something ordained by
God himself, is happening – and they ignore it, or in Herod's case,
actively oppose it.
I think we human beings can see
ourselves in one of the two camps, sometimes even if we are members
of a church, if we are religious. It's quite possible to be a pillar
of the church and at the same time have no sense of restlessness, of
incompleteness. And it's quite possible for people who aren't
religious at all to feel that restlessness and incompleteness, and to
look for ways to reduce those troubling feelings.
Some of us learn that we need a
savior. Some of us never learn that. The man I told you about would
probably have agreed that he needed a savior; or perhaps if told that
a savior existed (and he was told that many times) he might have
answered that he did not need a savior, he did not want one.
Christianity, of course, tells us that
all human beings need a savior. All of us have a sense that we are
not complete, that we are lacking something or someone to be
complete. I think if we are honest we can say with the Apostle Paul,
“but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war
against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin
which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free
from this body of death?” If we are honest we know that only
through God's grace have we been spared what so many human beings
suffer – hunger, oppression, discrimination, torture, poverty –
and only through his grace are we spared from serious sin and its
consequences. Deep inside, I know that I cannot make it on my own;
and we learn as we get older that there are many things we wish we
had done, had learned, had avoided; and now there is no hope of doing
them. We need a savior, because it isn't just the fact that we are
prone to sin, it is that we are made up of sin, because at the root,
sin is incompleteness, it is missing the mark. The greatest saints,
who sometimes seem almost morbid in their sense of their own
sinfulness, were concerned not about great sins – murder, robbery,
slander – but about things so small that most of us would consider
them minor faults. They were concerned because they loved God so
much that they wanted to be exactly what he wanted them to be, and
they knew they were not, and could never be, by themselves. And so
they learned that they needed a savior, someone who would make up for
wherever they missed the mark. And when they realized that they had
a savior, that did not stop them from struggling to become what they
were meant to be, but they also became light-hearted, joyful –
because they knew that with Jesus they would in the end be exactly
what God had meant for them to be.
The man from hospice knew he needed a
savior. He was looking back on his life and seeing the terrible
things he'd done, and granted, he was probably clinically depressed.
Saint Faustina said that even at the point of death God gives the
soul a moment so that if the soul is willing, it may return to God.
I hope and pray that he found his savior.
