it 30,000, or 300,000 years? We know the old standards, friendly, comfortable standards, because they are the standards of all history and there is no changing them. Revolutions can no more affect them than the daily revolution of the sun can affect the question—“which is the top nation”?
There is one hope only. That into the wicked, weary old world should come something new, something entirely different from the world. And that is what happened. God came, the eternal Unknown, and yet now also known, because known to us in the love and might of Jesus. The first and last word of Christmas is Immanuel—God with us.
“He deigns in flesh to appear,
widest extremes to join.”
God is with us. It may well trouble us. But when it has troubled us into repentance, shaken our hidebound crooked souls to new configurations, made us indeed new creatures; then there is the hope of the world.
“And we the life of God shall know,
for God is manifest below.”
—Charles Wesley
“THE WISE MEN”—Matthew 2.11
[Preached seventeen times between 12/28/41 at Slater Street Wednesbury to 1/6/91 at Newfield]
Frankly, I do not understand the wise men. I do not know quite what they are doing in the Bible, nor how they got there. The rest of the characters in the birth story are of a piece and belong together. Mary and Joseph and their friends and kinfolk represent the best of Jewish piety; the shepherds obviously have their place in the city of David, even Herod, bloody villain as he was, is quite understandable and certainly not unique. But astrologers don’t fit the Bible as these others do, and I shall not pretend to be able to make any explanation of how they got to Bethlehem and of what the star told them. I shall try to do something much simpler than that. I shall simply look at the three things we are told the wise men did.
THEY CAME
“We have seen,” they said, “his star in the east, and we have come.” Well that is pretty simple, I admit. But it is more than some folk do. They do not all get as far as that. They do not all come. For every one man that stops at the burning bush, there are a hundred that just warm their hands at it and pass on. There were so many more imposing and attractive places that they might have gone, places where they might much more reasonably have hoped to find the insight and the wisdom they wanted. They could well have passed Bethlehem by. They could have gone to Rome and offered their homage to Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, who fourteen years before, had established himself as the head of the greatest empire the world had ever known. There was a reason to go there. There was a great deal to take notice of in Rome.
Or being wise men, they might have passed Bethlehem and gone on to Athens to pay their respects to the shades of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle, to converse with their successors, the philosophers who still lectured and argued in the Porch and the Garden. There would have been reason in that too. Greek thinking had its weaknesses, but it too, like the Roman Empire, was the greatest thing of its kind that had ever been. Nowhere else had the same fearless, almost fierce clarity of intellect, wrestling with the problems of life. How the world came to be, how human beings ought to live and what they ought to think.
Or they might have gone to any of the centers of religion of their day. And Bethlehem was certainly no such place. They might have tried one after another of the famous cults which were spreading through the world, and tried to find peace and satisfaction in them. They might have gone to the Temple of Jerusalem, and found what they wanted in the great words of the prophets and the laws of the Old Testament.
But they didn’t. They came to Bethlehem. They came to Jesus. And the first thing I have to say is the simple reiteration, so simple we laugh at it—come to Jesus. True enough, it is simple, but I wish that the crowds of people who are very busy, trying to do infinitely more complicated things would do it. For the mainstream of the world’s traffic, by now, has built a bypass around Bethlehem. It isn’t interested. It still goes to Rome. To the ideal of brute strength and vitality of empire and domination. As soon as I speak of that sort of ideal, we all think of one thing, I know. But I want you to think of something else as well, of the each person for themselves attitude that there is in business and industry and even in our homes.
There are still people who go to Athens to find wisdom. It is true that the real Athens would be rather ashamed to own some of the people we know who boast of their cleverness, but at least they think of themselves as superior people. And there are still people in this country I mean, that worship at other altars. I am thinking of the people who tell us that they can worship God better in the country or in their gardens than in our stuffy Churches.
I have not the least doubt they are right. It all depends on what god you are talking about. What they mean is that they have a vague religious feeling in them that is stirred and exercised by the beauty of nature. True; but the god they are worshipping there is not the God who came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and who was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. It is a heathen god, a god who is no god at all, whom they worship in the open air—Pan the god who is everywhere, and everything and nothing in particular. By and large, they do neglect Him. They do not come to Bethlehem. Let me say therefore to you come to Jesus—for real power, which though it lay hidden in things that were not, brought to naught even the power of Rome, the power of love. God’s power walking on earth, encased in limbs of flesh, and offered to us who live the same life.
Come to Jesus—for true wisdom, that right vision and understanding of life, the gift of perspective and comprehension of life. For here only can you see the love that makes sense of life, the redeeming purpose that makes a cross into a standard of victory, that wears it as a crown. Come to Jesus—for finding God, not inside yourself, not in your imagination, in redeeming newness and vitality. Follow a good example then, and come to Bethlehem, come to Jesus.
THEY WORSHIPPED
Here is the hard core of the doctrine that lies at the heart of the Christmas story and redeems it from the charge of sentimentality. Christmas is not just a pretty story with a good dose of goodwill and peace on earth thrown in. It is not just an annual exercise in childishness and jolliness that we could no more stand every day than we could stand the excess amount of pudding and so forth that we eat. Let us see clearly what it does mean.
They worshipped him. Now you cannot worship a man unless you have reached the very lowest stages of paganism. The Bible utterly revolts against any such idea. Yet here are these men worshipping—a baby. It can only mean that this baby is no ordinary baby; in fact, explain it as you will, this baby is in some sense God. Now that is not merely novel and surprising, to anyone who has anything to think with in his or her head, it must be positively staggering. God who made everything that is, including us and Bethlehem, now appears in the form of a newborn baby. Still God, but at the same time a human being.
Now if this is not the most immense tomfoolery, then it is the most immense thing that ever happened in the world’s history, an event that means something for you and for me. All history may repeat itself again and again, but not this time. This is the place God came into redeeming contact with our life and by our relation to this we must be judged or saved. And it seems to me in the face of this that the only correct attitude for us is to be on our knees, worshipping. And this, let there be no mistake about it, is the center of Christianity, not in any thoughts, fancies, feelings of our own but in our simple and humble submission to the God who in his amazing pity stooped down from his throne to live among and for us.
This is plain enough and simple enough for any of us. It is the faith that saves and justifies us. The question for us is whether you can offer this man,
