The Rev. Noah Van Niel
January 5th, 2020
The Chapel of the Cross
Second Sunday after Christmas: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ps 84: 1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a; Matthew 2:1-12
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem Journey of the Magi. The poem takes our gospel passage for this morning, and, in the voice of one of the Wise Men imagines retrospectively what that journey from the Far East to that little town of Bethlehem was like. Eliot takes some artistic license in the poem, but he’s right about at least one thing—as we sit here on the eve of the Magi’s arrival, which we celebrate tomorrow on the feast of the Epiphany, as our Christmas celebrations come to a close and the post-holiday slump settles in, and the temperatures drop, we are heading into “the very dead of winter” which, to many, is indeed, “just the worst time of the year.”
I like this poem because it uses the familiar story of the Wise Men to help us ask one of the central questions of our lives as Christians. After recounting the difficulties of the journey, the Wise man says this:
All this was a long
time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
On first blush this may sound like a silly question. We are here for a birth. The birth of Christ! The manifestation of God in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah! The savior of the world! We brought gifts! But it is actually those gifts which hint to us that the mention of death in this scene of new life is not some morbid interpolation of Eliot’s. These Magi famously bring three gifts to Jesus, and these gifts have a symbolic as well as functional purpose. Gold is a gift fit for a king, affirming Jesus’ title of King of Kings. Frankincense is used in the incense burned around the altar in the Temple, thus marking Jesus as the great High Priest. But Myrrh…Myrrh is a fragrant resin, used for many things, but most significantly, to anoint and embalm a body for burial. Think of those women who will carry the spices to Jesus’ tomb to properly anoint his body after the crucifixion. They most likely were carrying myrrh.
Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?
Early in discerning my call to the priesthood, I worked at and attended the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. It is a handsome church, with a cavernous interior. Brick aisles, towering wooden balconies, and an ornate dome above the sanctuary. Along the back wall is a massive mural of the Nativity with figures larger than life size. It was a triptych. In the center was the Holy Family. To the left were the shepherds and to the right the Wise Men (a common, if inaccurate conflation of events). The church also had an enormous Cross suspended in the center of the sanctuary above the altar. Now as a lowly intern, one of my daily tasks was to gather all the books and set out the chairs for Morning Prayer every morning. This meant arriving quite early. And I remember one morning, as I walked in the narthex doors and crossed the threshold from the busy city streets into the dark, quiet refuge that is a church nave on a weekday, the rising sun was positioned such that it was shining through the back rose window and directly upon the Cross, making it sparkle gloriously. It was a sight to behold. Like a star lighting up the sky. But as I looked beyond the illumined Cross, to the back wall, what I saw was a huge, dark, Cross-shaped shadow falling over the entire manger scene. I’ll never forget it; it stopped me in my tracks. Jesus born in the shadow of the Cross. Bethlehem and Golgotha brought together. Birth and death in the same image.
You see what we have the benefit of knowing, and what this wise man speaking in the poem had learned, is that in Jesus, birth and death are never far from one another. Don’t let the twelve drummers drumming fool you, if you’ve been paying attention, the twelve days of Christmas are full of sanctoral reminders that Jesus was born in the shadow of death. The day after we celebrated Christ’s Nativity we celebrated the feast of Stephen, the first martyr, brutally stoned to death. Two days later we had the commemoration of Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents—the time when, after these Wise Men gave him the slip, Herod ordered the massacre of every child under two years old in and around Bethlehem. Joseph, Mary and Jesus only narrowly escape by fleeing down to Egypt. From the very beginning, death has been chasing this child.
But this close kinship between birth and death, is not unique to Jesus. It is part and parcel with being human. Birth and death are two sides of the same door. They are the threshold moments which bookend our earthly existence. There would be no death without birth, and there is no birth that will not lead to death. This is something of an extension of the point I made a couple of weeks ago when I was lamenting the inevitable loss of innocence our children go through as they grow up and encounter the vicissitudes of life. There is only one thing we can say for sure about a child when they are born: that they will die. In being given life we have also been given death. And perhaps this is why it was as important for Jesus to be born as it was for him to die because in him, God, who is our beginning and our end, has hallowed both of those liminal moments by passing through them Himself.
All this means that the answer to the Magi’s question, “Were we led all this way for Birth or Death?” is: both. We are here for a birth, but a birth given its fullest meaning in a death.
However, as the poem goes on, it becomes clear, it is not Jesus’ death we are here for today, it is our own. The Wise Man continues,
There was a Birth,
certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
Jesus’ birth precipitates our death. As followers of Christ, we are called, day after day, to die. Die to sin. Die to selfishness. Die to insensitivity and prejudice. Die to injustice and hate. Die to shame and guilt and fear. Die to violence and oppression. Die to all that is within us that is not of God and put to death everything in our world that draws us from the love of God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
But the reason that we, as Christians, are called to death, is for what it leads to: birth; re-birth. We are called to die so that we might more fully live. We are called to be reborn again and again in Christ. This is the cycle of our life of faith. We are to die so that our living may approximate more and more completely the divine life God has called us to, such that our world may approximate more and more completely the divine Kingdom God created it to be. The birth of Jesus, the presence of God with us, it changes us. It puts to death our old selves and makes us new. Having knelt at the foot of the incarnate Lord and paid him homage, we, like the Magi, cannot go back the way we came. We must return home by another road. This is why the Incarnation and the Resurrection are the tent poles that hold up our faith. They are inextricably linked in that circle of birth and death and rebirth each made possible by the other; each given its fullest meaning by the other.
In this new calendar year, as we move into the very dead of winter, I bid you ponder, what is it in you, or in your life that needs to die so that you may more fully live? What needs to be pruned, excised, dropped, so that those obstacles that inhibit our relationships with God and one another may be obliterated, like a stone being burst away from the door of a tomb?
Are we here for a birth or a death? We are here for both. We are here for a birth that will lead to death, and even more importantly, a death that will lead to birth, our Birth. This is the Good News of which we are stewards, the “glorious inheritance” we have been given; the foremost of the boundless riches that Christ bestows upon us and why we bestow our riches upon him: the chance to die, so that we may live. This is the central cycle that holds all this together. It is the source of our Christian hope; and the substance of his Kingship. And it is the reason that we, along with Eliot’s weary Wise Man can say at the end of his poem that though the journey was long and the road was hard, “I should be glad of another death.” To which I would only add: and another. And another. And another. Amen.