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In changing out the Shepherd figurines for the arrival of the Wise Men in our Nativity scene, it became clear that there are no Scribes or Pharisees present. Absent from the beginning of Our Lord’s life, they become all-too-present at the end of His life. This is because while God reveals Himself to both the lowly shepherds and the learned Wise Men, the proud and the self-important are noticeably missing.
God the Father announces the arrival of God the Son by both natural and supernatural means, revealing tacitly that this Babe in Bethlehem will be both fully human and fully divine. The natural means of revelation would be, of course, the Star to the Magi, and the supernatural means would be the host of heavenly angels to the Shepherds. In doing so, God the Father brings together science and nature, set so much at odds in our own time by skeptics and agnostics.
It’s not so much that God rejects the Scribes and Pharisees, but that they show little interest at Bethlehem, while demonstrating keen interest later at Gethsemane and Golgotha. Nor was their lack of interest in what the Wise Men were claiming as the newborn King of the Jews brought about by their orthodoxy: Saint Jospeh was, after all, an orthodox and observant Jew who believed that his foster son would fulfill the role of the long-awaited Messiah. It was because of their haughty intellectualism: it had made them proud and skeptical of the faith of ordinary people.
Yet, here were interesting, if not exotic, searchers from outside the nation, and, therefore, outside their religion, looking for this King of the Jews. These same Scribes and Pharisees will give Herod information as to where the Messiah would be born, but couldn’t be bothered to join the Magi in their search, a distance of about five miles, roughly the distance from Ludlow to Cavendish.
Was it because they thought the Magi were just crackpots… or that they had the “religion thing” all figured out and thought that people of other faiths should keep their religion to themselves… or perhaps they thought that the Messiah would come in some vague and distant future, but not in their own lifetime… or maybe they feared that the Coming of the Messiah would require a change in their faith, or in their position in religious society, or in their life as a whole? Or were they just lazy?
It is quite possible that these kinds of reckonings have become the basis for the formation of agnostic and secular thought which has not only seduced the imagination of contemporary cultural thinking, but has also poisoned the thought of some contemporary Catholics, causing them:
+to become skeptical of Church Teaching, Tradition, and practice of the Faith… or
+to believe that they are simply too intellectual or evolved for religion, and insist that it should be held as a private matter… or
+absent themselves from Sunday Mass and the practice of the Faith, describing themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”… or
+in an ultimate selfishness, claim Sunday as their own, rather than as the Lord’s Day?
This modus operandi perhaps doesn’t seem or feel like an outright rejection of God, but more like a re-structuring of thought… a re-ordering of priorities… or a re-thinking of morals. Heresy and apostasy are, after all, subtle in their beginnings.
Knowing that “Wise Men still seek Him,” those who have the background and learning to know where the Lord will be found, must show the interest witnessed first by the Shepherds and then by the Wise Men, in order to continue a perpetual search for Christ.
A caveat might be offered here: Absenting oneself from a metaphorical pilgrimage to Bethlehem while here on earth, could bring about the elimination of oneself from the procession to the New Jerusalem in heaven.
So, what are we to do: we who have the background and training in the Faith… we to whom God sends angels and stars… we who have received the Lord in History, Tradition and Sacrament… we who know where He can be found?
We can use the Christmas season as our own pilgrimage to a spiritual Bethlehem in order to remind ourselves that the Lord who made Himself known to the world at that first Epiphany, can be present to us today since we do, indeed, know where to find Him. And where is that?
The Star in the heavens reminds us of what we profess in the Creed: that Christ sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. So, we want to point our lives toward heaven: our thoughts, words and deeds… our minds, hearts and souls… and live here as if we were already there. And as that Star led the Wise Men to the “Little Town of Bethlehem,” we are meant to seek the Lord in this “little town of Ludlow.”
He is here, in the Tabernacle, upon the Altar at Mass, and proclaimed in the Gospel from the pulpit, waiting to be found, so that when we seek Him, we will find Him. And in our profound meeting of the Lord in Word and Sacrament, perhaps we, like the Wise Men of old, will return to our homes by another route, that is, another way of looking at the world. And further, as the Magi took the Good News to the Gentiles that God lives among His people, we can become a living sign, a Star, as it were, in the darkness, leading non-believers and the fallen-away to Christ.
And, finally, these quaint images of Christmas which evoke more than sentimentality: the shepherds, angels and kings… the stars, stables and cribs… can awaken within us a renewal of faith, hope and joy, begetting a new Epiphany of God coming among His people to save us from our sins, and re-direct us to our eventual home with Him in heaven.