Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Epiphany 2024

Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

We always read the Bible from our own individual and social contexts. This week, as I was reading commentaries on the Gospel according to Matthew, I came across one that compared the Matthean and Lukan nativities, saying that ‘the Lukan narrative has no negative element’.[1] I think that there are many negative elements in Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth: an unjust demand by an occupying power; a journey that means there is no place for Mary and Joseph ‘in the inn’; the birth of the Son of God on the margins of the town to a couple far from family and home. I realised, as I read this commentary, that I see negativity in Luke’s story because I believe the economic, social and cultural right to ‘adequate food, clothing and housing’ (Article 11, ICESCR) is just as important as the civil and political right not to be arbitrarily deprived of life (Article 6, ICCPR). Despite my years of ministry there is still a part of me that reads biblical stories through the somewhat bizarre interpretive lens of international humanitarian law.

But even idiosyncratically using that interpretive lens, and I do not expect anyone but me to do so, Matthew’s version of the nativity is more terrifying than Luke’s. Throughout his telling of the gospel Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses, the authoritative interpreter of the Law, which means that Matthew’s version of the Nativity echoes the stories of the Exodus. It contains a Joseph who has prophetic dreams, an evil king killing babies, and a son who is called by God out of Egypt, paradoxically after his family has first fled to Egypt for safety. We need to remember, as Alistair said last week, what followed today’s revelation to the magi: the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and the slaughter of the innocents by the bad, mad, king prompted by the foolishness of those same magi.

In today’s reading we get only a hint of this, in the fear Herod and all of Jerusalem feel when they hear of a possible rival ‘King of the Jews’ and the warning the magi receive in a dream not to return to Herod. Today’s story is primarily to be celebrated: the revelation of the Jewish Messiah to Gentiles from the East; the discovery by them that God is present in the child born King of the Jews; a new understanding of the mystery hidden in former generations. As God is revealed to the magi in the child they see with Mary his mother, so the magi, Gentiles, are revealed to be ‘fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise’ that this child’s life, death, and resurrection will bring to the world. As I have said before the astounding truth at the heart of today’s story is that Jesus’ birth was an event for Gentiles as well as Jews. The story of these visitors from the East demonstrates what today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians describes as ‘the boundless riches of Christ,’ ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety,’ the astounding abundance and inclusion of God’s love and grace. In the Epiphany the magi find and recognise God in the child Jesus; at the same time the Epiphany demonstrates that in Jesus God has found and recognised the Gentiles. What was true for the magi is still true for us; we may believe that we are the ones seeking God, but all our lives God has been seeking us.

We always read the Bible from our own individual and social contexts, and this year I am wary of just how pro-Gentile the story of the Epiphany is. It so clearly could spill over into being anti-Jewish. Despite the Jewishness of the gospel and its author, and the importance of the Jewish Scriptures in today’s story, the only people who appropriately respond to the birth of the Messiah in Matthew’s telling are Gentiles. Herod says that he wants to offer homage to the baby, but really wants to kill him. The chief priests and scribes of the people, despite being asked for the Messiah’s location, do not then ask whether they can accompany the magi to see him. It is only the non-Jewish outsiders who kneel and pay the child homage. As Brendan Byrne points out, in this gospel we are seeing an intra-Jewish debate, between those who believed that tradition was the key to interpreting the Law and those who believed that Jesus was the authoritative interpreter, so the gospel itself cannot be anti-Jewish.[2] However, subsequent Christian interpretations of the gospel certainly have been anti-Jewish. Christians need to be careful that as we read this story with joy because we have been welcomed into God’s people, we do not imply that Jews have been excluded.

Having said that, I still want to point out that were the magi trying to journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem today, they would have to go through Israel’s illegal Separation Wall at the notorious Checkpoint 300. On Christmas Day I read you an extract from Yet in the Dark Streets Shining by Bishara Awad, the founder of the Bethlehem Bible College. I want to read you some more. After the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the IDF withdrew from Bethlehem, which became part of ‘Area A’ – the 18% of the West Bank exclusively governed by Palestinians. Awad writes:

Israel continued to control the checkpoints around our city through which all people entered and exited … Large red signs warning Israelis not to enter any parts of “Area A” began to crop up across the Palestinian Territories, even as settlements and Israeli roads expanded rapidly beside our “forbidden” cities and villages.

At the same time, Jerusalem (and all the land on the Israeli side of the border) was becoming increasingly difficult to access for Palestinians who lived in the Occupied Territories. A new law allowed us to only visit Jerusalem during certain daylight hours. And then, another blow: we would no longer be allowed to drive in the city, or anywhere in Israel for that matter …

For Salwa and me, it was a challenge just to get to church every Sunday. First, it required finding someone willing to drive us (usually an international volunteer at the college). The second hurdle was making it through the checkpoint. Would our passes be denied? Would there be excessively long or slow-moving lines, making us late? Would the checkpoint be closed? …

As the nineties ended even the most optimistic among us were finally forced to admit that Oslo had only made our lives worse. Much worse. Instead of increased freedom, the feeling was more like living in a room where the oxygen was depleting. It felt like we were being slowly strangled.[3]

The magi, as Gentile foreigners, would be able to get through the checkpoint into Bethlehem in the same way that I did when I visited. It would now be illegal under Israeli law for Herod and his court to enter, though. Jewish Israelis are forbidden from visiting and seeing Palestinians as ordinary people, living in their own homes, which makes it easier to convince them that all Palestinians are terrorists who want to kill them. Herod’s soldiers would still be able to raid Bethlehem, as the IDF did this Christmas. Mary and Joseph would need to go through multiple checkpoints on their flight to Egypt, and arguing that they needed to do so to save the life of their baby might not work. I told you that I read the Bible through the lens of international humanitarian law.

I want to end by reading you T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’. There were lots of things that I wanted to say about it, until I reminded myself that I was meant to be giving a Reflection on the Bible readings, not a poetry seminar. I will just mention the apparent cultural clash between Persians and Judeans in the poem, the way it might reflect the current attitudes of many Jewish Israelis towards Palestinians, and the ‘hard and bitter agony’ any Birth is, when the old ways must be left behind and one finds oneself travelling ‘by another road’.

‘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.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

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? 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.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.[4]

[1] Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew (1993), p. 15.

[2] Brendan Byrne, Lifting the Burden: Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Church Today (2004), p. 7.

[3] Bishara Awad and Mercy Aiken, Yet in the Dark Streets Shining: A Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem (2021), pp. 171-2.

[4] ‘Journey of the Magi’ in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Faber, 1974).