PART TWO

CHAPTER VIII

THE MAGI

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, Behold, there came Magi from the East to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born king of the Jews? S. Matt. II, 1.

Hail to thee, Mary, the fair dove, which hath borne for us God the Word. We give thee salutation with the Angel Gabriel, saying, Hail, thou that art full of grace; the Lord is with thee.

Hail to thee, O Virgin, the very and true Queen; hail, glory of our race. Thou hast borne for us Emmanuel.

We pray thee, remember us, O thou our faithful advocate with our Lord Jesus Christ, that He may forgive us our sins.

COPTIC.

UT of the East, over the desert, we see coming to Bethlehem the train of the star-led Magi. The devout imagination of the Church, dwelling upon the significance rather than the bare historical statements of the Gospel, have seen them as the representatives of the whole Gentile world. We often think of the treatment of the sacred story by the teachers and preachers of the Church as embroidering the original narratives with legendary material. We can look at it in that way; and by so doing, I think, miss the meaning of the facts. What we call ecclesiastical legend will often turn out on examination to be but the unfolding of the meaning of an event in terms of the creative imagination. The object is to present vividly what the event actually means when the meaning is of such widely reaching significance as far to overpass the simple facts. It is thus, I take it, that we must understand the story of the Magi as it takes shape in pious story. That the Magi were kings, and that they were three in number, emphasises the felt importance of their coming to the cradle of our Lord. Actually, they were understood to represent the Gentile world offering its allegiance to our blessed Lord, and therefore they would naturally represent the three branches of the Gentile world as it was understood at the time. The importance of their mission was reflected in the presentation of them as

kings no less persons were required to fill the dignity of the part. There was, too, a whole mass of prophecy to be reckoned with and interpreted in its relation to the event, the most obvious of which was that of Isaiah: "And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising."

The Church story is essentially true, is but a dramatic rendering of the Gospel story. We may however content ourselves with the more simple rendering. We can hardly think of the stable as the setting of the reception of the Eastern Sages. Just when they came we cannot tell; but we seem compelled to put the Epiphany where the Church puts it in her year, somewhere between the Nativity and the Presentation, and the scene of it will still be, the Gospel implies, Bethlehem. "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, Behold, there came Magi from the East to Jerusalem." And at the direction of Herod, and guided by the Star they came to Bethlehem and offered their gifts and their worship. "They saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh."

We try to get before us what would have been the mind of S. Mary through all these happenings which attended the birth of her Child. What is written of her

here is no doubt characteristic: "Mary kept all these and pondered them in her heart." Wonder at the ways of God had been hers for so many months now— wonder, with devout meditation upon their meaning.

Where there is no resistance to God's will but only the desire to know it more fully there is always the gradual assimilation of the truth. S. Mary moves in a realm of mystery from the moment of the Annunciation to the very end of her life. It is so difficult to understand what is the meaning of God in this unspeakable gift of a Son conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and in the constant accompaniment of pain and disaster and disappointment which is the unfolding experience of her life in relation to Him. But we feel in her no speculation, no rebellion, no insistence on knowing more; but we feel that there must have been a growing appreciation of the work of God, unhesitating acceptance of His will. Just to keep things in one's heart is so often the best way of arriving at an understanding of them; is the best way, at least, of arriving at the conviction that what we in fact need to understand is not so much what God does as that it is God Who does it. Our true aim in life is to understand God, and through that understanding we shall sufficiently understand life. Failure in human life is commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless to expect to understand it without reference to the mind of God.