King Charles the Martyr

Sermon at the Annual Mass of the Society of King Charles the Martyr

All Saints Church, Ashmont, Boston

January 26, 2013

At the end of Dom Gregory Dix’s classic The Shape of the Liturgy is the famous “purple passage,” beloved of generations of seminarians, which begins with the question: “Was ever another command so obeyed?” After rehearsing the many different settings and circumstances in which Christians have celebrated the Eucharist, Dix notes how it also marks the great turning points in history. His examples include: “Alfred wandering defeated by the Danes staying his soul on this, while medieval England struggled to be born; and Charles I also, on that morning of his execution when medieval England came to its final end.”[1]

Over the years, I’ve wondered what Dix meant by that phrase. In what sense did medieval England come to its final end on the scaffold outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall? Histories of the English Civil War, or the Great Rebellion if you prefer, tend to focus on the religious and political dimensions of the conflict. The strife among Anglicans, Puritans, Presbyterians, and Independents took place in the context of the bloody religious wars of seventeenth century Europe – a world in which the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom no longer obtained. And fighting over such questions as who had the right to raise taxes and command the army, King and Parliament were engaged in a constitutional struggle for control of the administrative apparatus of an early modern state – in a setting where medieval feudalism was a thing of the past.

Yet the conventional histories tend to pass over a third dimension, namely, the social question. The King and his supporters, on one hand, adhered to a traditional vision of society inherited from the Middle Ages. His Puritan opponents, on the other, exhibited very different social attitudes arising from a radically new and distinctively modern mindset. This morning I want to explore the differences between these two world views, and their implications for us today.

The surroundings of this gothic-revival church of All Saints remind us that one hallmark of Western Catholic identity is reverence and respect for the Middle Ages. The leaders of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival – from the Tractarians John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, to the novelist Charlotte Yonge, to the slum priests Charles Lowder and Alexander Herriot Mackonochie – looked back on the medieval world as embodying a more just and Christian society than their own; and by more than a coincidence they also venerated King Charles as a model Christian ruler.

Medieval social thought drew on the Bible, the Fathers, the Scholastic theologians, and the canon lawyers. Its most basic assumption was that the Christian faith supplies a moral standard for all human institutions and activities. And it saw society as an organism composed of an array of different classes of people unified by a web of reciprocal obligations, duties, and rights. It is sometimes claimed that the idea of human rights is an invention of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; but this is not true. Rights were well known to medieval canon and civil law. The difference was that they generally attached to groups rather than to individuals. If you were a noble, you shared in the rights belonging to your class; if you were a monk, you shared in the rights belonging to your abbey; if you were a craftsman, you shared in the rights belonging to your guild. Corresponding to all these rights was a comprehensive set of duties and obligations towards other groups and towards society at large. Other people’s rights constituted your duties, and vice versa. If you were a knight, for example, you had a duty to protect and defend the Church; but you also had a right to the Church’s prayers for your soul in return.

At its worst, this vision of social order was hierarchical, paternalistic, and marked by gross inequality. Yet, while everyone was expected to know his place, there was at least a place for everyone. Even peasants enjoyed definite rights in return for service to their lords – most notably the right to equitable access to the land to raise sufficient crops and livestock for subsistence and survival after paying their rents.

Moreover, under the guidance of the Church, an ethic of mutual responsibility and care pervaded the entire social organism, extending even to beggars. A great social gulf may have been fixed between “the rich man in his castle, and the poor man at his gate,”[2] but on the basis of such Gospel texts as the parable of Dives and Lazarus,[3] the rich man understood that his eternal salvation depended on ensuring that the poor man did not starve to death. The greatest saints of the Middle Ages were known for their generosity to the poor, not only in individual almsgiving but also in the founding of hostels, hospitals, and orphanages.

          By the 1600s, this organic social vision had come under extreme pressure from changing political and economic conditions. Nevertheless, the government of King Charles I did its best to perpetuate the best social ideals inherited from the Middle Ages: particularly by upholding the notion of the common good over and against a rising tide of economic individualism. In one of his sermons, Archbishop William Laud remarked: “If any be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain.”[4]

          Yet private interests were asserting themselves vigorously. A prime example was the accelerating pace of agricultural enclosures. Stimulated by the burgeoning wool trade, landowners discovered that they could vastly increase profits by evicting their peasants, and giving over what had previously been commons to sheep-grazing and grain production. However, acting through such judicial bodies as the Star Chamber, the king’s ministers – notably Archbishop Laud himself – vigorously defended the rights of tenants whose landlords were trying unjustly to evict them.

          Despite the government’s efforts, however, the enclosures proceeded apace, creating new populations of displaced persons destitute of any lawful means of earning a living. The Tudor and early Stuart governments realized that purely private charity was no longer adequate to address this situation, and enacted a series of Poor Laws designed to provide employment for those willing to work, and relief for those unable to work. In Charles’ reign, work houses for the able-bodied poor were to be established in every parish, administered by the churchwardens and funded by tithes.

          In economic policy, Charles’s government attempted to regulate industry and commerce by means of patents and monopolies. At its worst, this system became an instrument of favoritism and a means of raising money for the Crown in the absence of a sitting Parliament. At its best, however, it represented a sincere if clumsy effort to promote the common good through just wages, fair prices, and high employment.

Charles’s love of the arts reminds us that the common good has a cultural and aesthetic dimension as well. Although his tastes were baroque and not gothic, Charles’s patronage of painters and architects witnessed in a thoroughly medieval way against the stark utilitarianism of the Puritans who condemned such pursuits as so much frivolity. More than two centuries later, the Arts and Crafts Movement, so well represented in this church building, sought to counter the dehumanizing effects of mechanization and assembly-line production by encouraging designers and artists to create handcrafted objects of beauty.

          The Puritans were driven by a radically different social vision. Although both Royalists and Puritans were to be found at all levels of society, contemporary writers remarked that Puritanism found its greatest support among what were then called “the middle sort of men” – neither nobles and aristocrats, nor peasants and manual laborers, but merchants, craftsmen, members of the professions, and the rural gentry – those whom we describe today as the Middle Classes.

The Puritan social ethic was one of economic individualism and self-reliance. In its doctrine of double-predestination, Calvinist theology taught that before the foundation of the world God had fore-ordained every individual to either eternal salvation or eternal damnation. The burning question, then, was how one might know that one was among the elect. Certain strands of Calvinism had come up with the answer that economic and material prosperity in the pursuit of one’s calling was the surest sign of God’s favor. At the same time, Puritanism condemned all luxury, idleness, and conspicuous consumption. Thus, through a disciplined life of hard work, frugality, and the shunning of worldly pleasures, the Puritan merchant or businessman sought to glorify God and assure himself of his own salvation.

Those imbued with this ethos chafed under the restrictions of a royal government that sought to put the common good of society above the individual interests of private entrepreneurs. Among its first actions, the Long Parliament of 1640 dismantled the government’s economic system of monopolies and patents. Later, during the Interregnum, the government of Oliver Cromwell attempted to legislate with a vengeance what we would today call private morality – banning such activities as plays, dancing, and public drunkenness. But it abandoned all efforts to regulate business and commercial activity according to any principles of social ethics. From the 1650s on, the idea gained traction in England that the conduct of business should be left in the hands of businessmen, unimpeded by the meddling of clergy or other agents of an obsolete social morality. Henceforth, the free market would reign unchallenged. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 did little to reverse this trend.

The greatest change of all, perhaps, involved attitudes to wealth and poverty. During the Middle Ages, the accumulation of personal wealth subjected individuals to the suspicion that they had grown rich unjustly at the expense of their neighbors. Excessive riches were seen as a spiritual snare, a source of temptation to the sins of pride and avarice – the best remedy for which was liberal generosity and almsgiving to the poor. But, under the influence of Puritanism, in seventeenth-century England a precisely opposite attitude emerged that regarded great wealth as the surest sign of God’s approval, and poverty as evidence of a flawed and degenerate character. The sufferings of the poor were their deserved punishment for sins of idleness, self-indulgence, laziness, and licentiousness. According to this mindset, the truest charity was not to relieve the poor but to discipline them. Working hours should be kept long, prices high, and wages low in order to teach the poor the virtues of thrift, and to prevent them from squandering their earnings in weekly drunken debauches.

          Against such attitudes, the early twentieth-century British economic historian R.H. Tawney wrote: “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.”[5] A bit further on he commented: “there is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way.”[6]

          Against this background, we can begin to appreciate the full significance of the beheading of King Charles on January 30, 1649 as more momentous than even the crime and sin of regicide. In its constitutional dimension, it represented the severing of the head of state from the body politic; and in its social dimension it signaled the final unraveling of the web of mutual relationships and reciprocal obligations that had bound English society together for centuries. Henceforth, it would be everyone for oneself. It is in this sense, I believe, that we discover the fullest meaning of Gregory Dix’s remark that medieval England came to its final end on the scaffold outside Whitehall.

          We can fittingly memorialize King Charles by taking another look at the medieval social vision by which he lived and died. Too often, those committed to traditionalism in religion and orthodoxy in theology unthinkingly assume a conservative social agenda to be part of the same package. Ironically, however, contemporary social conservatism tends to have far more in common with the Puritan ethos of the regicides than with the medieval ethos of the Royal Martyr. For example, in 1987 Prime Margaret Thatcher revealed herself a true heir of seventeenth-century Puritanism when she remarked that: “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families …”[7]

It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Reformed theology rediscovered the Church’s traditional social teaching, and sought to apply it to the changing conditions of the modern world. The result has been described as a third way that avoids the extremes of both laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist communism, and finds its classic expression in the great social encyclicals of the Popes beginning with Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII in 1891, as well as in the thought of such Anglican writers as Frederick Denison Maurice, Henry Scott Holland, Charles Gore, Stuart Headlam, and William Temple.

We do well to study and re-appropriate this legacy of Catholic social teaching. With its emphasis on the common good, fair prices, just wages, an equitable distribution of wealth, and care for the ecological commons of the earth, it carries forward today many of the same principles that King Charles and Archbishop Laud tried to defend, at the cost of their lives, against the rising tide of bourgeois economic individualism in the seventeenth century.

By trying to point the way to a more just society on earth, the Church does not turn its back on spiritual realities, but rather bears witness to its hope of heaven. There, together with all the angels and saints, King Charles the Martyr now reigns in glory with his Lord and ours, having exchanged a corruptible for an incorruptible crown, and enjoying the peace of that kingdom where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.

Bibliographical Note

This sermon draws key ideas from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), especially as developed and refined in R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Also helpful was Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revolution (1930). A critique of the Weber thesis is found in Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action (1957).

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[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: A&C Black, 1945), 745.

[2] Omitted from most contemporary hymnals, the third verse of “All things bright and beautiful,” by Cecil Frances Alexander, reads: “The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high and lowly, / and ordered their estate.” Hymns Ancient and Modern, New and Revised Edition (London: William Clowes, 1906), Hymn 573.

[3] St. Luke 16:19-31.

[4] Quoted in R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 172.

[5] Tawney, 267.

[6] Tawney, 268. 

[7] A transcript of the interview in which Thatcher made this remark can be found at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.

Epiphany 2, Year C -- Sunday Sermon

On the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

This past Friday, on the Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began. It concludes this coming Friday, on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. I don’t know if more was made of this in the past here in Rhode Island. But sadly, it seems possible these days for the Week of Prayer to go by without its being much noticed. So this morning I want take the opportunity to raise our awareness of the week and its themes.

The idea of a week of prayer for unity among the separated churches of Christendom was first proposed in 1908 by the Graymoor Franciscan Friar Paul Wattson, himself a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Pope Pius X officially endorsed the idea; and the practice gained a following in the Roman Catholic Church in the first part of the twentieth century. Following the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, many other Churches – Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican – started to observe it. In 1968 the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, and the Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity began issuing jointly prepared materials for the week – and have continued ever since.

To some extent, interest in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has waxed and waned with enthusiasm for the ecumenical movement in general. I’m old enough to recall that in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, following the Second Vatican Council, many people were optimistic and excited about the many ecumenical dialogues and projects of cooperation that had opened up in the midst of a new era of good will after centuries of mutual hostility and distrust among the different Christian bodies.

In more recent decades, that excitement cooled down as some of the differences among the churches proved more intractable than people had expected. Still, a number of surprising ecumenical developments have been taking place in recent years: notably the series of Agreed Statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) on a variety of doctrinal issues; the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999; and in this country the achievement of full communion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 2001.

Yet, despite these developments at the level of high-flying commissions of theologians, bishops, and other national and international church leaders, relations among Christians of different denominations and communions at the level of local parishes and congregations, dioceses and judicatories, often have more the appearance of rivalry and competition than dialogue and cooperation.

In one of the diocesan committees on which I recently served, certain people repeatedly advocated a state-wide effort to reach out to and recruit disaffected Roman Catholics as a growth strategy for the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. Almost every time they brought this up, however, I spoke out against it: “That’s no way to talk about our ecumenical partners!” I would say. “I have many former Roman Catholics in my congregation; and I’m always eager to welcome anyone who wants to join. But despite our disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church, nonetheless we’re in a formal ecumenical relationship with them, and we need to stop talking as though they’re the enemy.” But I usually felt like a voice crying in the wilderness.

The fact is, when we look at any Christian body besides our own, we’re likely to discover much that we agree with in what they teach and practice, and other things that we disagree with. The question is whether the agreements are more important than the disagreements, or vice versa. Here we encounter two possible extremes: at one end of the spectrum, a triumphalism that insists that unless your belief and practice matches ours exactly down to the last detail, you’re hopelessly mired in error and heresy; and, at the other end of the spectrum, a relativism that maintains that these differences are all humanly fabricated, whereas God doesn’t care where you go to church or what you believe and practice so long as you’re a nice person.

As an Anglo-Catholic, I don’t often quote Martin Luther, but he made a distinction that I find enormously helpful in thinking about these questions: namely, between the essentials of the faith, and what he called by the Greek word adiaphora, which means “things indifferent” or “inessentials.” Related to this distinction is a slogan often misattributed to Saint Augustine, but which actually comes from a seventeenth century Croatian Archbishop: in necessariis, unitas; in dubiis, libertas, in omnibus, caritas – “in essentials, unity; in inessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

Of course, that formula raises the question: How do we distinguish between essentials and inessentials? In particular, what are the essentials that mark a Christian body as a true Church of Jesus Christ? Here again, Luther comes to our aid. He proposes the following test: the true Church is to be found wherever the Gospel is truly preached, and the Sacraments rightly administered.

That answer admittedly raises still more questions. In what does the true preaching of the Gospel consist? And how do we recognize the right administration of valid Sacraments? But the important point is that those are the right questions to ask. The true preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments bring us into a saving relationship with God in Christ. And that is something that God cares about, deeply, for each one of us.

Moreover, these two tests, the true preaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments, help us to distinguish between what is essential and what is inessential in our dialogues with Christians of other churches, communions, and denominations. Sometimes we discover that on the truly essential questions, we are in agreement after all; sometimes not. And sometimes we discover that our disagreements are over matters that are really inessential, no matter how important they seem to us.

For example, committed as I am to our style of liturgy and music here at S. Stephen’s, nonetheless I have to admit that it’s not essential to the existence of a true Church. If I were forced one Sunday to attend a parish where the music was guitars and tambourines, and the art burlap banners with felt butterflies and rainbows, I would certainly not like it, and I would be homesick for all that we have here. But I would not on that account dismiss it as not being a real church, because the answer to that question depends not on good taste but on sound preaching and valid Sacraments.

It follows that the quest for Christian unity does not seek uniformity in matters of style, but rather agreement in essentials. To varying degrees, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and many other denominations do agree on many of these essentials. There are still many honest disagreements and differences to work out. But the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity celebrates the unity we’ve already discovered, while continuing to foster prayer, dialogue, and projects of mutual cooperation and community-building to achieve a unity that is yet to be realized, but into which Christ calls us. We need more ecumenical endeavor here in Rhode Island. And we do well to make our own the watchword: “in essentials, unity; in inessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

Epiphany 1: The Baptism of Christ -- Sunday Sermon

Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

“Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

Some time ago, I attended a clergy conference that included a guided meditation. The speaker began by telling us that Christian teaching has too often focused on our sin and unworthiness. However, Chapter One of the Book of Genesis tells the story of the six days of creation; and then Chapters Two and Three tell the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent, and the Fall. So, this speaker suggested, we need to spend less time in Chapters Two and Three, and more in Chapter One, where “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”

To this end, the speaker recommended that we meditate on the words spoken to Jesus at his baptism: “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.” Omitting the word "son," or perhaps substituting the word "daughter" if appropriate, we were to repeat the sentence over and over to ourselves, like a mantra, imagining God saying to us: “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased … You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased … You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased …”

There followed about five minutes of silence. Then the speaker “invited” us – nowadays it seems that in such gatherings we’re no longer instructed or asked to do anything, but rather “invited” – to share with the person next to us what we’d experienced. Most of those present immediately turned to their neighbors and plunged into animated conversations. The priest sitting next to me likewise told me some of his thoughts and feelings, and then asked me for mine. But, being in one of my Anglo-Catholic-curmudgeon moods, I replied, in all honesty, that I didn’t have any reactions because I rejected the premise of the entire exercise.

To start with, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased,” is something that God the Father says to Jesus at his baptism, but not to anyone else. Many people were coming to John the Baptist that day for baptism in the River Jordan, but God singled out Jesus, and no-one else, as his beloved Son.

Almost the same words are repeated at the Transfiguration, when on top of the mountain in the presence of his disciples Peter, James, and John, Jesus radiates dazzling light, Moses and Elijah appear, a cloud overshadows them, and a voice comes out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” Again, even though Peter, James, John, Moses, and Elijah are all present, God singles out Jesus, and no-one else, as his beloved Son.

It seems, then, that these words describe a relationship with God the Father that is unique to Jesus. The two halves of the statement, "You are my beloved Son," and "with you I am well pleased," each have Old Testament allusions that can help us understand what the voice from heaven is really saying about Jesus.

The first half of the description, “You are my beloved Son,” is probably quoting Psalm 2, verse 7: “Let me announce the decree of the Lord: He said to me, ‘You are my Son, this day have I begotten you.’” In its original context, this psalm verse speaks of King David or perhaps one of his descendants. Indeed, in the immediately preceding verse God declares: “I myself have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.” It follows that when the voice from heaven addresses Jesus at his baptism as “my beloved son,” part of what’s being affirmed is that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Messiah, the true King of Israel.

The second part of the description, “in you I am well pleased,” contains an even more subtle Old Testament allusion to the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. There, at the beginning of chapter 42, verse 1 introduces the mysterious figure of the Suffering Servant with the words, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” And in at least one of the Greek translations of the Old Testament that was in circulation when the Gospels were composed, the Hebrew phrase “in whom my soul delights” is rendered, “in whom I am well pleased.”

Isaiah goes on to describe the sufferings of the Servant of the Lord for the sins of the nations. We hear these passages in Church during Holy Week and on Good Friday:

He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed.

In short, when the voice from heaven designates Jesus at his baptism as “my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” we’re being told both that Jesus is the Davidic King of Israel, and that he's the Suffering Servant who brings healing to the nations by the punishment that he undergoes at their hands. In light of this information, we may well ask ourselves: do we really want to repeat the mantra to ourselves as though God were speaking to us?

Of course, in the early centuries of Church history, the Christian tradition came to understand this divine Sonship in even more profound terms. Jesus is the beloved Son of the Father as the incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son. Again, this relationship with God the Father is absolutely unique to Jesus. He is the only Son of the Father. He is God, and we are not.

Now, I believe that everything I’ve said up to now is true, except for one consideration: our Baptism. Today, on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, we take the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of our Baptism, to renew our baptismal vows, and to recommit ourselves to living the baptized life. Part of what happens at our baptism is that by repentance and faith we enter into that very same relationship that Jesus enjoys with God the Father as his only Son. What he has by nature, we receive by grace. God the Father adopts us as his own Sons and Daughters.

And so we come full circle to where we started. “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased,” is something that God says to Jesus and no-one else at his baptism. And yet God says the same thing to each of us at our baptism as well, because baptism incorporates us into Christ. In the words of the hymn by William Bright: “Look, Father, look on his anointed face; and only look on us as found in him.” Apart from Christ, we have no claim on God’s paternity. But reflecting on our status as baptized members of the Body of Christ, it turns out to be appropriate after all to imagine God saying to each of us: “You are my beloved Son / You are my beloved Daughter; in you I am well pleased.”

The Epiphany -- Sunday Sermon

Every year we begin the Twelve Days of Christmas at the Midnight Mass by hearing Luke’s account of Christ’s birth, complete with the shepherds in the fields, the angelic chorus, and the babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. Then, at the end of the Twelve Days, on the Feast of the Epiphany, we hear Matthew’s very different account of the same event, this time featuring the magi, wise men who come to Bethlehem bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the newborn King whose star they’ve seen rising in the East.

We really don’t know how historically accurate Matthew’s account is. But in his landmark volume The Birth of the Messiah, New Testament scholar Raymond Brown points out that all the details of the story would have made perfect sense to Matthew’s original readers. It was a common belief in the ancient world that the births of great persons were accompanied by heavenly portents easily recognizable to astrologers and others skilled in reading the night sky. Stories were told of the appearance of new stars in the heavens to herald the births of such figures as Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus.

Moreover, it was not at all unusual for envoys from foreign lands – and sometimes even their kings and queens themselves – to come bearing royal gifts to pay homage to a king or an emperor on a special occasion. In the Old Testament, the first Book of the Kings tells of the Queen of Sheba coming to visit King Solomon in Jerusalem bringing gifts of vast quantities of gold, spices, and precious stones. In 9 BC, when King Herod completed the building of his magnificent port of Caesarea Maritima, envoys bearing gifts came from many nations to join in the celebrations. Several Roman historians relate that in 66 AD Tiridates, King of Armenia, came to Rome with the sons of three neighboring Parthian rulers in his entourage to pay homage to the Emperor Nero. Their overland journey from the East was like a triumphal procession; and one of the historians even notes that Tiridates did not return by the route he had come, but sailed home a different way.

Yet, for the original readers of Matthew’s Gospel, the part of the story that would have rung most true would have been the contrast between the responses of the different characters to the good news of the birth of the Messiah: on one hand, the wise men from the East; and on the other hand King Herod and the chief priests and scribes of the nation.

The term magi originally had the specific meaning of members of the priestly caste of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. By the time of the New Testament, however, it could refer to anyone who dabbled in various forms of secret lore involving astrology, the interpretation of dreams, magic, and the occult. Outside this story, magi do not get a good press in the New Testament. For example, in the Acts of the Apostles Luke tells the story of one Simon Magus, who amazed people in Samaria with his magical powers, but fell foul of the apostles when he tried to buy from them the power to confer the Holy Spirit – thus giving his name to the sin of simony, the attempted buying and selling of spiritual gifts.

Yet, in Matthew’s Gospel, these somewhat disreputable and suspect characters are nonetheless the ones led to come and worship the newborn Christ. The achievements of their pagan learning bring them a good part of the way, at least as far as Jerusalem. But God’s special revelation in the Scriptures must perfect and complete God’s natural revelation in creation; and from the Book of the Prophet Micah the Magi learn that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem in the land of Judah. So they come, emissaries from the Gentile world, bringing the best gifts they can offer to him who is born King of the Jews.

The contrast with Herod and the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem could not be starker. When the wise men arrive from the East asking for the newborn King of the Jews, for they’ve seen his star in the East and have come to worship him, Matthew notes that Herod “was troubled and all Jerusalem with him.” And so Herod devises his devious plan to locate the child and murder him before he can grow up to present any threat to his throne.

The deep irony of this turn of events is that those whom we’d most expect to welcome the birth of the Messiah – namely, the political and religious leaders of the Jewish nation – are precisely the ones who reject and seek to destroy him, while those whom we’d least expect to welcome him – namely pagan astrologers from far-away lands – are precisely the ones who bring him tribute and homage.

For Matthew’s original readers, the story would have been all too familiar. Most New Testament scholars date Matthews Gospel to the late first century, possibly the 80s. By this time, the majority of the Jewish people have rejected the Church’s proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah who died on the cross and rose from the dead to effect a new relationship, a new covenant, between God and humanity. At the same time, owing to the success of the missionary efforts of Saint Paul and other apostles, Gentiles have begun to flood into the Church, professing their faith in Christ as the Savior of the whole world.

Yet the mainstream Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah must have caused some lingering confusion, doubts, and questions among these early Christian communities. What have we done wrong? Is this in some way the Church’s failure? Is this a failure in God’s plan?

It’s possible that Matthew told the story of the Magi at least in part to address such concerns. His message is that it was ever thus. From the moment Christ came into the world, those whom we’d most expect to welcome him have not done so, while those whom we’d least expect have come to worship him. And in the end the Kingdom of God is richer for their presence and gifts.

Occasionally I catch rumblings of similar doubts and questions in today's Church and even in our own parish community. Whatever happened to those old established families of the East Side who built this church and supported it over so many years? They’re the ones whom we’d most expect to still be here, but for the most part they’re not. What have we done wrong? But the New Testament indicates again and again that such questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Why some people and not others respond positively to the good news of the Gospel is ultimately a mystery beyond human understanding. 

In the story of the Magi, Matthew’s implicit message to his church – and to us – is not to reproach ourselves over those who aren’t here, but instead to rejoice in, and celebrate those who are; and then to follow the Magi in bringing our best gifts to bear in worshiping the King and advancing his mission in the world.