Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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have done so. It is a choice, a challenge to trouble anyone. And we can see why.
Thirdly, there was trouble because Herod was, in fact, confronted with the unknown. There was coming into the known, or at least comprehensible situation, the unknown the incomprehensible something, the incalculable factor that upsets the schemes of every planner. Into the plain human world came God, the one factor in life which is by definition beyond our grasp and beyond our control. There is nothing like the unknown to lay the cold clutch of fear on our hearts. We have all seen it, and most of us have experienced it. Felt it maybe, as the ambulance surged through the hospital gates, or when as children we stepped into the big new school alone, or when we went into our first job. And certainly we have felt it, or shall one day feel it in ourselves or in the world about us tells us that death after all is a real thing and not a name.
The coming of Jesus means the coming of the Unknown. “What will this mean for my Kingdom?” asked Herod. And what will this mean for my kingdom asks everyone whose territory Christ has invaded. Where is he that is born King of the Jews? And trouble fell on everyone—in chancery, in university, and in Church. And that is the beginning of hope. If it were not so, I should have found something else to talk about.
When people are troubled, there is always hope. I will tell you how I have seen that happen. I have seen people begin their studies in a severe self-confidence, a far greater confidence that they have settled the problems of theology than I dare admit. And I have no hope of their learning anything worth learning until they begin to be troubled, to see that the ocean of truth is a bigger thing than the parish pool they thought of. Bishop Westcott was once asked why there is in the Prayer Book no prayer for theological students. “Oh, but,” he said, “there is.” “Which is it then?” “Why the one headed ‘for those at sea.’’’ Well let me have the person that is at sea, rather than the one who is roped up to his homeport, and has never ventured out. Whenever a person is troubled in mind, in spirit, or in conscience, there is hope. How? Why? Let us look into this.
THE TROUBLE THAT IS THE GROUND OF HOPE
Of course not every sort of trouble has this result. But let us run the film through backwards and see the result. Why were the people troubled? You will remember the answers we suggested: 1) because the authorities had not been consulted. Don’t think that I’m saying that to commend anarchy—the complete absence of authorities. What was happening was that the old partial authorities were being superceded by a new authority. It is not a bad thing for a political tyranny like Herod’s to be superceded. It is not a bad thing for a religious tyranny that will see no light but its own to be superceded. But more, I spoke of that one small sphere where at least, if nowhere else, we ourselves are in authority. We are in authority, and that is precisely the trouble. We are the center of our own circle. All roads lead, not to Rome, but to ourselves. That is the very essence of untouched human life. And for that to be ended is always a good thing.
That is one of the best things about Christmas. It takes people out of the center of their own interests and affections. For once at least in the year we consider others—their happiness, their well-being, not our own. There’s the meaning of the Christmas classic about Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and the rest of them. What happened to the old miser Scrooge? He ceased to be his own authority. Of course it was upsetting but it was worth it in the end.
That is why Christianity is the hope of the world. It is no mere annual festival of good nature. If it means anything at all, it means the dethronement of self. That leads at once to the next thing. We have begun to speak of it already.
A new set of standards was involved. Not before time either. The old standards arose out of the very simple principle that we have been considering, the principle that I come first and that anything that ministers to my pleasure, to my self-satisfaction, and to my will power is right. And the new standards mean turning that upside down.
Now I am not taking back anything of what I have said. That does cause trouble. It is profoundly upsetting. If you have ever given up, for the benefit of someone else, a course of action you have cherished, you will know how upsetting that is. Charington knew, when he gave up the million pounds that he could have had in his father’s brewery because he saw a drunken lout knock his wife into the gutter. I do not say that that was an easy thing to do. But I do say that there is the way of hope for humanity. Look at this thing on the purely human level, as, for the moment I am prepared to do. There is something in the way of Bethlehem that can out do all of Herod’s Palace.
But how can these things be? Who can reorient his life around a new center? Who can set himself to follow so new, so exciting a standard? There is one thing more to say and it is the key to all the rest.
They were troubled by the coming of the unknown. The old was confronted by the new and altogether different. The old situation was known, yes, but it was too well known. We know so well the old circle of life about ourselves as pivot, because the wheels always turn so. There is no changing it. Of course we know that way of life, we have lived it thirty years, and our ancestors before us have lived it 3,000 years, or is it 30,000, or 300,000 years? We know the old standards, friendly, comfortable standards, because they are the standards of all history and there is no changing them. Revolutions can no more affect them than the daily revolution of the sun can affect the question—“which is the top nation”?
There is one hope only. That into the wicked, weary old world should come something new, something entirely different from the world. And that is what happened. God came, the eternal Unknown, and yet now also known, because known to us in the love and might of Jesus. The first and last word of Christmas is Immanuel—God with us.
“He deigns in flesh to appear,
widest extremes to join.”
God is with us. It may well trouble us. But when it has troubled us into repentance, shaken our hidebound crooked souls to new configurations, made us indeed new creatures; then there is the hope of the world.
“And we the life of God shall know,
for God is manifest below.”
—Charles Wesley
“THE WISE MEN”—Matthew 2.11
[Preached seventeen times between 12/28/41 at Slater Street Wednesbury to 1/6/91 at Newfield]
Frankly, I do not understand the wise men. I do not know quite what they are doing in the Bible, nor how they got there. The rest of the characters in the birth story are of a piece and belong together. Mary and Joseph and their friends and kinfolk represent the best of Jewish piety; the shepherds obviously have their place in the city of David, even Herod, bloody villain as he was, is quite understandable and certainly not unique. But astrologers don’t fit the Bible as these others do, and I shall not pretend to be able to make any explanation of how they got to Bethlehem and of what the star told them. I shall try to do something much simpler than that. I shall simply look at the three things we are told the wise men did.
THEY CAME
“We have seen,” they said, “his star in the east, and we have come.” Well that is pretty simple, I admit. But it is more than some folk do. They do not all get as far as that. They do not all come. For every one man that stops at the burning bush, there are a hundred that just warm their hands at it and pass on. There were so many more imposing and attractive places that they might have gone, places where they might much more reasonably have hoped to find the insight and the wisdom they wanted. They could well have passed Bethlehem by. They could have gone to Rome and offered their homage to Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, who fourteen years before, had established himself as the head of the greatest empire the world had ever known. There was a reason to go there. There was a great deal to take notice of in Rome.
Or being wise men, they might have passed Bethlehem and gone on to Athens to pay their respects to the shades of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle, to converse with their successors, the philosophers who still lectured and argued in the Porch and the Garden. There would have been reason in that too. Greek thinking had its weaknesses, but it too, like the Roman Empire, was the greatest thing of its kind that had ever been. Nowhere else had the same fearless, almost fierce clarity