So Christ has come. That’s what Christmas is all about, right? What happens after he comes, though? How are we supposed to respond?
The magi responded by going to find him. If you haven’t read T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” go read it. It’s short and highly accessible on a first read. (For those interested in poetry, this is a dramatic monologue. Robert Browning has many poems like this and they are great for studying voice. You can read more analysis here.)
Christians believe that seeking Christ is the journey of our lives. I’m a Christian, and I believe this. Like the Magi say, it is a hard journey. It is a journey of birth, but also a journey of death.
People like to read the Bible as a book of freedom. Slaves set free from Egypt. God’s people set free from the law. The oppressed set free from the oppressors. All of these images suggest that God wants his people to prosper. And he does want this.
Matt 23:11-12 The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Acts 13:17 The God of the people of Israel chose our fathers; he made the people prosper during their stay in Egypt, with mighty power he led them out of that country . . .
James 4:10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
1 Peter 5:6-7 Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
We hear God’s promise to exalt the humble, and we look for him to lift us up. We hear God’s desire to see the weak prosper, and we look for him to send us prosperity.
I don’t know about you, but in my mind I too often desire physical comfort, leisure, pleasure, entertainment, power, and lots of stuff like that. I expect God to lift me up. I expect God to lift up my family, my ambitions, my business goals, my career aspirations, my political party. I treat God like he is my personal genie, my fairy Godmother. I expect him to set me free from my life of labor in the cinders. He’ll send me to the ball and get me the prince and sing a song that makes me a fancy dress—or whatever the male version of all that is. I’ll beat the dragon and win the kingdom and get the girl.
But I forget that God lifts up the humble. He desires to prosper the humble.
What happens to those who lift up themselves? What happens to people with desires like mine?
It’s there in Matthew 23. I will be humbled.
Darn it.
I will be sent on the long hard journey. It will be a journey to birth, yes, but it will feel at times like death.
I get a false picture of my own relationship to God when I think of myself as humble. Because I’m not. When my picture of God, my theology, comes from the perspective of someone who is oppressed, I look to God to set me free. But I’m not oppressed or enslaved—except in some metaphoric sense, perhaps. Enslaved to sin, I guess. Oppressed by own selfishness.
But too often I’m the oppressor. And not in any metaphoric sense. Too often I’m the one forcing others to do my will. It’s a scary thought.
My picture of God, my theology, instead needs to come from the perspective of someone who is not oppressed. Someone who is already lifted up.
How does God relate to those people who are kings of the world? He calls them to his son. And the journey is hard. It is humbling. It feels at times like death.
And I should be glad of this. God’s call makes me “no longer at ease in the old dispensation.” I’m surrounded by alien people who are clutching their American idols, and I am no longer at ease clutching at the same idols myself. I still turn to them for comfort more often than I want to admit.
I should be glad of another death.
I should be.
God help me.
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