The Dispatch: Many Sons to Glory: A Star, and the Opposite of a Star, by Kevin D. Williamson:
Winter is a time of introspection—and a time of huddling together for warmth—because the exterior darkness exemplifies the interior darkness (“each in his prison”) and that other darkness that we must all give a stray thought to from time to time, when, however fixed we may feel our faith to be at other times, we fear that the darkness may be final. There is a reason the evergreen was adopted as a Christian symbol after a long career as a heathen totem—there is ancient wisdom in the observations of Yuletide, when those poor, cold, huddled masses dwelling up in the same frosty neighborhood where Santa Claus makes his home were desperate to see a little light. We sometimes convince ourselves that we know more about that ancient pagan world than did the people who were living in it—but again, they knew what they were doing.
And perhaps God knew what he was doing, too, with His first recorded words: “Let there be light.” …
Stipulate a real mother, a real father, and a real child. Stipulate that none of these people is insane. Mary and Joseph already have an idea of the divine nature of their son, but here come the Magi with something new to share with them: The first thing they need to know about their child, snuggled up and nursing contentedly and the most beautiful thing they have ever seen in this world, is that He is going to die.
And it is not going to be a quiet, natural death in bed as a happy grandfather. Jesus Himself, as a grown man with some strength and experience, prayed that this would not be true. “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
It is not nothing for a man to give up his life. But I would rather be an ordinary man giving up his life in an ordinary way than to be Mary watching what was done to her son. I would rather be an ordinary man giving up his life in an ordinary way than to be Mary knowing, even in the possibly vague way she knew, what was coming. Joseph, who died before Jesus began His public ministry, had the easier part of it, as fathers so often do. We remember him as Joseph the Worker, who got up in the morning and went to work to labor and provide for his family—an ordinary kind of service and sacrifice that complemented and supplemented and made possible the extraordinary things foretold by the gifts of the Magi. Joseph was the recipient of one great mercy: This isn’t really his story—look at Gerard vanHonthorst’s Adoration of the Child (c. 1620) and Joseph is barely there, already fading from the scene. There was no such mercy for Mary, whose part in all this was not mysterious stars and their perfect light but blood and pain: Hers at first and later—and indescribably worse—her son’s.
The story begins in starlight. But there is absolutely darkness waiting, too. …
Some people get nervous holding a baby. Some like nothing better. There is a kind of fearful wisdom in both—to hold a baby is to hold an entire world in your arms. The child is a complete creation. The child offers us nothing to interpret, even as we pause by the door before entering the manger, worried that we are intruding on an intimate domestic scene, having followed that peculiar star for our own peculiar reasons. A child: No perfect light. No burning bush. No miracles and resurrections—that is for later. Here, in the little bit of light surrounded by all that darkness: a newborn child. Nothing you have not seen before—and, all the more significant: nothing you have not been before.
In the Good Friday service, the congregation traditionally reads the words of the mob: We mock Him, we denounce Him, we demand His crucifixion. “Give us Barrabas!” It is good and wise that we learn to see ourselves in that crowd. We are made of the same stuff they were. But we are also told to come to the throne as little children—can you see yourself there in the manger, too? Down here in the dirt with the rest of us madcap theologians? “Unto us a Son is given,” and Emmanuel is here, “bringing many sons to glory.” There is your message and your scripture, your prophecy and your theology, your Alpha and your Omega, maybe crying, maybe contented, in His mother’s arms. The star had served its purpose, and so had the wisdom of the wise men. They traveled and traveled and walked right off the map, far beyond the borders of prudence or reasonableness or even wisdom and into the uncharted and dangerous territory of the thing itself, reality beyond symbolism or exegesis or interpretation.
“When they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him.” In the presence of that flesh and blood, those wise men forgot all about the star and its possibly metaphorical light—and forgot all about their wisdom, too. Unto us a Son is given. In the city of David, in this place at this time, Emmanuel here and now. Many sons to glory. Not a riddle or a symbol or an omen but a child.
“And this shall be a sign unto you.”
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