The strangers from the east

A word for the week

You have probably had the experience of a stranger noticing something about your own home that you had stopped seeing. A guest walks in and remarks on the light in a room you pass through fifty times a day without looking up. Sometimes it takes someone from outside to see what those on the inside have gone blind to. Hold that ordinary experience, because it is the pointed truth at the center of this story.

When Jesus was born, the people who should have known, the ones with the scriptures and the temple and the whole apparatus of religion, missed it. And foreigners noticed. Strangers from the east, reading the night sky by their own lights, far outside the faith of Israel, saw that something had happened and traveled a long way to find it. They did not have the right theology. They were not the chosen people. They came following a star and a hunch, and they came to worship, which is more than the experts managed.

Watch what happens when they reach Jerusalem and ask their honest question: where is the child who has been born king? Herod is troubled, and all the city with him. The chief priests and scribes are summoned, and here is the sharp irony of it. They know the answer. They can quote the verse. Bethlehem, they say, that is where the Messiah is to be born; it is written right here. They have the information exactly. And not one of them walks the six miles down the road to go and see. The outsiders travel hundreds of miles on a rumor. The insiders will not travel an afternoon on a certainty.

There is a warning in that for anyone who has been religious a long time. It is possible to have all the right answers and never once get up and go. It is possible to know the scriptures cold and let the strangers reach the child first. Familiarity is its own kind of blindness. The priests were not wicked men. They were just so used to their own furniture that God could be born down the road and they would not bother to look.

And there is a wideness in it, too, a wideness that is good news. God is not the private property of the people who own the temple. He let outsiders find him first. The ones the insiders would have written off as pagan stargazers were the ones on their knees before the child, offering what they had carried so far. That should reshape how we treat everyone still outside, still searching by whatever dim light they have. Some of them are nearer the child than the people with all the credentials.

The wise men, having found him, went home another way. Once you have really seen him, you do not go back by the road you came. Something in the route of your life bends. That is what finding him does, and it does not care whether you started inside the faith or far outside it. What it asks is only that when you see the star, you are willing to get up and follow it, all the way to the humble house where he actually is.