Bishop's Column
Posted Monday, January 15, 2007
Always Start with a Birth
January 2007
[Note: the Bishop's Column this month is his address at the Reconvened Convention]
ADDRESS BY THE RT. REV. CHARLES E. BENNISON, JR.,
TO THE RECONVENED CONVENTION OF
THE DIOCESE OF PENNSYLVANIA,
PHILADELPHIA CATHEDRAL, JANUARY 6, 2007
As Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, magi came from the East, saying, "Where is the one born king of the Judeans? For we have seen his star at its rising and have come to worship him." (Matthew 2:1-2)
The evangelist Matthew fashions this story to echo that of the conflict between Pharaoh and the Egyptian Empire, on the one hand, and Moses and the people of Israel, on the other. Herod the Great thus becomes a new Pharaoh. When Herod learns from the magi of a child born "king of the Jews," he plots to kill him. When the magi do not return to tell him where to find the child, he kills all the Jewish babies in and around Bethlehem, just as Pharaoh killed the male babies of the ancient Hebrews. Herod thus stands in contrast to the king whose kingdom stands against the Roman Empire he serves.
Matthew's story is full of polar contrasts - between East and West, the magi and Herod, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Herod as the putative king of the Jews and Jesus the authentic king of the Jews, and, most curiously, between nature and scripture.
The magi were, by definition, philosophers, theologians, scientists, investigators, consultants. By inclination and training, they were people in search of what actually is, what is natural – from natus, meaning "nativity" or "birth." They always started with birth.
When in his Letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul speaks of moving beyond God's Law he is speaking of two laws laid down by God - not only the Jewish Law given to Moses, but also the natural law given to Gentiles. He contrasts both laws with a single promise given to both Jews and Gentiles; the promise to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. He takes nature seriously.
Similarly, Tertullian, a late 2nd century Latin Church Father, wrote: "We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in his works, and by doctrine in his revealed word."
At turn of the 16th century Galileo wrote that the reality of the world is dually expressed in the Book of Scripture and in Nature, and that these two great books could not contradict each other, because God is the author of both. As he put it, "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze."
How provocative that Matthew, a writer of Scripture, contrasts pagan magi who read the stars and come to accept Jesus, while Herod reads the Scriptures and seeks to kill him.
Herod, of course, was a killer. Appointed by the Romans as king of the Jews in 40 BCE, it took him three years of military campaigning to gain control of the kingdom. He thus came to believe that one must kill to control. Kill he did. He executed many members of Jewish aristocracy. He killed his three sons, his wife Mariamne, and her father. He ordered that at his death a large number would be executed so that the whole country would mourn. Obviously, Saddam Hussein was not unique in human history.
Even more death-dealing were the construction programs he initiated during his 33-year reign. Gifted and extravagant, he built palaces at Jerusalem and Jericho, the fortresses at Masada, Herodium, and Machaerus, the port city of Caesarea Maritima, and the city of Sebaste. To win the favor of the Jewish populace, he rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, called at the time the most splendid architectural monument on the world.
Reviewing this record of achievement, historians have concluded that Herod's reign was one of prosperity for Palestine. When one investigates its real nature, however, it appears to have been a period of devastating poverty. There was the sheer cost of the construction projects. To finance them Herod had to tax the poor. Unable to pay their taxes, the poor lost their land holdings to large estate-holders. The economy became commercialized and monetized. Peasants went from subsistent but self-sufficient production on their own land to being dependent on how much they could earn as agricultural day-laborers for large landowners. They were paid in coin, and if they did not earn enough, they went into debt. If they could not pay off their debts, they entered indentured slavery. No wonder they referred to Herod, not as Herod the Great, but as Herod the Monstrous.
So Matthew tells us that it was "in the days of Herod the king," that "magi came from the East, saying, ‘Where is the one born king of the Judeans? For we have seen his star at its rising and have come to worship him.'" The natural phenomenon they observed and followed was not a fixed star in the heavens, but a comet or meteor heading into the west - symbolizing for ancient peoples a disturbance in the socio-political order on earth.
Imagine that you are standing under the four-stories-high Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute for its Sky Tonight astronomical presentation. Like Herod's Palestine under Roman rule, all the pin-point lights representing the stars and planets and constellations are fixed in place. Various rotations, naturally, occur, but they, too, on a fixed pattern. Then suddenly across the Philadelphia sky streaks a star that crashes through the planetariums aluminum dome, destroying what has been fixed. When it is rebuilt it must be rearranged it in an entirely new way.
Herod was not stupid. He understood that the moving star the magi followed signaled something like that for the fixed order of the "planetarium" he served and of which he was a beneficiary. No wonder, as Matthew puts it, he was "greatly disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him."
If not stupid, Herod is nevertheless paranoid. He consulted with his own theologians about where the authentically anointed Jewish king is to be born. They consulted the Scriptures to find their answer: Bethlehem. He consulted with the magi to find out when the star appeared. He hungered to know the where and the when – because he wanted to find and kill the child.
While, based on what he had learned from Scripture, Herod instructed the magi to go to Bethlehem to find the child, it was the star that led them "until it stopped over the place where the child was." Yes, it "stopped" or "stationed" or "set itself" in a new place in the Roman imperial planetarium, now rearranged in a completely new order of things.
The magi then paid homage to the Child and offered him gifts fit for the king that he was and is. Then, "warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country" and returned, not to business as usual, but to business as never before.
As we begin this New Year of God's grace, for the sake of the Child's peace let us who are so easily divided over Scripture take seriously our own nature, others' realities, and the actuality of our world. Always starting with birth, let us expect and effect a revolutionary re-ordering of the way things are. And let us follow our dreams.
— Charles E. Bennison, Jr.