Full Contact Christianity

Contrary to the popular song, the Magi were not “three kings.” The Magi were diviners, astrologers, prophets, wise counselors — not kings, but king-makers, the power behind the throne of the Parthian Empire, Rome’s enemy to the east. So when their delegation arrived inside the Roman Empire, in the court of Herod, Rome’s puppet king in the province of Judea, it made a bit of a splash. The fact that they were looking for a new king only made it worse. 

How did they come to be looking for a king? “We saw his star,” they said. Five hundred years earlier, Daniel had become the chief of the Magi, not only recording his own dreams and visions of Israel’s promised Messiah, but also bringing the Hebrew Scriptures with him. A thousand years before that, those Scriptures reported, Balaam had prophesied that a star would rise out of Jacob. 

The Magi watched the heavens as a matter of course. And when the star appeared, they searched their books, learned what it meant, and came to meet the king. Took a little doing, but they found Him. 

Christians sometimes get a little possessive of Jesus, and start thinking that “outsiders” (however defined) can’t possibly know what we know about Him. How could the Magi find Jesus by watching the stars? Because He made them, and rightly understood, they point to Him.  

As does everything else. 

God often shows us what He’s going to do by giving us a word that initially makes no sense. 

The coming of Jesus is first foretold to Adam and Eve as the Seed of the woman, who will crush the serpent’s head. As the centuries pass, God slowly adds more detail to the picture. Balaam, a strange and greedy figure, foretold a royal star rising out of Jacob (Israel). Many other prophets also spoke of a coming king that would conquer and reign. Others saw a suffering servant who would die for his people. It was so hard to reconcile these themes that some of the rabbis suggested the prophets were speaking of two different messiahs, which they called the (royal) son of David and the (suffering) son of Jacob. During Jesus’ lifetime, His closest followers glommed onto the ‘royal conqueror’ theme, and totally neglected the ‘suffering servant’ theme. 

What they did not want to see was the truth that Jesus embraced: by obeying the path of suffering, He was also walking the path to reigning. It only became clear in the doing: Jesus has transformed the world; He dethroned the divine kings, confounded the philosophers with the good of Creation, and sidelined the religious elite so that you and I can know God directly. And He’s not done yet.

He lived a life of service, and in His death gathered every sin, every character flaw and weakness and sickness of the world into Himself. They died on the cross that day, and were buried in the heart of the earth, and when He rose to new life, He brought none of that out of the grave. Whatever holds you back from the purposes God built into you, you could let it go today and be free for the rest of your life — because Jesus has already settled accounts with your limitations. 

So what are you called to? What have you been told you could do, what has God shown you, but you haven’t pursued it because it just makes no sense? What might happen if you just obey by doing what you can do now?

We have a bad habit of refusing to accept what God does because it doesn’t look like we expected it to. 

It was not just the divine kings and the philosophers who were scandalized by the coming of Jesus. In the prologue to his gospel, the Apostle John remembers, “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.” The very idea of a divine human being was a scandal to the religious establishment…a scandal that had been vexing them in their own Scriptures going back 500 years before Christ. 

During that time, the entire nation was enslaved and deported to captivity in Babylon, an experience that God told them (correctly) would cure them of idolatry forever. The prophet Daniel was an advisor to the Babylonian kings, and one day Daniel saw a vision that was nothing but trouble. He saw “one like the Son of Man” — a human, in other words — riding on the clouds. Now, this is already a problem, because in Daniel’s world, only God rides on the clouds. A human being can’t do that. But it got worse. The Son of Man rode on the clouds to the Ancient of Days (God, again), and received a kingdom from Him. For a good Jewish boy whose nation has just given up worshipping idols, this is one too many gods — and one of them is a human. The whole thing is no good. Daniel 7 says he was grieved in his spirit. In the dream, he gets an explanation for part of what he sees, but this part of the vision is not explained, and even after he’s given an interpretation, he says that his thoughts greatly troubled him, and he kept the matter to himself.

The riddle posed by that vision had been troubling interpreters ever since Daniel wrote it down. And the religious powers that be had a very hard time accepting that a child born to a construction worker could be the answer to the riddle. 

What is God doing in your life that doesn’t look like you expected?

This time of year, people get caught up in all kinds of resolutions–a modern, if short-lived, renunciate lifestyle that would do the monks of yesteryear proud. Now, far be it from me to talk you out of going to the gym or passing on that second helping of pie, but let’s not lose our balance. Like the Preacher said, eat your bread and drink your wine with a merry heart all the days of your fleeting life, for God has already accepted your work.

In the teeth of the philosophers’ disapproval, the early Jesus-followers stubbornly maintained the goodness of material things. If the Divine Order of the universe–the Logos–could become flesh, then flesh had to be good. 
They even put this into their early baptismal formulas: the closing of the early versions of the Apostles’ Creed have a line that we translate, “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.” Except it doesn’t quite say that. The Greek word for “body” is soma, and that’s not the word they used. They used the word sarx, which is the same word the apostle John used in the shocking climax of his prologue: “The Word became flesh.”

What the creed actually says–and remember, this is the creed you would memorize and say in public in order to be baptized; every Christian knew it–is “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh.” That which Christ assumed–full humanity, including the physical, fleshly body–is good, and will be fully redeemed on the last day.

So eat the fat and drink the sweet before God with a merry heart; He has given us all things richly to enjoy, and every gift of God is good, if it is received with thanksgiving.