Advent Calendar – 20 December
Nativity Stories: Chief Priests and Scribes of the People
Speak truth to power. They make it sound so easy, as if they were saying, Speak in full sentences or Don’t talk with your mouth full. As if they would leave their villages and fields of wheat and children at the breast, and knock on the palace doors and beg to enter to tell Herod exactly what a fool he’s being. They wouldn’t dare; they know full well what response they’d get, a whipping or worse. Power means power: the only truth you speak to it is the truth it already believes.
And we’re busy enough anyway, what with the law to administer, judgments to make, divorces to grant. There is never an end of cases before us. How to follow the law in a province of the Empire with its own laws? Fascinating questions, and I confess I have learned much from delving deeper into scripture to discern the truth. Such work could take up every minute, but there are also festivals which must be overseen, coming around every twelvemonth, rituals which draw the people closer to the Lord. It’s safer ground: the finer points of sacrifice and Sabbath observation, remembering God’s mercy to us in the past.
But there are days when power is not content to leave us be with our religious questions. He calls us in, Herod, to make some judgment. We know fine the focus of his interest: it is his interest. What judgment will extend his comfort? Speak the Lord’s truth to such a question and he’ll find another priest who’ll identify the text which makes his point, Herod’s point. So we speak a truth, a prophecy which does not lie, a law which is not unrelated, but we may overlook the verse which is the killer, the truth which would undo the truth he thinks he needs.
This day he sent for us, he was distracted. He sat, he stood, he roamed about the chamber, he interrupted. Where is he? Where has he been born? This child, this pretender, this usurper of my throne? How dare he come into my kingdom?
“What child is this?” we asked, to buy some time.
How stupid we were, he raged, how wrapped up in our obsessions. How could we not know of the visitors to Jerusalem, the star-gazers from the East. Call yourselves my priests, yet ignorant of this? They’ve followed a star: it is this upstart prince’s. He spat the words.
“The Messiah, my lord?”
“Who else? The anointed one. Where is he?”
There was so much we could say of God’s promised one: to be born of a virgin, a destroyer of weapons, a charmer of animals; making friends of enemies, hearers of the soundless, seers of the sightless; unbolting the prisons, unseating the rich: in truth a king such as we had not had since David’s time. But instead we answered his question, no more, no less. “If such a Messiah has been born, and it seems quite unlikely my Lord, given the peace which you have engendered in Judea, the consensus is that it may be Bethlehem. There is a verse in Micah which tradition applies to messianic hopes.”
We gave him that, and even then it was a risk to hint the new-born one would be a shepherd better than any current squatter on the throne, more caring of his people, abiding with them on hill and treacherous path, guiding them safely into the fold.
Herod’s Inquiry into the Birthplace of the Messiah, Amiens Cathedral