December 23

Strangers Asking the Way

A stranger on the far side of the world is building a family tree, and the branch they have reached turns out to be yours. They were reading old records for their own reasons, they found something that belongs to you, and they took the trouble to tell you so.

The men in Matthew's account are foreigners. They travelled in from outside the country, and the covenant God made with Israel was not theirs. They set out anyway, they covered the distance, and when they ran out of what they knew they stopped and asked.

The words about the star are lines from an oracle spoken by Balaam, a man sent for by a king of Moab who wanted Israel cursed. He was no Israelite himself, and he handed the king a blessing on the people he had been sent to curse. Matthew never says whether the men from the east knew those lines. Balaam named a star. These men saw one.

I see him, but not now. I see him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob. A sceptre will rise out of Israel.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem and asked: Where is he who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him.

Numbers 24:17a; Matthew 2:1-2

The oracle is honest about the distance. Balaam says he sees him, and each time he says it he adds the limit, not now and not near. Then two things come up out of the same people, called Jacob in one line and Israel in the next. Whatever he was looking at would rise inside one nation.

The men who acted on it belonged to neither name. They give a reason and an intention in a single sentence, and both are in their own mouths: they saw his star, and they have come to worship him. The star has an owner in that sentence, and where to find him is what they have to ask for. A sign does not have to be explained before it can be followed.

They also had to stop and ask. Bethlehem is named in the line before their question, and they were in the capital, enquiring in a city not their own after the king they had come to find. What they had was enough to get them onto the road and not enough to finish it.

If there is somebody you love who stands outside all of this, hold this passage beside them. God reached these men with a star, hung where people with no claim on him could see it. You are not his only route to a person you love. Pray for them by name, and keep praying through the long stretches when nothing appears to be moving.

Lord of every country, foreigners found their way to your Son with little to go on. Keep me from writing anybody off. Set something in the path of the ones I pray for, and let them follow it.