An Inner Journey

Homily for Sunday, January 5, 2025
Second Sunday of Christmas
Matthew 2:1-12

“On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother,
and they knelt down and paid him homage”

Matthew includes much in his story of the wise men coming to visit the Holy Family.  Matthew details what the wise men carried in their treasure chests:  gold, frankincense and myrrh.  He tells of the upheaval in Jerusalem at the wise men’s arrival. He writes of King Herod secretly summoning the wise men and of King Herod’s deception of them.  But there is much that Matthew leaves out of his account, including what might have been the wise men’s experience of this event such that “upon entering the house, [when] they saw the child with Mary his mother… they knelt down and paid him homage.”  

Fortunately for us, T.S.Elliot fills in some blanks.  In his poem, “The Journey of the Magi,” Elliot imagines from the wise men’s perspective things such as:  What was their journey like?  What was their reaction to finally finding the Holy Family’s house? And what happened to them  after they returned to their own country?  

First, their journey.  In (perhaps) familiar lines, Elliot imagines:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Their journey was difficult, suggests Elliot. And Elliot imagines, too,what it was like for the wise men finally to find the Holy Family’s house.  

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley
Wet, below the snowline, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream…
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place:  it was (you may say) satisfactory.

Bringing treasure chests filled with gold, frankincense and myrrh, the wise men probably had expected to arrive at a palace.  But the place “was (you may say) satisfactory.”  They were surprised and underwhelmed.

And the last stanza of Elliot’s poem speaks to the question, “What happened to the wise men afterwards after they returned to their own country?” He writes:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This, set down
This:  were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

What Elliot imagines is that in their travel, the wise men had made not merely an outer but an inner journey.  Like their outer journey, their inner journey was difficult – “This Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us,” he says.  And as the outer journey took them to a place they did not expect – a mere house instead of a palace – so did their inner journey take them to a place they did not expect – “This Birth was… like Death, our death,” he writes.  And like Peter and Andrew, and James and John leaving their nets and following Jesus, Elliot imagines that encountering Jesus forever changed the wise men’s lives – they were “no longer at ease… in the old dispensation,” he says.  Though they may not have been aware of it consciously, it could be that all these things – the difficulty of the journey, the unexpectedness of Jesus’ humble state, and the sense that their lives were forever changed – [it could be that all these things],taken together, led the wise men, “Upon entering the house… [to kneel] down and pay him homage.”

Among the many ways in which an encounter with Jesus changes lives, the desire to kneel down and pay him homage is perhaps the most powerful.  St. Ignatius of Loyola believed that when we come to know Jesus, we of course also come to love him.  For when we truly know Jesus and see how much he loves us, said Ignatius, we can’t help but love him in return.  If we could allow ourselves to let Jesus near and to truly encounter him, we would of course want to “kneel down and pay him homage:” to adore and worship, to place him at our center, to make him our priority and to arrange our lives accordingly.  

I wonder:

·  What about your journey has been difficult; and where might you have had “a cold coming… of it,” with “the ways deep and the weather sharp?”

·  Conversely, I wonder, can you point to a time when you “came down to a temperate valley… /below the snowline… with a running stream?”

·  Has there been a Birth in your journey? 

·  Or, conversely,has there been something about your journey that in some way has felt like a death?

·  Would you, as Elliot wrote, “do it again?”

At the World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in 2005, an estimated 1 million young people gathered to hear Pope Benedict speak.  He spoke about the wise men:

This was where their inner journey began.  It started at the very moment when they knelt down before this child and recognized him as the promised King.  But they still had to assimilate these joyful gestures internally…  They had to change themselves…  They themselves must now become different…  [As they gave Jesus gifts,] now they have to learn to give themselves…  They will no longer ask:  How can this serve me?  Instead they will ask:  How can I serve God…?  They must learn to lose their life and in this way to find it…  

I wonder, can we allow ourselves to adore?  Can we more fully place ourselves at his disposal? Can we center our lives around his?  And what might we need to change in order to more faithfully serve him? I will leave us with further words of Pope Benedict, also spoken to the young people at the World Youth Day in 2005:

Dear friends, this is not a distant story that took place long ago.  It is with us now…  He is present now as he was then in Bethlehem.  He invites us to that inner pilgrimage which is called adoration. Let us set off on this pilgrimage of the spirit and let us ask him to be our guide.

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