Shepherds and Kings

If we say the Sacred Scriptures are the highest source of knowledge of God's action, that does not mean that even there we are the recipients of principles and directions. Even there we are given far more. The content of the Old and New Testaments is divine revelation, but not of doctrines as they might appear in a compendium. They speak to the heart of every believer, and in speaking they suggest at first, and then effect, according to the openness of the believer, encouragements and correctives with an infinite range of nuancing. So understood, they appeal to far more than his mind. They call the believing reader or listener to conformity. When we are told 'here are models' that is true and we have made a beginning. But we could also go on to learn that here are living models with living effects which will reform us according to the best possibilities. Not your own possibilities but possibilities which are divine, which your baptism provided the always active basis of your living and on which he will build according to his choices and directions, sometimes according with our acceptances, sometimes against our willing. For his will is normative and leads to supernatural normalising, but his ways of achieving that end are unlimited. He is omnipotent. He is omnipotent because he has the power to reform every man according to the sublimity of his own norms. He is also omnipotent in his silent selection of every means, and every detail of every means infinitely adaptable to every variation in our conduct and dispositions, never losing his control of us. And this second way in which omnipotence can be considered is in God completely identical with the unity of his action, while for us there are the struggles and strains to move ever towards this view. And those who were nearest to his action in his revelation of himself through Jesus Christ, were most subject to his influence, and rose ever towards him, refracting through this the divine action, and under the divine power able to contribute towards our formation and reformation. For the models here are not descriptive phrases but always effect in us what they teach. Mary most definitely and emphatically, such that she becomes an object of the highest veneration. We do not forget Mary for a moment as we consider the universalities which are present in the first summoned witness of the birth at Bethlehem, expressed in the simple words "Shepherds and Kings", who, to our great gain, we may find to have qualities which, in the way just described, are communicable to us.

In this I repeat the title of a meditation by Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson, who was a great apostle by the spoken word and by the written word, which I remember reading fifty years ago, and which I have not re-consulted. So what I am offering to you in this revised framework are two meditations, of which the rest of this first meditation will be a reflection on the shepherds, and the second will be a reflection on the Magi-kings to whom I shall refer to as Magi, with some final thoughts about Mary.

We are contemplating not individuals, but in each case a group in which each individual had a task which was individual and also common. Carrying out the task meant consultation with each other, and then a return to an individual task. Were they married? With the unsocial length of those long night watches for both groups? The shepherds belonged to the poorest, and it is just conceivable that they had a family background to which they could return infrequently, if the pasturing was on common land in the mountains. They needed understanding, for those night watches in particular made them oblivious to their social impact. I have seen their near equivalents in the shepherds from Monte Falco in Umbria, where in winter there was a bareness on those hills from where the cold tramontane wind is born. They would go in winter especially to Rome, to play on primitive bagpipes, with an instrument which sounded more like a whistle. The Magi also made up a group, researching on the revolutions of the heavens, and the coincidences which arise in their movements, and the eccentric intervention of planets. But the heavens also had their significant areas which had relationships to special groups of men, on whom they were thought to exert an influence which could be interpreted in fact prophetically. And all this could only be investigated in the absence of light by night. Shepherds and Magi had their night time work, at a time when other men were relaxing or sleeping. Yet the Magi were consciously providing the highest social service through their observations, and their interpretations of them. And before we say that the Magi were natural mystics, we must understand that their natural mysticism was an intellectual mysticism, which enabled them to pinpoint the places involved and to select the symbolic gifts which they should bring. Though the incense related to the divinity, the gold and the myrrh of death where not extensions of religious devotion but what seemed to belong to other domains. Yet it was the shepherds’ experience of the presence of angels, firstly as messengers and then as the court of heaven, which was a purely religious experience.

On a first showing, the shepherds were the darlings of God, with their natural affiliation with Bernadette and the Fatima children, who were also sheep tenders. They were also Jewish though probably reckoned not highly amongst the Jewish devotees, because they could not return every week to the Synagogue. The Magi presented the homage of the gentiles, expressing itself in the correct discernments of one of the oldest and most respected of their sciences. They were brave in putting their conclusions to the test. The shepherds came down from the mountain, the Magi crossed the mountain paths, and both were drawn by exalted instincts experienced and undeniable. The heavenly phenomena known to both groups only lightly concealed the presence of God. Both groups were panting after a source which drew them with a hunger and thirst for what it was stirring up in their souls: sudden for the shepherds with the hope of finding a source of unobtainable joy; long drawn out with the Magi, who from the beginning knew that, according the laws of their science, it would take them to the ruler of the Jewish nation which had brought all its religious experiences into an overarching unity.

The story is told with complete matter-of-factness interspersed with moments of original and spontaneous intensity. That corroborates the tradition which builds on the basic fact that the memory of Mary was the original repository of the story. That must have been based on what the shepherds said when they arrived in the stable and poured out their story. The words attributed to them showed no mere emotional excitement, but, after an initial fear, a specific religious exaltation. The two are quite different. Here the near-synonym “elevation” is a word which appeals to me personally, especially as it was used by Bossuet. It refers not to the sensible experiences which lie at the outside of the soul but refers to the soul in its greatest depths, where it exists in its greatest simplicity.

There were two levels of revelation working together to produce the report which Luke gives. Together they produced a striking clarity and consistency. The most important was that later reflection of Mary: pondering the appearance of the shepherds and what they said, linking them with other experiences of her own. Already there was a considerable deposit stored in the more intellectual and spiritual part of the memory of Mary, renewed, becoming more simple in itself. A united compound of privileged experiences of the divine. The original conception of Jesus under the Holy Spirit, and within the cloud of the divine glory, surrounding her, penetrating her bodily intimately and effecting a human conception in the normal organ, was the most elevated and yet intimate experience of the divine ever known, and she knew that it was not the seed of a human body, and that the seed was surrounded by a newly created human soul, which would guide and order and also initiate activities of a human body, and that united to this human soul, with all the capacities of both sensitive and rational experiences, was a self hood which remained divine and was uncreated which would contain all of these activities, having raised and kept Mary within itself, sanctifying her without equal. The total purity of Mary from her own conception allowed her to accommodate herself, actively as well as passively, to this total intimacy with divinity which would mature virginally, because of the purity of its divine source, until that birth at Bethlehem which had just occurred. A maturity of human presence to the divine of a higher nature than is referred to in the human and common connotations of ‘adoration’: the closest parallel to the timeless production of the divine Word by the heavenly Father, which, in its purity, it imaged. In her virginal simplicity, that is the virginal unobstructed grasp of her mind, that vision was not only a redundancy from the original conception of Jesus from the Holy Spirit, but was constantly renewed growing in qualitative intensity as the pregnancy progressed, purity building on purity. When the shepherds told their story, it was not news to her. The angel and the heavenly host itself were already elements of an even greater experience, whose extension to the shepherds must have expanded her heart with even greater joy and enlightenment.

The devotion to the heart of Mary is essentially a reflective contemplation of her knowledge with its quality of love, for all of these elements which this purely rational analysis has produced were transumed into love, which she experienced (as it has been expressed) without the weakness of ecstasy, because of her unobstructed nearness to the divinity in itself.

For the shepherds there was first of all the assertion of the angel, addressing the shepherds compassionately but with authority: “Do not fear”, which would be the normal human reaction as the angelic presence made itself known. The angel intended to raise the shepherds, as he had raised Mary to the summit of their human qualities. Uncertainty and fear cannot contribute anything positive; faith of its nature produces confidence and an ecstatic repose. It disposes of positive energies. Then it will communicate itself with its proper certainties. It seeks to produce great-souled men. It will make these simple shepherds who are not highly esteemed by the world into great-souled men. The collective moral effort relies on the presence not so much on the presence of strong-minded men, but of great-souled men. Great-souled men, who pass the heart-throb of their compassion to people paralysed by fear. A new innovating elite: not for one generation at one moment of history, but for every moment of history. Fear communicates itself. Fearful souls are turgid souls. The service of God calls for something better. Not turgid souls but clear souls, captivated by truth and the service of truth. Those who instinctively enunciate the truth so that the souls which it touches become themselves the sources of energies for others. They give the whole of themselves and leave it to God to bring about the increase. Fearful souls sometimes commend themselves on the grounds that they are wise and prudent. But those calculations are out of place if one wishes to communicate clarity. Clarity which is authentic makes no mistakes. Illuminated itself, it is itself an illumination. It is a divine gift from the source of all clarity. Therefore let it be passed on, and let God guard and protect it, and let him use it as an instrumental cause for his own good purposes.

The message is defined as “Good news of great joy”. It is meant “for all people”: a universal message. Addressed to shepherds, almost cut off from communication with anyone else! The poorest of the active poor. But Luke had formulated the first beatitude as “Blessed are the poor”, and he himself would trace the spread of this message first among the Jewish people and then to others outside Israel. And in the mind of the angel, there is no doubt that the prime function of the one who is born is to be “Saviour”, whose need was admitted outside and inside Israel. It corresponds to the disposition in all men, whether openly admitted or not, to seek a restoration of lost spiritual and bodily integrity. Then the specific Old Testament qualities: “Christ the Lord”. He will be the anointed one, the Messiah, spiritually anointed with those gifts promised to the Messiah in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, to be a spiritual King for an earthly people. But he is also “the Lord”. The passage is open to the interpretation that the divinity of God is in play, which is the instinctive Christian interpretation. And he is born in the city nearby, Bethlehem, where David himself was born. In this way the prophesy of Malachi has been fulfilled, but as more than a formality. Joseph the putative father provides the link to David, because he descends from him. Contained within the numerous implications and entailments is that the Saviour, who is more than kingly, will have characteristics which are analogous to those of David: Energy and Wisdom, and also the power to Heal, all contained in his quality of being Saviour: not formalities but realities. Irresistible Power acting in the intimate and detailed depths of the soul is also entailed, for although to be a Saviour may not be the same as creator, such energies and power are needed to re-erect and re-animate the world of men universally and individually. We call on that power in our prayers without realising the full entailment of what we are doing, because we do it within that power. It is a reality for which men should have the highest enthusiasm, which is the initial sign that it is active in them. Not the turgidity of indolence or the turgidity induced by sins which have replaced a habitual outgoingness and unflagging energy with the weight of habits of imperfection and contraction, the breeding ground of even worse.

And so that they need not make themselves conspicuous by asking for the child, unmistakable prophet-like signs are given: the new born child will be wrapped in those long bands, which are called swaddling clothes, and will be found in the food-trough of animals – for Mary and Joseph were directed to a stable. In a way this also fulfils the characteristic of the Messiah as Suffering Servant, that the Messiah chooses not to make himself prominent: he does not “raise his voice in the street”. What exegetes have named “the Messianic Secret”. A secret by intention, but the undiminished enthusiasm of the Shepherds would make that intention as ineffective as the later charges of Jesus that those whom he has cured should not make it known.

And then the reaction of the shepherds. The initial fear was the reaction of mind and especially of body to the Angel’s appearance, which struck a level deeper than that of their normal and conventional consciousness. Such touches are at the same time healing and strengthening. Strengthened they certainly were, and resolute: quite sure of the reality of the experience. It is a kind of rule for the discernment of spirits, which we may be called upon to use. We have to reflect seriously: is this excitation alone, which makes a person happy in a superficial sense, or is it accompanied by a profound sense of peace so deep and so pacifying that that it can only come from God? If that is the case it is to be followed with a sense of hope and trust. Here the shepherds are agreed and their spokesman says: “Let us believe this as coming from God, and so let us go down to Bethlehem and search out the child: it seems that the message from this angel is to be trusted, and he has given us explicit directions. We ask first of all whether there was a childbirth this last hour or so, and if the child is in swaddling bands made in advance by a careful mother, and if he is in manger, protected from anything sharp or hurtful by those swaddling bands, that will be the baby!”

So, full of enthusiasm they went on their exclusively religious quest. Used to travelling by foot over uneven ground they went quickly. They could only entrust their sheep to the custody of their dogs, and they must not stay long. Their enthusiasm and conviction expressed itself in their story. Their enthusiasm conveyed itself to those who heard the story. They were the first evangelists of a new epoch. They were too genuine, too committed, to be making up the story, and naturally their story was first poured out in intensity to Mary and Joseph. Luke named Mary first because she was a true progenitor. Joseph is a little side-lined, but he would have accepted that it is appropriate in his deference to her privileges, which held out hope for the whole world. In the presence of Jesus they spoke into the depths of divinity, to which all the others were privileged listeners, to whom their conviction united with the correspondence to the circumstances of the stable itself communicated conviction. The silent divinity of Jesus and the silent truth-bearing Mother drew the whole truth out of them, a great confession of faith which was also a gospel preaching, formulated in a new way: that God has left His heaven and concealed His true nature in raising humanity to himself. It was not the Torah which existed in the beginning, as they might have heard the Rabbis say, but the Son of God, who was the Son of Man who existed from the beginning, who had become man through this most gentle woman, whose own silences showed her to be absorbed into God in her, reposing in God even in her body. They had found the presence of God revealed on the mountain, and they were finding it again here: the extremes of holiness in its great mystery and of homeliness united together as one. And they were at home with it.

And then they remembered their sheep, and sensing that their visit must terminate they went back to them, but were incapable of restraining the praises of God which were rising in their hearts, as they continued in solidarity with the presences of the court of heaven. A deep habit of praise had installed itself – that is infused itself - into their hearts. It was something they could not stop. They had been in the darkness of the Bethlehem streets, lit only from the oil lamps in softly lit little areas outside the doors and windows.

They were soon away from the houses and in the darkness, but their song of praise continued as they felt secure and uplifted in the divine presence, for God makes his presence felt wherever pure praise rises to him. Perhaps stumbling a little as they climbed the hillside of their original revelation, which now became again the setting of human toil, in the darkness of an unknowing which for them had been transformed into knowing. The darkness made the presence of God clear by annulling the particular forms which surrounded them. That is a reason why it can be better to pray by night.

They returned to the toil of watching and waiting, and their thought went to the child and his Mother in the future. They turned to the task of lambing and rearing, to searching out pastures even in wintertime. Knowing their sheep and leading. Their task becomes a living model of the task of pasturing. Their prophet Ezekiel had passed on the prophetic condemnation of bad shepherds; David their King and Psalm-writer had even uttered the expression “The Lord is my shepherd”. This child would proclaim himself in relatively late manhood not only One with the Father, but “the good shepherd”. A good human shepherd of what “Israel understood themselves to be … a nation of shepherds in contrast to their neighbours who are either city dwellers or settled farmers” [so Francois Bovon, Luke I (Hermeneia ) p.86b]. Perhaps this was an echo from the past, repeated with a certain nostalgia, and to that extent still actual. A good shepherd growing up from the midst of some Rabbinic teachers looked upon as a nation of shepherds, and in this way bonding a human population closely with a staple task on their mountains and less than second-class land, a people amongst whom humility should have been the norm and arrogance of all kinds should have been, if present at all, the exception.

If they were following a star, the Magi must have followed up their nightly observations of the heavens with travelling by night. Once they had sighted the beginning of an unusual movement they must have followed it continually to become aware of its trajectory. Astronomy before telescopes observed the movements of the heavenly bodies. Even in the sixteenth century the observations of the Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, from his tower in Copenhagen, were eye observations, carried out with great refinement, and were sufficient for him to establish that the moment of the planet, Mars, was elliptical. He passed his findings to the German astronomer Kepler, who was able in consequence to discover intuitionally the proportions which were present in planetary movement.

A German astronomer has assured me that the part of the chapter 2 of Matthew’s gospel which concerned the Magi is “full of Chaldean astronomy”. By “Chaldean” he understood the valley of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which included Nineveh and Babylon. From the debris of baked clay tablets, with writing which consisted of combinations of the impressions of a reed cut crosswise, producing a kind of wedge shape, in the still wet clay, which was then fired, fragments of their astronomical knowledge have been transcribed and published. The stars of our Milky Way galaxy move relatively little. New events were therefore studied very carefully, not only for their movements but for its relationship to the hardly changeable background of fixed stars. The fixed stars had their areas of influence, and they had an apparent daily movement resulting from the changing parallax. The movement of this new star was related to a constellation which according to their tradition was thought to preside over the events in the Kingdom of Judea. Further factors associated its movement as related to a new King. But still there was an element in the movement which could not be strictly derived from the evidence. Some kind of inspiration from God which moved them to discern the birth of a new king, to whom worship should be offered. Inspiration added to that the selection of gifts, made in advance. They came to offer worship, but incense was only one of three gifts. According to the sequencing it came between gold, which was traditionally a gift offered to Kings, and the myrrh. Gold was also traditionally linked with the gift of wisdom. It was the first gift. The angel informed the shepherds about a Messianic king, long expected and long promised, who would have the characteristics of Kings, but with a superabundance of the same wisdom which characterised David and Solomon, and perhaps Ezechias and other good kings. But before we attempt to make correlations, let us note that it was an offering not of sovereigns but of astronomers who must have been only exceptionally moved to leave their place of observation and meet the person whom they had dimly perceived to have been signified by the movement of the star. Behind the certainty of their identification there was both the indications provided by their accumulated law, which had even adapted an older pattern of correspondences to have included the Jewish Kingdom, and an inspiration which was divine. The Kingly element of gold was, in the list, given predominance over the incense. At any rate it signified a human presence, which was true; the myrrh too indicated a human presence, which was mortal. It was a mystery of inspiration that they should bring him gifts which signified his divinity, and myrrh which signified his human death. It has analogies to inspirations to the prophets who were often bidden to perform actions or to say things which they did not understand, so to speak establishing the purity of the inspiration, uncontaminated by the human instrument who embodied them or carried them out.

With unswerving directness, the Magi went to the Jewish capital, and presuming that the child would be the heir to the reigning monarch, and they went to the royal palace and were allowed to speak to King Herod the Great. The dating of the whole Christian epoch up to our own days has been distorted by the well-intentioned calculation which was defective of Dionysius Exiguus, that begins the epoch too late. The theory that the star was neither a comet nor a nova but a triple planetary conjunction gains a degree of plausibility when it appears that it took place in BC5 and the death of Herod the great took place a year later. That the planets fell out of conjunction and back again could be correlated with the seeming disappearance of the star of the Magi and its re-appearance, especially in full conjunction over the stable, which filled the Magi with joy as a kind of confirmation of the final stage of their journey.

That all Jerusalem was troubled with Herod at the appearance of the Magi and the nature of their search could be seen as a fear that this messianic appearance could not have happened at a worse moment and that it could precipitate political complications, by upsetting the delicate power balance established between the Romans and Herod, and by implication with his house. This would show that whilst lip-service was given to the messianic prophesies the real faith of the people was diluted by practical reasons – raisons d’état. Herod’s dissimulation of his true attitude from the Magi, and his request that they should investigate for him the existence of the child in Bethlehem kept the Magi in the integrity of their innocence. It has always seemed inconsistent if scientists play a political game, though there have been exceptions. This innocence and integrity have the intended effect of throwing the unworthiness of Herod into relief, which was more than confirmed by his vain attempt to kill the possible Messiah as a baby as a defence of his own possession of the throne, and his intention to pass on power to his own children.

The gospel does not dilate on the selflessness of the Magi in their devotion to their science, which was a composition of observation superimposed on a tradition, but it is implicit in the radiant honesty of their dispositions. They act like men who have been, like the shepherds, the recipients of a vision. But the vision was of a completely different kind, even if the finality of the vision was the same. We may be able to conjecture parallels for our largely scientifically-based culture. In fact two sources of wisdom are present. The wisdom of the magi has the essence of the Old Testament prophetic inspiration. Indeed even higher. The old testament prophesies were often related to national political contingencies – like the punitive exile to Babylon, and its so merciful ending, with Cyrus described as a Messiah, because, though a Persian, he embodied so many of his characteristics. If he acted messianically, the draw of the pagans towards the Messiah had preceded that of the Magi, which rose from a natural inspiration, sharpened and detailed, from the same source. The history which is played out on the overlap between supernatural and natural remains of perennial importance, and a great amount is played out with conscious reference to the facts. Christian evidences which drew a lot from comparative religion have shifted their ground and often to the setting of the science, with the setting of science being treated from the higher vantage point of religion.

If the Magi could accept the Child born in a stable and lying in a manger as the true king of the Jews, worthy also of the incense of worship, but having to pass through a death and the laying out in the spices of tradition before his glorious resurrection and ascension to Heaven, and if the whole terrestrial and cosmic reality can be penetrated by the divine power of Christ as King of the Universe, we can make this vision our own, with the certainty that the God of the Christian faith in his triune reality, even with one of those persons now inseparably united to the humanity which he took from Mary, that this is the ultimate basis of dynamism of the whole cosmos, and that as a duty we must make an intellectual connection between them. So there is a need of both: the spontaneous simplicity and enthusiasm of the shepherds, and an intellectual sapiential appreciation of the cosmos by the Magi, ever searching a contact with divine. For Socrates expected the prompting of his daemon, and the Magi wanted to let the austere sapiential considerations terminate in the divine adoration of their mind and hearts. Like the shepherds they had their enthusiasms, but they wanted them to be in unison with the purity of their minds and hearts, because that to which the mind and heart arise at their highest, as they are separate, is not the same. But they can rise together in unison to God, and then the intellectualism of their rising to God is rendered more human in its base and in its structure. Together the devotion of shepherds and Magi will produce an elevation of the spirit which is higher than that of the Magi alone, when the heart finds connaturality with the glory of God, whilst the mind finds a connaturality with his essence.

It is no wonder that, when they had received the information that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, that they left with joy and led by the star. When they had entered the palace of Herod they must have felt the difference between their own enthusiasm, and the cold and formal reception which they received here – that can be inferred from the disturbance produced when it was grasped that these men had come to view the Messianic king, so long expected - so long that expectancy of him had become the characteristic by which he was known. It was easy to acquiesce in the hope whose realisation was consequently deferred, but not easy to live in the uncomfortable situation that he had been born, which rendered the whole future unpredictable. The plan by which he would be discovered by the Magi who would report back to Herod privately would have allowed him the time to decide finally what to do. He counted on their identification of the Child king, but in the absence of this information he had the reserves of cruelty to kill all the children who had been born since the star appeared.

And now they followed the star for what they knew was a relatively short distance to Bethlehem. They followed it with the enthusiasm of scientists who know themselves to be a short distance from the final definition which will complete their task of discovery. The Child drew them to himself, but using all secondary promptings to generalise the force of its silent call. And as they neared Bethlehem enthusiasm was replaced by desire: a desire for God: the desire not only to see, but the desire to adore Him who was the end of all. Concentrated desire: intensity which refused to be distracted from any other object which they encountered under the night sky, from any object entering their memory or imagination. The presence of the Christ child concentrated the attention of the shepherds into an outward élan of praise. With the Magi their enthusiasm was concentrated into an élan of desire for the truth which makes all true things true, which enters with special solemnity and simplicity into the human scene. That point of light whose movements they had studied and followed and projected was unnatural: its significance was unseen rather than seen. Theirs had been the research of the unseen from a scatter of star-lights. They sensed what lay beyond, and knew it to be the knowledge store of whatever could be known. They appreciated for themselves that they had been in the search of the hitherto unknown and unknowable. That made sense of the inspiration to bring incense, but the involvement with human death meant that there would be a real man, or rather child. They knew that they were making for the ends of the earth, where the heavens and the earth met together.

Trusting more to the star for guidance which was now irradiating an inn and its outhouses, they felt its beckoning not into the main building but to a half-cave stable in which they saw, more from the radiance of the star than the single lamp which was there, the persons of a mother and a Child, whom she had raised from a feeding-trough, to cherish: drawing love from him to give it back to Himself. Here, heaven and earth met but not as at a boundary. Rather heaven was seen as penetrating and surrounding earth and the Child and mother too, and mother and Child were penetrating into heaven, and in the slow movements of the mother with those of her child, heaven and earth moved together. In the shadows they discerned another presence watching like them. He had been and remained plunged in devotion. With a simple prostration of their bodies they opened their souls as well to be taken into this movement of adoration, and found more than satiety. In continuity with this adoration their hands found the gifts in the baggage, and in continuity offered them.

Matthew records no words between Mary and the Magi, and perhaps there were none. The language of devotion was more appropriate. Mind and spirit utter connaturally in silence, for which the darkness of the star-fields is the place to arise to the Creator and Mover of the cosmic all, and to find under it the All which is one and pure spirit. The cave-stable contained this and far more besides.

When the shepherds reached the stable, Luke does not indicate any gesture of adoration on the part of the shepherds; he makes it clear that they were intent on pouring out their story of their heavenly vision, whose experience had fired up their enthusiasm, so that they must make known what they had seen. No doubt they had accepted that this stable birth was what the angel had referred to, but their perception that his prophet-like command referred to the child whom they were now contemplating. The coincidence caused their enthusiasm to mount as the truth was so apparent to them. Perhaps Mary said nothing, and just retained their words as also confirmatory for her. The cosmos through the shepherds was expressing its greetings at the visit of one who is sometimes himself called the visiting day-star. Mary listened as they no doubt loudly proclaimed their summons by an angel, and that in the stable all was just as had been prophesied.

But there is one detail in the story of the Magi which adds a fact of significance which is easily missed if you have regard only to the individual words, and have no sense of the overall continuities and interconnections with their qualities. At the sight of the Child, the Magi fell down in spontaneous adoration. We have thought about the concentration of their thoughts as they covered the last stage of their journey. Contrast this with the dispositions of Mary as signified in her gestures. The text says simple that they “saw the Child with Mary his mother”. “With” Mary, and as a young Child lately born, she was either tending him in the manger, or, as we have suggested, holding him, embracing him: feeling the spiritual warmth of his presence and communicating to him the warmth of her human body, if not feeding him with her virginal milk. According to the grace of adoration, there does not seem to have been as great a surge of adoration as passed through the bodies of the Magi, as they prostrated themselves to the outflowing from the presence of divinity.

But Mary had experienced the nearness of God for so long, from his conception onwards. We cannot think that her devotion was used up, burnt out, because her bodily manifestations did not rise to those of adoration, which one might have expected. But the outflowing of divinity to her in continual closeness from the conception from the Holy Spirit onwards was without parallel. The only possible explanation which lies behind this is that, through her Immaculate Conception her body must have been raised to a degree of continual connaturality to the nearness of her Son. We must never forget that the virtues of the man, Jesus Christ, came from an overflow from the divine Person whose existence extended itself to unite with the human nature from the moment of His conception, but the virtues of Mary were communicated to her human nature and human person in a participation which raised her to a level of equality: the first proceeding from the divine nature of Christ, the second proceeding from a communication in grace. Therefore the one with the other in equality communicated as a grace. But the equality was also a kind of dialogue of one with the other, with relative movements: an impulse to adore at a particular moment in her; an impulse to obey at a particular moment with him. The rebuke of Him by Mary at the Temple at one time; the extension not only of brotherhood and sisterhood, but also of motherhood to the disciples when the family were searching for him. The whole parallelism of Mary to Jesus as Queen to King has its source here. The interrelation of Mary and Jesus about petitions presumed in the tradition that certain prayers are only answered if they pass through her as an efficacious mediatrix. Or the essential overlapping of functions: that Mary is the Mediatrix of all Graces, and yet Jesus is the single mediator, and so Jesus empowers her prayer to obtain things that without it would not be obtained. To qualify her prayer as if there were an “as if” attached to it, as if the modality of Mary diverged essentially from the modality of Jesus would offend against the sublimity of their unity, presented here by Luke as in that image reproduced thousands of times and understood without difficulty, that Jesus lies in the arms of Mary contains this simple insight. We may think without difficulty that their mediation is single and simple – in the single principle of salvation perceived by St Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort. But with the dynamism of earthly existence, that must not affect the quantitative duality of their existence and activity, which however may be regarded as qualitatively one, even if the duality passes through a unity of what is by nature joined to what is graced. Here the sublimation of a human nature rises to meet the generous mercy of the divine nature, in an equality in functioning in some respects[1] without an equality of nature and person, too great to be brought within the realm of participation in the conventional sense which invokes too much for this situation the notion of “part”. Yet “participation” in an exalted sense, and therefore a full sense, expresses the elevation of Mary’s nature, in which equality in functioning (but not in nature and personality) expresses her status, and includes the pure grace of her elevation and of her functioning. .

This iconic situation lasted for perhaps a few days. The contemplation of Mary mothering the child, and the Magi reviewing also in their minds the history of their observations which had led to this visit. For they were knowledgeable people who were not afraid to act. They had forgotten the appropriateness of rulers meeting rulers, and had from the exalted nature of their contemplation acted according to the enthusiasm of wisdom, whose rules are not those of etiquette or of research but higher still.

Illumination from divine wisdom came also in the night as the angel came first to the Magi and then to Joseph to leave because of the menace of Herod. The situation with the adoring Magi around the mother and Child could be that of a symbolic church of any age. In time it came to an end, and without physical traces as the Holy Family made its way to the land of idols and pyramids, and its minority of Jews reliving their original flight to Egypt to seek a source of food, under the protective Joseph. Luke and Matthew set out a simple story which is in effect a mystery of Jesus protected and contained by Mary’s contemplation. But like the other mysteries of Jesus contemplated with the eyes of Mary. The same mystery made present for all ages: contracted to its essentials and expanded to a stillness in act, opening it to universal accessibility. Freed from terrestrial time, and made accessible from heaven. Amen

[1] “Compassionating” in the sacrifice of her Son could not be denied. That is an intense form of suffering, and, being a passion, is a negation. But could her disposition be regarded as positive, so that she is Coredemptrix? The dogmatic constitution on the Church of the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, did not use that expression but used an expression which could open itself to that interpretation. “[The Fathers of the Church] judged that Mary disposed herself to God not merely passively, but as cooperating in human salvation with a free faith and obedience” (56). “… vehemently suffering with the Only begotten who was also her own, associating herself with His sacrifice in her maternal soul, lovingly consenting in the immolation of the victim born of her” (58). It is of the greatest significance that “Coredemptrix”, or its equivalent, has been used in the teaching of a series of Popes, especially from Leo XIII to John Paul II. These texts can be found in a chapter of a book published on the web: Mark I. Miravale, Mary: Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, Advocate. It appears with a recommendation from the Dominican Cardinal Luigi Ciappi, Personal Theologian to the Popes from Pius XII to John Paul II.