Matthew 2: 1-12
Merry Christmas! Christ is born! The star announces Christ’s birth that turns the world upside down. The star above the manger signals that nothing will be the same, that God-with-us breaks into our score-keeping world with radical mercy and love.
Matthew 2 tells us that it was the “magi from the east” who saw the star. Why didn’t everyone see the star? Why did it take foreigners who were not even Jews to point it out? It took people from far away to come tell all Jerusalem the news about their own country. Outsiders who seemed to know more about the sky overhead than the very people who lived there.
Why couldn’t everyone in Jerusalem, the religious leaders and political experts, all see it? Maybe their eyes were so focused on the latest scandal in the news that they couldn’t pay attention to anything else. Maybe their lives were so stressed just keeping a job and raising a family that they never paid attention to the sky that draped over their lives every day. Maybe they hadn’t watched the sky enough to know that this star was remarkable, out of the ordinary, amazing enough to portend the world turned upside down. Or maybe they refused to ever be in the dark long enough to see stars, preferring instead only sunshine?
Today I’m wondering about the out-of-the-ordinary star that may be over my life – today, right now—that I don’t see. Who are the outsiders, the unexpected foreigners who can see the star over my life and point it out to me? Am I willing to stay in the darkness long enough to see it?
O Light of the World, hold me in the darkness, open-hearted to those who follow your star, so that I may see it, too.