Advent & Men, Part 2: “The Stirring – From Threat to Gift”

December 10, 2023 – Second Sunday of Advent

Matthew 2:1-12

Pastor Mike

A few weeks back, Lana (Gribas) gifted me an Advent & Christmas devotional to read this year called Watch for the Light. For each day of these holy seasons, the book offers a poem or a theological reflection pulled from the Christian tradition, whether ancient or medieval or modern. This past Tuesday, the reading came from a man named Alfed Delp, a Jesuit priest martyred in Germany in 1945 for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Just before he was hanged, he wrote these words from his prison cell:

There is nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm, we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this to and endure it… Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken.[1]

 This shaking, this unsettling, which reveals what is true and what is false has a biblical basis in the characters we encounter today in Matthew’s Gospel reading: King Herod and the Magi.

 Our pew Bibles contain the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation, which says that Herod becomes “frightened” when he first hears the Magi’s news about the appearance of the star and the birth of the Messiah. Frightened – and all the city of Jerusalem with him. This translation actually does us, as readers, a disservice, because the Greek that’s been rendered as “frightened” actually means to “to be stirred up” or “agitated” – like when water is struck or worked into a froth by a wind. As an experience of feeling, tarasso, which is the Greek verb, means “to cause one inner commotion,” “to take away one’s calmness of mind.”

 Which is not the same thing as being afraid. A person may respond to that inner topsy-turviness with fear; fear may be wone of the strands of feeling that gets stirred up. But it’s not a given. Taking into account Herod’s actions, the translator’s decision to say “frightened” may be contextually appropriate enough, but it obscures from view the inner spiritual moment on which everything hangs: the moment of personal response to inner commotion. Often, our response to being stirred is so quick and compulsive and habituated that it has become a reaction, and we don’t even notice the moment come and go. But, with the Spirit’s help, we can learn to notice the stirring, to linger with it, and to experience it as a great gift which leads closer to Christ.

God is holy, more expansive and purer than we can fathom. God is mysterious, coming to us in ways we do not expect. God is alive and personal, not a dead fact we read about in a book. When we encounter the living God genuinely, being stirred up is the inevitable and appropriate outcome. So, how do we respond when something new strikes our spirits, when we find ourselves in unexpected circumstances, when unforeseen feelings and questions rise up in us?

 Herod responds as many of us do. He notices something happening in him and around him which he doesn’t understand, and he feels threatened. He reacts to this perceived threat by using his authority to manage and eliminate the threat, to bring it under control. How? By calling a meeting, of course, with the educated and influential professionals. By seeking specialized knowledge, the foretold whereabouts of the Messiah’s birth. He holds secret consultations with the Magi. He gives them orders to go find Jesus and then bring word back to him. He deals with the stirring of his own spirit, and the agitation of his city, by taking charge.

 The Magi’s response to Christ’s birth could not be more unlike Herod’s. They, too, are men; they, too, according to tradition, are kings. When, in the far Eastern lands, they looked up into the sky and saw that star, they, too, must’ve been stirred. In fact, they were so shaken that they literally came loose! They set off on a journey across many months and miles to see where and to whom their stirring would lead them. They responded to their stirring with wonder, awe, curiosity, a willingess to go and see. Most important, they responded to their stirring together, the firsts of those crowds that would come to coalesce around the body of Jesus and become the Church.

 Let’s make it as clear as we can. Herod’s reaction to the stirring is isolated and isolating; his knowledge of Christ is vicarious; his words are orders; his body remains stationary. The Magi’s response is communal; their knowledge of Christ is direct; their words are questions and blessings; their bodies are on the move. Herod and the Magi become something like cardinal directions which we can use to better understand our own ways of receiving or resisting God’s advent. There’s something in there for all of us.

Even so, since our question during this Advent season is what the good news of the incarnation might be for men, let’s look at this Gospel story through a gender lens. Let’s consider Herod and the Magi as men. After all, for men and boys who have been conditioned to repress their tenderness, dull their awareness of feelings, and break ties of dependence upon others, being stirred, agitated, and unsettled by something they do not understand or cannot control is, indeed, terrifying. Men are expected to move others and do not like to feel that someone or something has the authority to move them. Men have worked hard to tamp down the stirring, so when it comes upon one of us, we easily get overwhelmed, confused, or scared. In reaction to this, we try to reestablish control. And if that fails, as it fails with Herod, the only place we’ve been taught to go then is anger – even violence.

Last week, I shared about some of the ways men are conditioned to dominate, and dominance can range from the hot domination of rage and violence to the cold domination of silence and withdrawal. The need to be in control hides an inner emptiness, which has come about due to a series of boyhood wounds. From the outside, Herod sure looks like he’s got it all together with this consultations and meetings and order and plans, and I bet some people in his court and kingdom appreciated his management of the situation. But the King acts out of self-preservation. He feels his authority has been challenged, and when the Magi disobey him and do not return to Jerusalem, Herod’s panic is revealed as he escalates astonishingly fast to the ordering the murder of all Jewish boys aged two and under.

The Magi are men living in a receptivity mode. They receive the signs of stars, the messages of dreams, the hospitality of many along the way and finally of Mary. They invite the stirring into their hearts and letting it propel them along. But for being receptive and moveable, are they made somehow less as men?

No. They are acting fully in their power. They are really living – living an adventure. They’re the ones who end up being in a position, inside Mary’s house, to give gifts and speak words of blessing. It is a lie that when men give up the ways of dominance, when men surrender their need to control things, that the alternative is a kind of lifeless passivity. It’s the exact opposite. Dominance and control can only narrow life. There’s nowhere to go – Herod stays put in his chair. Living out of receptivity, consenting to God as God and trusting in the gift of the stirring, leads to a widening of our experience, and to a profound depth of joy. When men reclaim their fullness by receiving the love of Christ, they – we – become fully alive.

God stirs us up in so many ways. We listen to a person’s story, full of suffering or happiness, and something shakes loose in us. We read a book, or see a photograph, or hear a song, and something twinges within us. We’re asked a question, we have a confrontation, we’re made aware of a personal blind spot, someone we love asks us a hard favor, or even to change. We have a recurring daydream or thought that won’t let us go. We’re told that God is showing up out there in the world far beyond our realm of experience or expectation. There’s the moment of inner commotion, and the masculine compulsion is to say No. But the power of God the Father in us, and the authority that is ours as God’s children, is to say Yes.

Embrace, brothers and sisters, embrace the stirring. The clenching of your gut, the ache in your chest, the quickening of your pulse, the tears forming on the edges of your eyes. And ask the Spirit to be with you in those moments and to lead you through them to a joyful encounter with Christ.

The stakes are so high. The more we kill the stirring, the more our children will suffer. The more we trust the stirring, the more our children will be blessed. May God give us the opportunity to enter the house of mother and child and open our chests to share of the treasure that is there.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] Alfred Delp, The Shaking of Reality,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2001), 82, 86.