(Photo: Edward Burne-Jones – The Adoration of the Magi; in the public domain)
“Wise men still seek him” or so proclaims a popular slogan that appears on cards and facebook posts this time of year1 (well, more at Christmas, but I digress). Relieved I was therefore to see the headline of a recently discovered copy of a 2014 Time magazine that boldly proclaimed, “The Search for Jesus.” Aha, thought I, the search is on again. Another batch of wise men are on the move.
Reading the article naturally deflated me a bit–these men apparently weren’t of the same mind as those earlier magi. They seemed more “wise guys” than wise men. Like so many popular articles that purport to unearth or reexamine the “historical Jesus”, this Time Magazine piece merely rehashed the statements of Christianity’s fifth column, revisionist scholars like Rudolph Bultmann and the members of the “Jesus seminar.” The summary statement of the article went like this:
This time of year, many people will conclude that those scholars are asking the wrong questions. They’ll answer as one reader did in the letters to the editor following the 1996 story: “It doesn’t matter who Jesus of Nazareth was or what he was,” he wrote. “What’s most important is the lessons he taught.” (You can find this online at Time Magazine’s website.)
Perhaps what is meant by “wise” is the root of the issue. One quickly recalls the statement of St. Paul the apostle:
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.(First Corinthians 3,Holy Bible, King James version).
Of course an ancient Hebrew proverb tells us The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10, Holy Bible, King James Version). The “fear of the Lord” and “knowledge of the Holy” are roughly synonymous (if we recognize here an example of the Jewish poetic form known as “parallelism”). To know the holy God is to revere Him (“fear” here connotes more than dread or terror–it is fuller of the awe of the numinous, and reverence for that which is beyond our mortal coil). The reverence for God and knowledge of the Holy are things that precede and are prerequisites for attaining wisdom.
One might go a step further and say that the journey toward wisdom requires more than a mere “head knowledge” of the Holy. Recalling Jesus’ words to his disciples the evening before his death, it would appear that in some mysterious way an encounter with the Holy is required: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” This indicates that the beginning of wisdom is an encounter with (or the gift of/the activity of) the Holy Spirit of God.
In the end, the slogan should perhaps be reworded this way: “truly wise men still find him”, or better yet, “wise men still adore him”. The “wise guys”, those who know not the holy, who are wise in the world’s fashion, might find themselves forever seeking in vain.
May you have an encounter with the Holy. May you seek the one born to be “Messiah”, and find Him.
1The great Feast of Epiphany among other things celebrates the coming of the Magi to worship Jesus. Traditionally, this is commemorated on January 6, twelve days after Christmas.