NOTES for Mat 2:1-23

For the Evangelist, the newborn Child is the promised Messiah, who is to embody in Himself the whole Sacred History of the people of Israel and bring it to fulfillment. That is why today’s account contains recognizable details from the story of Moses, the Exodus from Egypt, and the journey through the wilderness. An evil king seeks to destroy Israel’s hope and kills innocent children (Ex 1); God brings Israel out of Egypt (this parallel is confirmed by the quotation from the prophet); sages from the East, guided by a star, bless Israel (Num 24:17). God saves His people not from outside history but from its very heart: Christ is born on earth in order to pass through all the trials and hardships of His people and, indeed, of all humanity. The wondrous mystery of sharing in God is fulfilled in the One who walked upon our earth, breathed our air, saw our sky, lived in our world, and filled our history and our life...

How many creative people - writers, poets, artists - this short story has inspired. Why? Outwardly it is a completely ordinary event, the birth of a Child, but in His honor an unusual star lights up in the sky, and that star leads three magi to Bethlehem. And now there are three elders bowing before the Child, three pagans before the King of the Jews, three learned sages before the One on whom the Lord's Spirit of wisdom and understanding secretly rests (Isa. 11:2).

All human wisdom, all human knowledge, can do only this: lead us to God for true knowledge and suggest what gifts we may bring with us.

Christ promised us the Second Coming. We await Him. But we await Him in a special way. And that is not at all how we await Christmas. We know that there will be a Christmas service, that many people will come, and everyone will congratulate one another. But if we stopped to think, we would understand that the feast of Christmas is not only a remembrance of His incarnation that has already taken place. It is Christ's coming into the world. A coming that has not yet happened, that we are only waiting for. This means it is both an echo of the first coming and a herald of the second; this is the amazing, connecting quality of this feast.

Today we celebrate a special service, the so-called Royal Hours or Hours of the Eve of the Nativity of Christ. At the Royal Hours we read several passages from the Old Testament, from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the accounts by the evangelists Matthew and Luke of the Nativity. The most important thing in this unusual service is its emphatically Paschal character. In essence, it is almost an exact copy of those Hours that are celebrated on the day of Christ's death on the Cross, on Great Friday.

The Royal Hours both of Great Friday and of the Nativity of Christ were composed by Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem (d. 644) in the first half of the seventh century; their deep similarity is meant to mark the beginning and completion of God's saving action — the Nativity of Christ and His sacrifice on the Cross. These events reveal to us God's design as God's saving passage through our world, which is completed in the triumph of the Cross and the Resurrection.

And about why the Nativity takes place, St. Sophronius writes this: "As one descended from the line of David, Mariam was once being registered in Bethlehem with the elder Joseph while carrying in her womb the seedless Fruit; but when the time of the Nativity came, there was no place to stay, and the cave appeared to the Queen as a beautiful palace. Thus Christ is born in order to raise up His image that had fallen before." This means that the Nativity is the beginning of the way of the Cross, and this is exactly how the Church approaches it.

When reading the Gospel story of the visit of the Magi, a natural question arises: why was Herod so afraid of the Messiah, about whom he did not even know for certain whether He had been born yet or not? The answer is clear to anyone familiar with the political situation in Palestine in Gospel times: in the Messiah, who, according to the generally accepted ideas among Jews of that time, was to become king of Judea, Herod could see only a political rival threatening his power. To us, familiar with the Gospel story, these fears cannot help seeming ridiculous. Yet they led to tragedy, to that massacre in Bethlehem which the infant Jesus escaped, but during which many other children died.

There is no need to speak of the cruelty of power; it is obvious. But something else is just as obvious: the absurdity, the tragic meaninglessness of what is happening. Herod knows nothing about the Messiah; he has never seen Him and never wanted to see Him. In his attitude toward Jesus he is guided, in essence, by those popular legends and myths because of which Jesus concealed His messiahship almost to the very end of His earthly ministry. And this fear, based on an illusion, makes Herod a murderer.

Of course, no power in the fallen world does without bloodshed. But apparently, when power is guided by myths and common notions that have nothing to do with reality, especially much blood is shed. In that situation Herod, in essence, needed to do very little: simply go and look. And understand that this Child lying in a manger would never claim his power, nor the power of any other earthly ruler, which He does not need.

But Herod goes nowhere. He remains captive to his own illusions and his own fear. And he becomes a murderer.

The coming of the Magi troubled not only Herod but also, as noted, all Jerusalem. Herod's anxiety is understandable, for he, like any cruel ruler, imagines everywhere if not conspiracies, then rivals. But other people, to whom Herod's tendencies do not seem to belong, are also worried that the birth of the Child may bring some important changes into their lives as well. And any changes, even the most long-awaited, are inevitably connected with discomfort.

Thus from the very first days of the Messiah's earthly life a dramatic discord begins in the souls of many of those who, after a long expectation of His coming, proved not ready to meet Him. But in these same days there also begins the coming to Christ of many of those who had long wandered along paths far from true knowledge of God, but who even in the forest of paganism managed to find a trail leading out of it. And if the Magi came to Bethlehem following the star, they returned already having received revelation and therefore no longer needing their former divinations. The Magi went back by another way not only because of the danger from Herod, but also because the former paths had been exhausted after Christ came into the world.

The Gospel of Matthew has preserved for us the tradition of Mary's being visited soon after Jesus' birth by those whom the Russian Synodal text calls, in a Slavic manner, volkhvy. The translators rendered the Greek word "magi," which we find in the original text of the Gospel, in this way.

Who were these "magi" from the East? To the east of the Roman Empire lay Persia, whose relations with Rome were far from friendly. The state religion of Persia in Gospel times was Zoroastrianism. The priests of this religion were called "magi" in Greek. However, these people did not practice magic in the modern sense of the word.

They were servants of the great good god named Ahura Mazda. And they waged war against his dark counterpart, who was called Angra Mainyu, or, in Greek pronunciation, Ahriman. They also awaited the one whom they called in their own language the Saoshyant, or Liberator. The one who was to come and lead on earth the great war of the forces of light against the forces of darkness. And perhaps some of these people knew that they were not the only ones awaiting the Saoshyant. That in the West, in a land called Judea by its inhabitants, there was a people awaiting the same one they awaited. Only they called him differently: the Anointed One, the Messiah. And there were people who dared to go into a hostile country to find the one for whom they had waited so long.

God led these people where they so wanted to go. And He gave them to see the One whom they so wanted to see. They left a royal gift for the divine Child and His Mother. Gold as an offering to a king. Frankincense for anointing to reign. And myrrh, the sacred herb of the Zoroastrians. Then they left as they had come. To wait for the day when the Saoshyant whom they had found would begin His war. Just as many Jews waited for this. Neither they nor the others knew that the war would be quite different from what they imagined. But the Kingdom too turned out not to be what most expected. And yet whoever wanted to receive it, received it. In the end, the point is what one strives for, not how one imagines it.

The Angel addressed the warning about danger not to Mary, but to Joseph, to the man and head of the family responsible for making the decision. One often hears the question: why were the other parents in Bethlehem not warned about the coming massacre of the infants? We cannot now find a reliable explanation for this. Perhaps, unlike Joseph, the other fathers of families were unable to hear the warning or dismissed it?

Many centuries earlier Joseph, the son of Jacob, after coming to Egypt, was able to save his family, and with it the whole people, from death by famine. And now a new Joseph goes to Egypt in order to save from terror the One who will become the Savior of humanity. As Moses had to leave Egypt, Joseph had to flee hastily into Egypt, saving himself from a likeness of Pharaoh who had come to reign in the Promised Land.

From the very moment of His birth in a world poisoned by cruelty, and then from the flight into Egypt, Jesus had to share the trials of the earthly path of both the people of Israel and all humanity. And from these first days on earth His way of the cross toward Golgotha begins.

What can one think about the slaughter Herod carried out in Bethlehem? A crime? Without question. Terrible, unheard-of? In general, no, as awful as that sounds. Even in antiquity it was not something extraordinary, and even less so against the background of events in recent centuries.

The most terrible thing here is not cruelty as such, but the logic that gives rise to this cruelty. This is not about justifying it: rulers like Herod did not consider it necessary to justify cruelty when it seemed expedient to them. And Herod, the murderer of children, by the way, entered history with the epithets "the Great" and "the Builder." He was remembered as a clever and skillful ruler who maneuvered artfully through the intricacies of the great Near Eastern politics of his time, and as, in modern language, an "effective manager" who carried out a whole series of large-scale projects. In particular, it was he who carried out the reconstruction, and in essence the complete rebuilding, of the Jerusalem Temple, turning it into a grand and majestic structure.

But people, as we see, interested Herod only in the context of these same large-scale projects. Anyone who posed even the slightest threat to them had to disappear, not to mention those who, even hypothetically, might in some way threaten his own power. Such, apparently, is the reverse side of "effective management": people here become nothing more than expendable material. And the cheapest material of all.

For the Kingdom, every person matters. For the rulers of this world, no one does.

It is very clear that the Gospel of Matthew was written for Jews. For both him and his readers, it is important to see that Jesus' childhood corresponds to Old Testament prophecies; this testifies that Jesus is truly the Messiah.

At the same time, we see here an example of how, in the very earliest years of the Church's existence, the apostles taught people to perceive Holy Scripture. The words of Christ are alive in them: "Search the Scriptures, for you think that in them you have eternal life; and they testify of Me" (John 5:39), and they discover this testimony even where no one had seen it before.

The coming of Christ into the world is accompanied by a terrible tragedy: the killing of innocent infants. We shudder as we read these lines. But let us compare this episode with the way Christ describes His second coming: "for nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places" (Matt 24:7). That is, He foretells tragedies for us, tragedies again. Why, we want to ask, why? Why must our good God come in such a frightening way? But this is only part of the promise. Let us look at chapter 31 of Jeremiah, from which the words in today's fragment are taken: "a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping." What is it about? A new age. About this: "then the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old together; for I will turn their mourning to joy, will comfort them, and make them rejoice rather than sorrow." We must pass through trial; otherwise there is no way to remove evil from our life, so deeply has it dissolved into it. Trial is inevitable and is caused solely by our sin. "Rejoice in hope" (Rom 12:12), says the apostle. Let us take this call, and hope itself, seriously. For now God is with us.

All of us would be glad to be beside Christ in His triumph and glory. But the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph share with Him first of all His humiliation and suffering. So it was in the first days of His earthly life, when He had to become a refugee and flee from human cruelty. Later the Mother of God remained with Him on Golgotha too. And it is precisely this that we need to learn from Her, because being beside Her Son in His passions is salvation.

From the very moment of His birth in a world poisoned by cruelty, and then from the flight into Egypt, Jesus had to share the trials of the earthly path of both the people of Israel and all humanity. And from these same first days on earth His way of the cross to Golgotha begins.