"SEARCH FOR A PERSON" ^_[1]

INDISPENSABLE PREPARATION

1.  The incarnation of Jesus Christ and his epiphany to the Gentiles are but two of a myriad of interrelated events, imperceptible or apparent, that bear the imprint of personhood and relationship. Most remarkable is the Christian emphasis on the consanguinity of these fundamental principles in the story of creation.

2.  The Book of Genesis begins:  "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  [Gen 1:1]  With this exordium  (Lat. introduction),  Sacred Scripture announces that the decisive events of creation are attributable to a divine being in whom essence and existence  is peerless and unequaled, unparalleled and unrivaled.

3.  The formal and orderly arrangement of constituent elements--void, darkness, deep, heavens, earth, water, light, time, vegetation, life, and man--are the indispensable preparation for the order of relationship; God willed to relate to that which is other and apart from himself. God moved over the face of the waters; he spoke to time and space; he named that which he created; he established the fruitful relationship of like and unlike things; he judged what he created, and he blessed living creatures with fecundity. In all created things the evidence of God's personhood is discernable.

EXCEPTIONAL EVENT

4.  The Genesis story solemnizes and celebrates this reality to preserve for man the living proof of God's immediacy, that is to say, his nearness to all that he has created through, with and in love:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men."  [Jn 1:1-4]  God's creating Adam into existence emerges as the exceptional event of the unimaginable creation.

5.  To Adam alone is given the gift of personhood, the self-evident expression of God's image and likeness.  [cf. Gen 1:26]  Moreover, the Genesis account makes evident that, in the creation of Adam, God acted in an extraordinarily personal way:  "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed."  [Gen 2:7-8]  To grasp the least of  the staggering implications of these ancient verses, we are obliged to remember that the Genesis account makes no claim whatsoever to annotate the human condition.

PROFOUNDLY PERSONAL ACT

6.  Rather it proposes to describe or portray--in the pentimenti^[2] of these Biblical stories--the fact of divine personhood: the creator God-person manifesting himself to the human person in a way that is direct and accessible for the creature. With this in mind, what aspect of the Divine Nature may the foregoing verses be addressing? If these verses represent an answer, to what question are they addressed? The poet James Weldon Johnson, writing in the early 20th century, composed a dramatic and pastoral work drawing upon the Genesis tradition. His poem "The Creation" urges the reader to grapple with the God-man relationship:  How can man understand God relating to him? Consider these verses excerpted from Mr. Johnson's poem^[3]: 

UP FROM the bed of the river \God scooped the clay; \And by the bank of the river \He kneeled Him down; \And there the great God Almighty \Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, \Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, \Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand; \This Great God, \Like a mammy bending over her baby, \Kneeled down in the dust \Toiling over a lump of clay \Till He shaped it in His own image; \Then into it He blew the breath of life, \And man became a living soul. \Amen. Amen.

7.  In the tradition of the Negro spiritual, Johnson's poem reveals a strong pastoral theme expressed with simple eloquence, a rhythmic procession of highs and lows, a steady expansion of force and effect, and the irremissible human response to divine activity--so be it! What do these verses have to say? Adam's creation was a profoundly personal act of God. God's creation of Adam was laborious. Adam was borne of and birthed into relationship with God. Man's living soul innately images God; absent the context of integral personhood, the complementarity of potency and intimacy is inconceivable. The creation of Adam is embedded in the human consciousness as a celebratory event.  God is simultaneously omni-potent and omni-intimate; moreover, potency and intimacy subsist in perfect complementarity in the Divine Being. Thus the poet, absent all self-consciousness, dares to speak of God as great and as a mammy. The magi dare to worship a king and a child.

PATHOLOGY OF SIN

8.  If man is situated at the center of anything, he stands at the ontological (of or relating to being or existence) junction of divinity and humanity, potency and intimacy. To be more precise, he seeks to return to this privileged coordinate, having been dislodged from it by his consumptive egotism, the pervasive human affliction identified by Gods revelation as sin. Christians know that the exceptional means by which man may be regenerated and restored to this privileged coordinate is divine grace. By the same Divine Revelation, man learns that he is radically incapable of graced existence except through the power of the Divine being that created him. Here man's speculative faculties miscarry.

9.  Man's mythological fear that an encounter with the divine necessarily places him in the presence of a hostile colossus of unimaginable magnitude and terror tends to reflect his acute and conscious awareness of the knowledge of his own interior disorder, that is to say, his own consumptive, even rapacious egotism. Tremulous and turbulent fear, a symptom of the pathology of sin impairing the human intellect and will, evidences mans awareness of his interior disorder and his knowledge that all manifestations of sin are alien and parasitical to his humanity: "O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam which gained for us so great a Redeemer!"^[4]

INTERIOR HUMAN MIGRATION

10.  The Divine Being--in whose triune personhood subsists the infinite and ineffable love of a father, the preexistent and eternal prayer of the son, and the mission and inexhaustible grace of the comforter--answered humanity's cry, an overture not merely reflective of curiosity but of languor, estrangement and helplessness.^[5] Love entrusted to prayer the mission of restoring the breath of life  [cf. Gen 2:7]  and the splendor of potent and intimate relationships to a fallen people. He identified what mankind must do extract itself from error, and how it must cooperate in recollecting its dissipated potentiality:  "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?"  [Eze 18:23]  

11.  In his encyclical Fides et Ratio  (1998)  Pope John Paul II reflected,  "...it emerges that men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable--a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves."^[6] Adam's banishment from Eden compels every human being to recover the original loss of his fruitful and very personal relationship with God and his fellow creatures. So catastrophic was this loss that all human beings participate in its void--anthropologically  and ontologically--and are, as Adam, culpable for the original sin. The search for a person is indicative of the unique experience of an interior human migration--man's enduring impulse to return to a point of origin, to restore immortality to the principle of potency and oneness to the principle of intimacy with God.

LEAP FROM ADAM TO CHRIST

12.  The search for a person, inscribed on Adam's heart at the moment of his sin, finds its fulfillment in the incarnation of the new Adam, Jesus Christ. The leap from Adam to Christ requires a renunciation of this world and all its created splendor: man's search for fulfillment cannot have as its ultimate end any created thing in the temporal order, even that which is "pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil".  [Gen 2:9]  Conversely, the leap from death to life is made possible by:

...CHRISTIAN FAITH (that) immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God. In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognizes the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfillment.  [Fides et Ratio no. 33] 

In answer to the people's entreaty--"what must we do, to be doing the works of God?"--Jesus answers, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent".  [Jn 6:28] 

13.  The leap from Adam to Christ consists in this:  "Moving beyond the stage of simple believing, Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God."^[7] Any impulse to faith leads men and women of good will to respond radically to the love of God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life".  [Jn 3:16]  As to the whole creation of all that is seen or unseen  [cf. 2Cor 4:18], "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved".  [Acts 4:12] 

ONLY THE LORD JESUS

14.  Only God, Master of all creation, whose image and likeness cannot be manufactured, and whose signs and wonders are beyond human imagination, can sanctify humanity and fill the void that perforates every man's soul with grief. Only the Lord Jesus Christ--beside whom no human claim to divinity can be asserted--is worthy of total human trust:  "I gird you, though you do not know me."  [Isa 45:5]   Only Jesus Christ to whom "all things are subjected"  [1Cor 15:27-28], and to whom "every knee should bow"  [Phi 2:10]  may declare as his own name "I AM WHO I AM".  [Exo 3:14-15; cf. Jn 8:58] 

15.  This name, exalted "above every other name"  [Phi 2:9], obliges man to surrender his egoism and complacency; hence, the Christians confession:  "Hallowed be thy name"!  [Mt 6:9; Lk 11:2]   We make this confession knowing that the "sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us".  [Rom 8:18]  To assist the Church in conserving the sacred mysteries and the truths of salvation, the Father and the Son entrusted her to the custody of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, not without his own lavish gifts to the Bride of Christ, bestows wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.  [cf. Isa 11:1-3] 

UNUSUAL STAR

16.  The story of the magi makes a Christian wonder, then, about his own personal legacy. What gift does God call him to bequeath to the next generation, to the children who come after him? Will this generation of Christians remain faithful to the Gospel? Will the next generation entrust itself to the Lord Jesus through whom the Father revealed his profound, personal love of and for mankind? "When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?"  [Lk 18:8]  The shepherds of the field found the infant Jesus first--the poor and unclean of Israel pay homage to one of their own--and later by the magi who personified the gentile world of wealth and nobility, its historic appreciation of things mysterious, and its unprecedented homage to the child of promise in Bethlehem's manger.

17.  The Church honors the magi's search for the newborn king of the Jews as an experience of epiphany. The expected King of Israel is discovered to be the Son of God and saviour of the world! Tradition names the magi as members of a priestly caste--learned scholars of philosophy, astronomy, astrology--characteristic of ancient Medea and Persia.^[8] Pursuing an unusual star situated over Bethlehem in Judea,^[9] they hope to discover the true king for it is he who will determine the world's destiny. The magi are these: the young Caspar carrying a thurible-shaped jar of frankincense symbolizing Christ's divinity and priestly office, the middle-aged Balthasar bearing a gold-covered horn or cup of myrrh prophesying the messiahs sacrifice and death, and lastly the aged Melchior conveying a rich casket of gold as a sign of the messiahs royalty.

ITERATION OF TIME AND SPACE

18.  Perhaps they pursue an iteration of time and space, a glimpse of the river bank to participate in Adam's creation:  they are emblematic of an exhausted and prostrate gentile world which had yet to breathe the life of God.^[10] The magi seek a king, a person in whom the world can trust. Nevertheless, their understanding of kingship is rooted in the wisdom of the world. The swaddling infant will not grow up to glorify himself; he is destined to "bear witness to the truth of God".  [cf. Jn 18:37]  The child in the manger will not train and lead armies; "everyone who is of the truth" will hear his voice.  [cf. Jn 18:37] 

19.  Our Lord's perfect humanity and divinity invites his followers to draw close to the divine persons of God. In point of fact, the humanity of the Christ child safeguards the charism of personhood in the Holy Trinity. Man searches for a person in whom he can place his trust and the comportment of his very life. His search is not too hard, nor is its object far off. The person we seek is not a creature of myth, that one should say, I do not know him. Neither is he mortal, that another should say, I have no need of him. Rather, the person for whom we search is very near. He is in our world and in our hearts.  [cf. Deu 30:11-14]  He is the child born to Mary, wife of Joseph, of the House of David. He is a son given to the world, to his own home.  [cf. Jn 1:11]  He is called, "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace".  [Isa 9:6-7]    

UNCLEAN IN BIRTH AND DEATH

20.  Perhaps it is true that the magi and the infant Jesus both exchanged gifts: for frankincense, Caspar is said to have received perfect faith; Balthasar, perfect truth and meekness for myrrh; and Melchior, the gift of charity and spiritual wealth for gold. An intriguing tale is found in Marco Polo's TRAVELS  (written ca 1298 AD)  to the effect that the magi's gifts tested the authenticity of Christ child's royalty. Gold would reveal Jesus kingship, frankincense his divinity, and myrrh his healing powers.^[11] These traditional elements are reminders that mysteries are not puzzles to be solved nor riddles to be explained.

21.  The Christ child is born impoverished and ritually unclean; he will die the same way on the cross. These are circumstances that imagination cannot embellish. The infant Jesus, dwelling in a stable, is presented to the unclean shepherds of Israel and the unclean magi of the greater gentile world. One day Jesus would proclaim the blessedness of all the unclean: the poor and poor in spirit, the mournful, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and those persecuted for his sake.  [cf. Mt 5:1-12; Lk 6:20-23] 

TWIN ARCHETYPES

22.  One day Jesus would admonish the rich saying:  "But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets."  [Lk 6:24-26]  The magi seek a priest, prophet and king who bears witness to the truth and is, in his person, the form and matter of truth itself. The epiphany of Our Lord serves to remind the wealthy and powerful that Christ will present himself in an altogether different manner to the world when he returns again:  "And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory."  [Mk 13:26] 

23.  The Christ child is high priest, true prophet and mighty king. He is the messiah  (Heb. anointed one)  of the children of Abraham whom God sheltered in a "desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness".  [Deu 32:10]  He is the root of Jesse  [cf. Isa 11:10], risen to rule the gentiles who are "by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree".  [Rom 11:24; cf. Rom 15:12]  In Abraham is the fatherhood of a "nation and a company of nations"  [Gen 35:11]--Israel and the gentile world, the twin archetypes of divinity and humanity in our Lord Jesus Christ.

ULTIMATE REALITY

24.  Israel reveals to the world that the messiah is eternally begotten in the fullness of divinity; the gentile world reveals to Israel the Christ "taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men".  [Phi 2:6-11]  The Son of God, of the same substance as the Father,  came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man.^[12]  Not for his own triumph did Christ do this but rather ...for us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.... ^[13] to the "glory of God the Father".  [cf. Phi 2:11] 

25.  The magi, honored by tradition as wise men, endure as an icon of man's fruitful and relational use of his intellect. They are remembered as masters of knowledge dedicated to reason and a self-reflective pursuit of the truth. That the knowledge available to the magi is long dismissed as jejune is quite beside the point. The wise men celebrated in Matthew's gospel remain relevant today precisely for their realization that scientific data is not the end point of the human quest for potency and intimacy. Comprehending the existence of a higher, more perfect order of truth transcending data and logic or the existence or non-existence of things, and guided by the reflected light of the knowledge available to them, the magi entered a hard-bitten and odorous stable to behold the Emmanu-el  (Heb. God is with us)  in whose luminous personhood subsists the Alpha and the Omega  [cf. Rev 1:8, 21:6]  of ultimate reality.

CARAVAN OF THE CENTURIES

26.  They gave him gifts. They paid him homage. They worshipped him. As a "lamp shining in a dark place"  [2Pet 1:19]  consumes its oil, Bethlehem's prophetic star declined and was extinguished. The magi returned to Persia in the dawn of a new day with the morning star rising in their hearts.  [2Pet 1:19]  Without break or interruption in the orderly caravan of the centuries, the Church has conserved the normative truths of salvation, entrusting her treasure to the "children of the promise"  [Rom 9:8]  of every generation who seek and hope to find. The time of the Church's glorification is near.  [cf. Rev 19:7-9]  We accept that mankind's full restoration to God must, during this interim age of secularization, remain open-ended and painfully incomplete:  "For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacence of fools destroys them; but he who listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of evil."  [Pro 1:32-33]  Confirmed in the Spirit of God, however, we cling to the assurance of our potent and intimate relationship with the Father and with one another:  "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive."  [1Cor 15: 22]