Acting for Others: The Gift of the Magi

Agency, Solidarity, and the Difference God Makes

Some reflections on the Magi, acting, and the world as God’s summons to us.

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Beginning with God: How We Think About What Things in the World Are

Christmas, and the stories we tell about it, are fundamentally stories about God.¹

To try to tell a story about what it means for God to be a character in the story means that the events take on a different pale, and not just because there is an additional character. For God to be thought of as a character in the story means a fundamental shift in what stories are, and what it means for us to have narratives that are coherent about our own lives: they must now account for the unaccountable—God—or risk shrinking down events to manageable bites of history.

This all gets very complicated very quickly, so a quick example:

If I tell a story about how my son made me a decoration for my office door (which he did yesterday), it’s a lovely story and you’ll get misty-eyed. But I tell that same story about something which God was speaking through my son’s actions, it becomes a different story indeed. It doesn’t diminish the door decoration, but expands its horizon, fills it with iconic measure, disrupts the quiet give and take of power and counter-power in a way which is not only more interesting, but more open-ended: there is a way in which now this little gift lives on far beyond the lamination and composition of a nonet. It becomes iconic.

Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash

All of this brings us to the magi², the first actors in Matthew’s Christmas story. It is not until Matthew 2 with the actions of the magi that human action fully enters the picture³, illuminating the difference God makes to how we act, and particularly, how we act on behalf of the needs of others.