The Buddha, The Christ, And The Prophet: Some Thoughts For Epiphany

It is a good thing that the stories of Jesus' birth eventually went far beyond merely commemorating his role as Messiah to the Jews. And it must not have been easy to get the extrapolation going. At every step of the way, the earliest Jewish Christians had to fight the temptation to keep their Lord all to themselves. After all, their leaders in Jerusalem kept clinging to just that kind of narrow vision, to the continuing frustration of Paul and his Gentile Christian congregations, for whom Judaism had come to mean more than God's walling off of an especially privileged and embarrassingly small sampling of humankind to the detriment of everyone else.

If John's Gospel had it right, Jesus went out of his way to speak of himself as the light of the world and not only of the Temple, to the chagrin of the latter's most revered leaders. And in spite of its heavily Jewish flavor almost everywhere else, Matthew's Gospel allows its Christmas story to tilt intriguingly in a decidedly universalist direction. Whoever those three august figures were who joined Luke's shepherds at the mouth of that cave outside Bethlehem --- Kings? Astrologers? Teachers of Wisdom? --- they most certainly represented an interest in the newborn King that greatly surpassed the long cherished hopes of only the Jews.

Matthew wrapped things up nicely at the end of his narrative, with Jesus sending his disciples to "all nations." To be sure, the message of Matthew's Jesus was first a message for the Jews. But it was also a message for everyone else besides. People who truly understand who Jesus was and what he was about have always gotten this. Alas, too many of his professed followers through the centuries have not.

One of the most powerful signs of spiritual vitality is the willingness to maintain a constant struggle with people who look to their particular religion to envelop only those who are like them. What makes this struggle necessary is the very essence of true religion itself, the binding of people in an ever widening and deepening human fellowship. Religions which serve only the few may thrive for a while, but not over the long haul. Confucianism, for example, has passed from the scene of salvation history because it was for too long interested in creating only a Chinese culture, and because it was eventually overpowered by people with a very different view of what that Chinese culture should look like. Zoroastrianism faded from prominence because it was not interested in making this present, material world better for anyone; its labors were directed toward a very narrow goal of defining a pathway out of this kind of world altogether, and even at that, for only a privileged few.

For the Buddha, by contrast, truth had to be truth for everyone, and if helping people attain it meant sacrificing a tradition that opened it up only to members of the highest caste of Hindu society, then so much the worse for Hinduism. And for the Prophet, Allah wills a universal fellowship of humankind rather than the endlessly warring tribes that constituted the Arabia of his time. To the end of ensuring it by choice and not external compulsion, Muhammad taught, Allah demands respect for non-Muslims even and especially in Islamic lands.

Sadly, many followers of the Buddha, the Christ, and the Prophet continue to miss the all-important epiphany theme in all three of the traditions which honor them. Each sought to manifest something of universal significance to people who are open to fresh encounters with the truly Sacred rather than with their own idols. But each ran into difficulties early on from people clinging to the notion that the only light the world has is the illumination that emanates from their own savior figures, and that the only true faith is a faith which condemns everyone who does not hold it in the ways that they do.

One of the things I treasure about Christmas pageants is their depiction of how easily three strange visitors from exotic lands blended in so easily and quickly with a scruffy and smelly band of sheep-tenders on the wrong side of a town filled with people who were overwhelmed by demands of the world's and not God's devising. The unearthly calm of a well-produced scene heralding the arrival of the Magi can be a vivid representation of a silent night lit not just by stars in the sky, but by more than one messenger from God serving the truth of God in more than one way and in more than one time.