#polyphonic scripture

Beginning with the Persian magi in Matthew’s Gospel and ending with the Roman centurion who recognizes Jesus as the Son of God, the Gospels are full of such characters — people who come from beyond the tribe to bless the tribe and then return to where they came from.

In Judaism they are called ‘righteous gentiles.’ I do not know what they are called in Christianity, but Jesus receives them more than once, whether they come from Samaria, Syrophoenicia, Canaan, or Rome. In story after story, they enter stage left, deliver their blessing on the Christian gospel, and exit stage right, leaving their mark on a tradition that is not their own.

If it is easy for Christians to overlook the ‘otherness’ of these religious strangers, then I think that is because we assume that once they enter our story they never leave it. In gratitude for their blessing, we baptize them as anonymous Christians. We make them one of us. A few do join us, but this is not the norm.

In the case of the Persian magi, their appearance in Bethlehem is as surprising as a delegation of Methodist bishops arriving in Dharamsala to recognize the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Once they deliver their gifts to the starlit Hebrew baby, they go back to where they came from, presumably to resume their vocations as Zoroastrian priests. Yet every Christmas we sing of them in church, as if they had never left.

This tradition of strangers bearing divine gifts begins early in the Bible with the story of Melchizedek, a Canaanite king and priest who comes out of nowhere bearing bread and wine for Abraham (then Abram) after a great battle. You can find it in Genesis 14 if you want, but since it is only four verses long you are also welcome to my summary.

First Melchizedek blesses Abram in the name of God Most High, whom he serves. At no point is there any discussion about whether Melchizedek’s God and Abram’s God are the same God. After blessing Abram, Melchizedek blesses God. In gratitude, Abram gives him a tenth of everything. Then Melchizedek exits the story as suddenly as he entered it, leaving Abram to become Abraham, the father of the Jews. The End.

Though Jews and Christians have made much of this mysterious stranger, some going as far as offering up elaborate interpretations of Melchizedek’s identity in order to establish their own priority, the story needs no embellishment. As short as it is, the narrative already has a clear message in place: God works through religious strangers. For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God sometimes sends people from outside a faith community to bless those inside of it. It does not seem to matter if the main characters understand God in the same way or call God by the same name. The divine blessing is effective, and the story goes on.

Other examples of redemptive religious strangers in the first testament of the Bible include Bithiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter who plucked baby Moses from his rush basket in the River Nile and raised him as her own; Jethro, the Midianite priest who was Moses’s father-in-law and teacher; Ruth, the Moabite who became the ancestor of King David; and Cyrus, the Persian king who ended the Babylonian exile and allowed the Jews to return home — the only non-Jew in the Bible who is ever identified as God’s anointed one.

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The remarkable thing about the stranger-loving commands in the Bible is that they appear in the sacred scriptures of Jews and Christians, which are honored by Muslims as well. By all rights, you would expect such scriptures to protect a religious community’s privileges and diminish the rights of those who do not belong to it, but that is not the case. Instead, these communities have chosen to preserve commands that clarify God’s care for outsiders as well as insiders, religious strangers as well as friends.”