How blinded are these biblical authorities by their own Jerusalem Bias! Wittingly or unwittingly, they provide the tyrant with the secret intelligence he needs for his next raid on his own subjects, his holocaust against The Holy Innocents. And what does the priests' Bible-quoting do for the magi? It sets them up for an ambush. It is bad enough when travelers like me are too proud to ask directions. But how much worse when we are the ones giving the directions, biblical directions at that, yet are so power-prejudiced ourselves that we trick the traveler into a trap.
Have you noticed the worst thing about The Jerusalem Bias? It makes us exclusive. Suppose we assume what the astrologers assume, what Herod assumes, what the chief priests assume, what "all Jerusalem" assumes, what the whole Gentile world assumes, namely, that authority can only mean one thing: being in control with others under our control. When we operate as if that were the only authority there is, we will be driven to exclude others. We will have to exclude them from our top of the heap. Either we will exclude them by keeping them down. Or if they threaten to rise up, we will have to put them back down. Or as with Herod, we may have to put them away. We don't need swords of course to exclude them. Shunning is almost as effective. Or snubbing. Sometimes silence will do. At bottom The Jerusalem Bias has to exclude even the Bethlehem Baby. His very contrary kind of authority -- the authority to die for us, the authority to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, the authority upon earth to forgive sin -- cannot be tolerated, not even imagined, except as a counter-plot against the world. Therefore, Herod has to remove him.
So exclusive of others is our Jerusalem Bias that finally it even forces us, the excluders, into isolation. Take Herod, for example. He himself was the one who finally was left out. Did the astrologers return to Jerusalem with the information he demanded, the Baby's whereabouts? No. Thanks to a special tip
However, the best wisdom stories have the last laugh not at the expense of the villain but, beyond that, at the expense of the hero. In this wondrous Epiphany gospel who is it finally who suffers the consequences? Not the astrologers, surely. For all their blundering and naevete they were only temporarily inconvenienced. But then must it not be Herod, the villain, the heavy in the story? Isn't he the one who finally is left with egg on his face, and far worse than that? I suppose so. Still, even Herod, come to think of it, does get his way in the end. Didn't he want the newborn king in Bethlehem destroyed? And did his scheme suceed? Maybe not right away, but sooner or later it did. Eventually, when the Baby was thirty-something, Herod's wish finally came true even if only posthumously. You've heard the expression, "laughing from his grave."
Granted, we did say that Herod, the great excluder, winds up ultimately as the excluded one. Then doesn't that make him the one who, in the words of the psalm, is being laughed to scorn? Maybe. But then how about the Baby, the very hero of the story? How did he wind up? Not excluded? We know better than that.
Think back just a week or two. Place: Powell Hall. Clue: George Frideric Handel -- a Lutheran (sort of) turned Anglican (sort of.) Another clue: Diminutive Amy Kaiser coaxing every last bit of spirit out of that fine chorus. Right, The Messiah. The Messiah? That one is the Messiah about whom the tenor stands up and sings, "All they that see Him laugh him to scorn?" And then, as if on second thought, the tenor stands up again to up the ante. Not only do those laugh the Messiah to scorn who "shoot out their lips and shake their heads." More scandalous