Advent Attentiveness

Rachel Coleman

As Advent 2023 draws to a close and our season of waiting climaxes with the celebration of Christ’s coming, the readings in the Lectio365 app have focused on the story of the magi in Matthew 2. This episode has gripped me in a new way this year, intersecting with the Holy Spirit’s gently unrelenting emphasis in my own life during this season: attentiveness. The questions that have persisted are, “Am I attentive to the voice of the Spirit—in Scripture, in dreams, in the inner whispers, in the voice of other believers, in the ordinariness of daily life? Am I alert, aware, attuned, expectant?”

What has struck me about the magi this time is their extraordinary attentiveness. These pagan astrologers display an astonishing readiness to see God at work, to hear his voice, and to respond appropriately. It is a broad attentiveness, attuned to multiple frequencies. First, they are attentive to the witness of creation. As Craig Keener writes, “For one special event in history, the God who rules the heavens chose to reveal himself where pagans were looking.”[1]  They are looking—and when they see God’s gracious sign in the stars that they had studied so closely for so long, they are responsive. What they perceive in the skies impels them out of Persia (modern-day Iran) into a desert journey of thousands of miles.

When they get to Jerusalem, these highly educated professionals are attentive to the witness of experts from other fields. I am impressed with their humility—they arrive in Herod’s court with a question, seeking the expertise of those who might best be expected to solve the mystery of where they might find the one “born to be king of the Jews.” Rather than staying enclosed in the hermetically sealed box of their own field of study, these astrologer-astronomers are alert to what they can learn from theologians and biblical scholars.

The magi are attentive to the witness of Scripture. When Herod’s experts quote Micah’s prophecy about Bethlehem as the location of the anticipated royal birth, the foreign visitors take that prophetic word at face value, without questioning or doubting. With more faith than is sometimes shown by the “people of the Book,” these pagan visitors don’t hesitate to act on the Book’s revealed truth. If the Spirit takes an ancient reference to the city of David and underlines it as the destination toward which their astral guide has been leading them, then to Bethlehem they will go!

They are attentive to the witness of the Spirit in a dream. Neither science nor religion has caused them to bracket out dreams as a reliable means of divine communication, and when the Spirit chooses to guide them in that way (“go home by another route”), they respond with alacrity and obedience.

Attentive, alert, aware, attuned, expectant—the magi demonstrated such qualities to an extraordinary degree. Their example challenges me on at least two fronts. First, does the quality of my own listening and looking for the words and presence of the Holy Spirit reflect that kind of broad attentiveness? Am I looking, intentionally, on alert for the whispers and glimpses of the divine? Am I ready to respond with the kind of radical alacrity that sent the magi across deserts, into the halls of power, through the doors of a home in a tiny Judean town, onto their knees before the newborn King, and then on a sneaky escape from Herod’s terrible plots? Second, I am challenged by the identity of these attentive, alert, expectant responders—they weren’t members of the people of God, but pagan outsiders, who were nevertheless actively seeking to see God’s signs and to hear his voice. Who are the magi-like people in my context, and how might God be asking me to be part of his “show and tell” for those pagan seekers?

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[1] The Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 2009), 100.