Some years ago, during the hours of darkness, an I.R.A. terrorist hid himself in the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. He sat in the choirstalls and stared at the great picture by Rubens, The Adoration of the Kings, that hangs behind the high altar. Then, in a frenzy, he deliberately slashed the painting as violently as he could. (Happily, it has since been perfectly restored.) What could have prompted so seemingly pointless an act of vandalism? Possibly he was mentally unhinged or drunk? It was a strange and curious episode, but not, I think, without significance.
The story of the adoration of the kings does not appear in the gospels. Only in one gospel, Matthew, is the story told of the journey of the magi. They were not kings but astrologers who followed a mysterious moving star, and we are not told how many they were. Christian tradition (showing the profoundest insight) has turned them into kings, seeing one of them as a black African, and has even given them names, Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. Artists have delighted in depicting them prostrating themselves before the Christ Child and offering their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This is a mythical, not a factual story. It is a tale whose meaning is expressed in symbols and pictures. It deals with perennial psychological realities, not with one-off happenings in history.
The theme of the King’s College painting is adoration. That word has come to have a churchy sound. We hear it at Christmas but it may seem old-fashioned and remote from our experience – or so we may think. If so, we are utterly mistaken. Adoration is one of the most earthy and everyday realities of human life. It is inescapable, vital, essential. If it were to disappear, life would lose its savour and its basic humanity. It might even disappear.
In Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, something of a ludicrous wimp, wistfully declares, ‘I was adored once!’ But so were we all! We were adored by our mothers and fathers. Parents are happy to sit gazing in wonder at their new-born child. It is not too much to say that this adoration brought us into life. It sustained us through the perils of helpless infancy until we developed the strength to lead an independent existence. Adoration gave us life. Where adoration is absent or fails – as sometimes it does – the result is tragic disaster and misery. If adoration completely disappeared, human life would be at an end.
The Christ Child in the picture is the centre of radiant beauty. He represents divine potentiality. He appears weak, defenceless, powerless, and so needs and deserves the utmost care and devotion. Yet he also represents life’s delight in itself, and its unimaginable power to bring itself forth again and again in endless renewal.
What is government for? It exists not for itself but to protect, support, nourish, affirm the life so beautifully present, so fragile yet so powerful in potentiality, in this Child. Government is truly but the servant of human well-being. So the kings must kneel, prostrate themselves in homage and offer their richest gifts to the child who represents the deepest humanity.
This image of Adoration shows up as shoddy and ignoble all that would seek to harm and defile the Child and human well-being. It is an affront to the murderous destructiveness of terrorists of every description. No wonder that drunken thug in the chapel years ago could not bear it and lashed out in a frenzy of destruction. Tragically the Child’s beauty and innocence are always threatened by the evil and the ignorant. But in every act of loving devotion to every new-born child, the divine image of the Holy Child is restored. Every Christmas gives us yet again the wonderful sense of Life’s renewing power. O come let us adore!
Frank Walker is Minister Emeritus of the Cambridge Unitarian Church.