Today, he was a much older man. His bones ached. It hurt to move much at all, and so he was content, most days to not move much at all. Today, though, Balthasar thought about other things. It was early, yet, still very early in the morning. But he’d received news.
They’d found themselves talking about the old days, this week, revisiting that journey, all those years ago, the baby they’d found in a stable, whom they’d paid homage, even in such a state, to whom they’d given their gifts, the gold, the frankincense, and yes, the myrrh. They’d all had a sense of foreboding. Nothing they’d seen, no signs. They’d heard the rumors of the authorities in Jerusalem.
It’s not true, what they said even in those days, that no one talked about the man, that he existed in a vacuum, that his life was unremarkable in his lifetime. There are remarkable people you treasure whom no one would think to record for posterity. That will always be true. The scale shifts. The everyday kindnesses that are so easy to take for granted, the wisdom that comes from sources outside traditional roles. These are things that can leave a profound impact on the world. They called Balthasar a wiseman, but he thought, he hoped, you didn’t need to be one to understand such things. He knew he was wrong about that. He knew that was the true distinction.
This man had made an impact, and he had inspired fear, not because he led an insurrection, either against Rome or his own people. No, never anything like that. Those are the things that wind up being recorded. They don’t talk about love, about compassion, the things so many people yearn for, so easy to ignore, why they’re so precious.
But that was what had happened to the man. All through the night he’d been undergoing a trial. He’d been arrested. Outside, in the worlds untouched by the circles within Jerusalem, it had quickly become a scandal. Word reached Balthasar quickly, much more quickly than the distance should have allowed. He was worlds away, in so many ways. None of this should have concerned him, and yet it had, many years ago, and even a wiseman couldn’t really have appreciated, then, the implications, so seemingly regional, irrelevant.
The man was going to die. He was going to be executed. He would be long dead before Balthasar could muster himself to undertake another journey. The Romans were a bit too predictable. The authorities there knew how these things worked, all too well. They’d conspired to rid themselves of a pest, who had threatened their peace of mind, their complacency, a man who had dared gather the lost flocks of their society and given them hope. He would end up on a cross. The landscape had begun to look naked, Balthasar was told, if there weren’t at least a few of those about on any given day.
No, he hadn’t considered the myrrh for its other applications. He’d gone in search of a king. Depending on how long it took the man to die, if somehow his family still had the myrrh, it would be used for something very different, before this day was done.
Balthasar found himself ashamed. Ashamed for humanity. Ashamed for his own weakness. Weakness in body, now. Weakness in spirit. Then. Weakness in spirit even this week. They had all undergone a journey when this man was born. They hadn’t bothered, when they knew he would die. No one had. He would die alone. He deserved so much better.
He felt very old. He still didn’t understand faith.
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