Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 6 · January 6
Treasures Opened
“And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”
The Oval, London, summer of 1882, the match against Australia that produced the Ashes. One of the England players that week is a twenty-one-year-old named Charles Studd, and a full ground has come to watch him. Three years later he sailed for China with six other Cambridge men, and around that time, coming into a large inheritance, gave it away in a series of gifts to mission and orphan work. The accounts differ on the sums. Nobody disputes the giving away.
He was doing something Matthew records without a word of commentary. By the time the wise men arrive the family is indoors, in the house, and Jesus is the young child rather than a baby; Herod later kills boys of two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men, which tells you roughly how long the journey took. The men who come in are foreign astrologers who read the sky for a living, and the first act of worship in Matthew's Gospel belongs to them. They fall down. Then they open the treasures, and the gifts are named with no explanation attached: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. Matthew never says what they mean. He says they were given away.
A full ground watched the cricket. Nobody watched the cheques, and it is the second thing still doing work a hundred and forty years later. The men on the floor at Bethlehem had an audience of four: a woman, a child, each other, and God. The Oval crowd came for a performance and got one. Bethlehem is the room your giving this week is standing in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 6 is The Banquet (Song of Solomon 2:4).