Yesterday, Today, and Forever

by Maria Von Trapp

  “You see,” I concluded my little digression, “the Gospel is still going on in our very own days, and if we only would let Him, our Lord would re-live His life in each one of our lives all over again. Don’t you know from your own past the times when the star has seemingly vanished, and don’t you know this ‘exceeding great joy’ when it appears again?”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said Hester, and she seemed to know what she was talking about. “And?” she added, which made me conscious that I hadn’t finished my story of the three holy kings yet.

  It must have been rather late by now, because, in the house below, one after another of the lighted windows was darkened. “Let’s not look at the watch, but let’s finish,” I resolved.

  When they had passed through the city gate, they had to go directly south for five miles. This is something for our imagination to dwell on: the long caravan, really three caravans merged in one, the many camels with their bells, the swift horses, the stately elephants — for each king had come on the animals of his country — and a big star traveling above them in the air, enveloping them all in a soft light. How they must all have looked up to the star gliding along before them and thanked God from the depths of their hearts. After five miles the road turned sharply to the left, and there they saw Bethlehem, the little town perched on the hillside — like Assisi — in the midst of vineyards and olive groves, surrounded by big sheep pastures. The star traveled right into town and stopped above a house.

  There was no doubt: now they had reached their destination. Camels and elephants dropped to their knees, horses stood still, and the next moment the Magi-kings had dismounted and were now beckoning to their servants. This was a sign which they understood well, and the kings were brought the gifts which were intended for the newborn King of the Jews. In the East it was the custom to give a present to any superior as a sign of respect. We see that repeatedly in the Old Testament. Now Matthew tells us, “Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh” (Matt. 2:11).

  On this very day Joseph must not have been at home. He was most probably at work somewhere because “they found the child with Mary his mother.” And now something quaint happens: “They fell down and worshiped him.” Little Jesus was obviously sitting on His mother’s lap. And His mother, the most humble handmaid of the Lord, accepted the homage of these venerable men with complete composure. She did not stop them. She did not interrupt their adoration with polite words. She knew that falling down and prostrating was a tribute given only to God, and Mary accepted it for the little King.

  Later, our Lord would exclaim several times: “Truly …not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Matt. 8:10), always talking about one or another Gentile. If the little Child could have talked, He would have said the same right then. The Sanhedrin, the official law-giving body, had formally announced that “the Christ is to be born in Bethlehem,” and everybody understood that this little Child the highborn strangers from the Orient had come to worship must be identical with Him. It is one of the greatest riddles that the members of the Sanhedrin just seem to have returned to their homes from their summons to the king. No one — no Pharisee, Sadducee, rabbi, nor any of the elders — seems to have taken any action at all concerning the child only a few miles away in Bethlehem. Some of them must have heard some rumors of the birth in the cave with the manger, of the Gloria in Excelsius, or of the talk of Simeon and Anna. It is just incredible and unbelievable that nothing, absolutely nothing, was done until the pagans — the Gentiles — prostrated themselves before Him and presented Him with gifts.

  An eighth century saint, Bede the Venerable, said, “The first is said to have been Melchior, a bald man with a long beard and hair, who offered gold to the King and Lord” (princes from the East always honored their sovereigns with a gift of gold). The second, Caspar, was a beardless young man of a ruddy hue, and he came with frankincense, the most expensive fragrance of the East, always considered too precious to use for humans, and always reserved for the temples. Then came Balthasar, the dark one. His vessel of myrrh reminds us of the story of his people, grand but sad, myrrh used for the embalming of the dead. Never again in His whole life will our Lord be offered gold or frankincense, but twice He will be offered myrrh: on the cross by the soldiers, and after His death, by Nicodemus. Strangely enough, His mother will receive it from Nicodemus, as she receives it now from Balthasar.

  After the official homage was paid in prostration and presenting of gifts, Mary got up, I am sure, and showed her precious little child to her noble guests. Each one was allowed to take Him in his arms and look at His smiling little face. It must have been the happiest moment of their lives.

  Then with their hearts full to the brim, they must have asked the mother questions. Mary will be asked questions by another Gentile later and will tell all the wondrous secrets to him who will put them down as the Gospel of Luke. Mary might have told these great and venerable souls the story of the annunciation and what the angel said, the story of the visitation and what Elizabeth said, the story of the nativity and what the shepherds said. Then it was time for her royal guests to leave.

  What a horror to think that at the same time the old dying man in Jerusalem with one foot in the grave was already preparing his soldiers to kill this beautiful young boy, who was now clapping His little hands and having the time of His life!

  When Joseph came home from work that evening, Mary told him about the wondrous happenings of the day and showed him the gifts. To the mind of the silent man must have come the words of Psalm 72: “May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him!” (Ps. 72:11). And then, although they didn’t know it, they spent their last quiet evening for a long, long time to come. The little boy had been put to bed. Mary and Joseph went and looked at the gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

  Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar could hardly go to sleep with so much happiness throbbing in their hearts. When their tired eyes had closed in slumber, an angel of the Lord came to them with a message from on high: they were not to return to Herod.

  What a consolation to us when the children of the world all around us are getting smarter all the time! In prayer time we say every Sunday, “For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone” (Ps. 91:11–12).

  One can’t help wondering whether this angel, having given his message, turned right around and went over to “the house” where he also had to deliver a message.

  Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar would get up quietly, order their camp to be broken up quickly, and instead of going north to Jerusalem, they would head straight east, for the Jordan, and in a couple of hours be across the border out of the reach of Herod. The mysterious East would swallow them up.

  Tradition has it that after the Apostle Thomas had baptized them, they in turn tried to preach Christianity in their countries, but met with so much hostility that they soon died for their Lord and King. The early Christians venerated them as martyrs.

  Now the moon was looking directly into our window.

  “When we go to Europe next year,” Hester asked, “shall we stop at Cologne?”

  “Oh, let us hope so,” I said, and we walked down through the deep snow. The house was all dark now. Only the moon and the stars had witnessed the story which had warmed our hearts for the last hours.

  Maria von Trapp, shortly before the family’s flight from Austria.

  Chapter 9

  The Fugitive

  In the beginning of this book I told “how it happened.” “It” means that we as a family became so much interested in the life of Christ that we started to rebuild it for ourselves, to re-live it day by day. After a few years of doing this, and as we knew Him better and better, we began to feel very close to Him. Finally, He was not only a good friend; more and more He became like one of us — a member of our family. As it had all begun with my telling my crying little gir
l the story of the flight into Egypt, this story has always remained a favorite among us. We have tried ever so hard to collect all that is known about it, and on top of this, use our family imagination. By now it has grown like this:

  While in Bethlehem the two little groups of three holy persons each, the holy family and the holy kings, finally fell into peaceful slumber, Herod in nearby Jerusalem was very restless. For one thing, he could not sleep because of the awful disease which was eating him up; but on this night something else kept him awake — the thought of his innocent little rival. With growing impatience he awaited the return of the three kings. These stargazers — would they never come?

  Little did he know that just now in the middle of the night the course of those “stargazers” had been changed, and they were already on their way far from him. He, of course, had expected them back the same evening, maybe late at night, and now the hours were dragging on, and he worked himself more and more into one of his paroxysms of wrath. The mere idea that this hated child should escape him drove him into fury.

  In the early dawn of morning he shouted his commands, which he had changed from murdering just one little boy living in a certain house, to killing every child up to two years, to be absolutely sure He was among them. Herod had three companies of mercenaries: Galatians, Thracians, and Teutons. On these brutal soldiers he could depend to execute any command, however bloody, even against the members of his own family. A stiff march of an hour and a half took them to Bethlehem, where they began at once to scatter. They searched the houses, butchering the baby boys in their mothers’ arms. Before the little town had fully awakened to what had happened, the soldiers were already on their way back. The shrieks of the inconsolable mothers rose to heaven: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children” (Matt. 2:18).

  How many little boys were killed? It is said that Bethlehem had a thousand inhabitants at that time. The number of births in a year was about 30. In two years, therefore, there would be 60; and if half of them were girls, it would leave 30 boys. In those times, however, there was quite a high rate of infant mortality, so maybe there were no more than 20.

  The little bodies lay in their blood, while their parents were completely overwhelmed with grief.

  Matthew finishes his story about the three wise men: “And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him’ ” (Matt. 2:12–13).

  “When they had departed,” the Gospel says, so obviously, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar first disappeared with their caravan and were swallowed up by the darkness of the night when the angel came to Joseph with the command, “Rise.” This meant immediate danger. These words of the gospel might never have been so widely and so fully understood since they were written down, as they were by millions and millions of people all over Europe and all over the encroaching realm of the Iron Curtain: “The Communists are coming — arise and flee!” What Herod was to his time, a tyrant, Lenin and Stalin have been to our days. They all have one thing in common: They have no use for “the Christ.” Now as then, they seek to destroy Him. Therefore, the angel goes also through our days, or rather nights, and the “arise and flee” is heard by millions. That is why our times seem perhaps closer than any of the 19 centuries to the very beginnings of Christianity. Whenever refugees are fleeing because their Christian faith is threatened — all over the highways and byways of Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, in the Balkans, or in China — they never have to feel alone. In them our Lord Jesus Christ, the same yesterday as today, is still on His flight into Egypt.

  Joseph, tired though he was from his day’s work, must have been immediately wide awake upon hearing the word “Rise, take the child and his mother.” With a heavy heart he wakened Mary, who was so peacefully asleep with her baby, trusting so completely in his protection. When Mary recognized his voice and understood what he said, she arose — I almost said hastily, but no, that would not be right. I am absolutely sure that in her whole life she never did anything hastily. Everything she did and the very way she did it must always have been just right because she was so completely anchored in God. She just rose quickly, very quickly. And the handmaid of the Lord kept her head again as she had done when the great angel appeared in Nazareth, when Elizabeth had said such outstanding things, and when Simeon’s message tore her heart. In no time she had wrapped up the little boy tenderly and taken the few things she would need, for poverty doesn’t take long to pack. The only really valuable things they owned were the gifts of the kings. Joseph must have wrapped them carefully. Maybe in less than ten minutes they had quietly left the house. The donkey they came on from Nazareth must still have been around. And Joseph lifted Mary with the sleeping child in her arms onto its back.

  We feel it now as a great privilege to have been refugees once, to know what anxiety means. The clatter of the donkey’s hooves on the cobblestones of Bethlehem, for instance: wouldn’t that wake up somebody who might report them later? That’s why they hurried down the slope into the vineyards and fields to get away as fast as possible. Every sound arouses ones fears. “Maybe they have found out and are on our heels” — that’s the constant fear. When the sky grew light, the first cocks began to crow, and the horrid battalion entered the small town, perhaps Mary and Joseph, who were slow travelers, might still have heard the shrieks which rent the air and sent cold chills down their backs. They were still very close to Herod’s power. They were still in the neighborhood where they might have been known and identified. ...

  Oh, it is so wrong to picture the flight into Egypt as a nice, smooth hike with angels on all sides ministering to them. The angels certainly were there admiring, adoring, almost unbelieving that the Lord would not have protected His only-begotten Son by means less troublesome than this pitiful flight. Where was the Angel of Death who slew the Egyptians? Where was the angel with the fiery sword at the gates of paradise? But it was obviously the will of the Most High that the child and His mother be saved not by supernatural interference, but by the natural means of a tedious flight. We people living many centuries later understand perhaps a little better why: He really has become “like one of us,” and we can go to Him also during a flight or a persecution, saying full of confidence, “You know how it is.”

  The books say that there were two main routes going from Judea into Egypt. It is interesting now to look them up on the map. The more popular route was “by way of the land of the Philistines” (Exod. 13:17), via Ascalon and Gaza and then along the shore of the Mediterranean toward the delta of the Nile. The other way led through Hebron and Beersheba to the land on the Nile. Every refugee will tell you that if one wants to get away from feared territory as quickly and safely as possible, one uses the less-traveled routes. That’s why they must have gone south to Hebron about 15 miles. It has been ascertained that “the ordinary rate for a long journey on foot was about 17 Roman miles per day,”1 so the holy family could have reached Hebron that first day. Every refugee will also tell you that you don’t stay overnight in a town, even if it should be dear to you, because it contains the tomb of your own ancestors (like Hebron, where Father Abraham had buried his beloved wife, Sarah); so they hurried on.

  Farther south about 20 miles was an oasis, the famous Beersheba, the southernmost settlement in Judea. Did Mary and Joseph talk about the fact that from here Father Abraham had set out to sacrifice his only son, that here also he had pushed Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness? Here, Joseph must have filled their water bags, because now they were setting out into the barren desert. Beyond Beersheba they could afford to breathe a little more freely because they were out of Herod’s immediate jurisdiction, but they were still in the Roman Province of Syria. You never could tell wh
ether Herod had perhaps gotten the Romans to lend him a hand. Therefore, Mary and Joseph would keep hurrying on toward the river Rhinocolura. After having passed the frontier between Syria and Egypt, they did relax somewhat, but now came the worst stretch of the journey, more than a hundred miles of unbroken desert.

  When we were on the way to California in our big blue bus, we saw for the first time in our lives real desert with sand dunes. Because of our favorite Gospel, we asked the driver to stop on the highway and we, taking our shoes and stockings off, waded into the dunes. We were thinking that the sandals of antiquity were not much more protection than going barefoot because the hot sand would be constantly between the soles and the leather. I remember so vividly how we couldn’t stand it more than ten minutes, hastening back to the bus with a stinging sensation all over our legs which lasted the rest of the day. And this was in early spring, and the desert was not yet at its hottest. It certainly gave us firsthand experience of how those 360 miles between Bethlehem and Heliopolis must have been.

  The books say that in those times little ones were nursed by their mothers for a full two years. Every mother knows that during the time of nursing one wants to drink a great deal. The water in the skins had to be dished out very sparingly. He, who would later feed five thousand and another time four thousand by a miracle, didn’t do a thing to help Himself or His mother and foster father, although a wave of His little hand would have turned the desert into paradise.

  There are many lovely legends woven around this flight through the desert. Painters throughout the centuries have taken hold of them, and we see Mary resting peacefully on a green carpet of grass while Joseph is picking apples and the infant is playing with young lions. In another picture we see little Jesus beckoning to a group of tall date palms, they bending down so that He can pick what He wants, or the animals of the desert coming to their aid and the holy family riding on zebras, giraffes, and lions. The loveliest of all these stories, however, is the one true version that nothing extraordinary happened and they had to take every step through the hot sand by themselves, shiver through the cold nights, for us, for you and me. Since we discovered this story when we were just beginning as refugees, it warmed our hearts. It made us feel good in that company!