It’s that time of year. Time for twinkling lights and jingling bells and announcements ringing from angelic choirs. Time to wrestle boxes from where they’ve been hiding for the last 11 months and find out what’s in them—expected memories and perhaps some forgotten surprises. Time to set up the shepherds once more under the sagging eaves of what was most surely a leaky roof. Time for long journeys and the inquisition of foreign kings to end where the star came to rest.

Time to remember those first visitors, such an unlikely group. They were witnesses to the focal point of history, and yet we hear about them just this once and never again. Those shepherds in the field—they were nameless and probably to a large extent, clueless, like a bunch of folks from a small town brought in off the street at the last minute to be extras in a movie they will never understand. What happened to those shepherds anyway? Ever wonder if any of them were still around when the movie came out thirty years later?

And the magi—those eastern kings. Mystical. Brooding. Psychic. They were pouring over celestial maps and ancient charts of the heavens, and someone saw it. Someone else confirmed it. Some unexplainable alignment of the stars. Perhaps they had somehow procured the Torah to confirm these signs, but that is unlikely. More probable that God allowed their own holy books to contain it. After all, they were invited guests, and the invitation had to go out. He probably would have left it lying around in one or more of the books they commonly read. I have a feeling we would be surprised and perhaps more than just a little uneasy about who would turn out to be today’s counterpart to the magi and about what they would be looking into today in order to see any new metaphysical signs in the universe.

But harder to understand than these unlikely guests who attended this event was the absence of all those who should have been there and weren’t—those who had the prophecies and the predictions and the Scriptures that told all about it from the one true God. These were those who studied their scriptures daily, who deciphered every word down to the dotting of the “i” and the crossing of the “t”. How did they miss it? Were they looking somewhere else? Did they miss the forest for the trees? Or did they see it and deny it because it meant too much of a threat to their order and control? They got the invitation, too, a long time ago, and when it came right down to it, perhaps they had other, more important things to do. All we know is this: the silence from this little corner of the universe at such a moment in history, was deafening.

Ever wonder if any of these same quandaries are at work today? Are people who aren’t even looking ever surprised by Christ? Do people who are looking, but in the wrong places, ever end up finding Jesus anyway? Do lights ever go on for folks who are simply standing out in a field tending their responsibilities, or do the searches of modern sages ever lead someone through the mazes of the supernatural to the real living Christ? I wouldn’t put anything past a God who chose this odd group of guests to attend Christ’s birth day, and gave them such a unique array of pathways to get there.