We’ve really been making the grand circle tour through the birth narratives this Christmas season. On Christmas Eve we heard the story from Luke, about how Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem for the census, and the angel appeared to the shepherds who came to worship the infant Savior. Last week was the birth narrative from John, which started at the very beginning of creation itself. And this morning, we hear Matthew’s version of the famous story, this one with no shepherds or census, but instead with wise men from the east following a star to bring gifts to honor the newborn King of the Jews. Our nativity scenes tend to mesh this whole thing together, turning the manger scene into a menagerie, with sheep and shepherds, camels and kings, stars and angels, cows and even the occasional lobster, spilling out from the stable. But the Gospels themselves don’t do that. Instead, each writer tells the narrative a little bit differently. While the central facts remain the same, Jesus was born in Bethlehem to parents Mary and Joseph, miraculous events heralded his birth, then he moved to Nazareth, where he grew up, the details themselves are different. As an aside, the fact that the birth narratives don’t agree actually makes them more believable for me. Anytime you have multiple narrators telling a story, you would expect them to bring in different details. Were all the birth accounts exactly the same it would be easy to discount them as just a story. But precisely because the Gospel writers retell the events differently, I can lean into the central truth of the narrative, that promise that to us is born, in the city of David, a savior, who is a king like no king the world has ever known. So let’s dive in this morning, and see what truths the writer of Matthew has for us.
First off, the arrival of the wise men happened well after the birth of Jesus. We celebrate Epiphany twelve days after Christmas, but they could have come up to two years after his birth. Long enough that verse eleven tells us that the Holy Family has moved into a house in Bethlehem.
And who were these wise men? Tradition has called them kings, an idea that actually came from the Isaiah text we heard this morning, which said that “kings would come to the brightness of your dawn,” set the number of them at three, based on the three gifts, and even gave them the names of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. The Bible itself actually gives us none of those details. We don’t know how many of them there were, we certainly don’t know their names. What we do know is they were definitely not kings. Scripture calls them Magi, a word which means “wise men” or “astrologers.” They were probably
Zoroastrian priests from what is now modern day Iran, who specialized in the study of astrology and the interpretation of dreams. What is important for Matthew is they were not Jews, they were practitioners of a totally different religion. They had no access to the Torah or its wisdom. And yet, they, not Herod, the allegedly Jewish ruler of Judea, but these pagans are the ones who are able to follow God’s guiding and find the Messiah. Herod purported himself to be a faithful Jew. It was under his leadership that construction on the second Temple began, the crown jewel of the Jerusalem skyline, the center of Jewish faith and hope, the very dwelling place of God. Herod was a follower of Torah, he claimed faithfulness to its teachings, he was around all of the greatest scholars, he of all people should have been able to find the birthplace of the long-promised Messiah. Yet when the magi appear, bringing news of Christ’s birth, Herod has to send them to find Jesus, and bring back word to him of the location of the child. My colleague Tom Ott from First Congregational calls this conversation between Herod and the magi one of the very first interfaith dialogues.
Of course, one has to wonder if, like so many interfaith dialogues, this one was ruined from the start because Herod went in totally close-minded. Because it seems possible that Herod could not find the Messiah because Herod did not want there to be a Messiah. Faithful Jew though he may have claimed to be, Herod was first and foremost, a pragmatist. One of the universal truths across all the Gospel birth narratives is the introduction of what will become the central conflict of the life of Jesus, the conflict between the powers of this world and the power of the Most High God. A conflict that eventually led to Jesus being put to death on a cross, the preferred method of execution for Roman political prisoners. Of course, God then gets the last laugh when Jesus rose from the dead, destroying not only the world’s attempts to get rid of Jesus, but the very power of death itself.
But we’re not quite there yet. This morning, the conflict is small yet, just some foreigners telling King Herod of a baby born King of the Jews. A problem for Herod, certainly, but not one so big that Herod could not yet stop it. You see, even though Herod claims to be a faithful Jew, and may even have seen himself as a defender of the rights of his people, what Herod really is, is a faithful lover of power. Herod has the Torah, he has the writings of Isaiah and the other prophets, he has everything he would need to know of the coming Messiah. But Herod saw Jesus not as hope, but as a threat. Because in Herod’s worldview, there was already a king of Judea, and there simply was not room for another one. This baby, Herod knew, was a threat to the carefully amassed kingdom he had created.
And so God didn’t use Herod to lead us to Bethlehem. God used magi, wise men from the east, priests of another religious tradition, to point us the way to the Savior of the nations. What unexpected guides these strangers in a strange land are for us. They come, they kneel at the feet of the Christ child, they shower him with gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. Gifts, by the way, with their own depth of meaning. All incredibly rare and valuable, they are gifts worthy of a king. But there is more to them than their value. Frankincense and myrrh are spices. Their oils were used in coronation ceremonies to anoint the newly crowned kings. But they were also used in burial practices, anointing bodies for the grave, as the women would come to do to Jesus after his death on the cross. In these gifts, the magi prefigure the whole of the Gospel story, that this child is a king whose power is made known through death. And then, after leaving their gifts, they left, as suddenly as they came, by another road, so as not to return to Herod, back to the east, back to their study, their families, their lives. They never converted to Judaism, they never show up again at all. But they, these foreign priests, are the ones who throughout all of time have played the role of the ones who lead us by the light of a star to the cradle of the Christ child.
The gift that the magi give us is the promise that God leads us through all sorts of people. God’s leading and guiding and shaping in our lives is not contained to appointed religious leaders, educated teachers, worldly authorities. In fact, if Herod is any example, the authorities can, and often do, get it wrong, very wrong. No, God is too big, to powerful, to all-encompassing to be constrained like that. And in fact it can be in conversations with people who see the world, and even God, different than we do, that our own faith can be stretched and strengthened and deepened. We can come to know God better by following for a time along the path of another, who can lead us to a different perspective, a fuller picture of our creator God.
The other gift of this story is that we too can be magi. We too can lead others to the Christ child, even when we ourselves do not exactly know what we are following. The magi did not know where the star would lead them. They could not know. And yet, it is by their leading every year that we come to see the great epiphany, the great unveiling of the one who is God born among us. And so, like the wise men, we can trust, that our best following, whether or not we know where we are going, or even what we are looking for, can and will lead us to the presence of God. Because in the end, it is not the following that matters. What matters is that God wants to reveal Godself to us. And God will stop at nothing until the wonder is revealed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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