The Magi

The story of the Wise Men ranks right up there with the Christmas and Easter stories for firing the imagination. Poets as distinct as WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Longfellow have wrapped words around the visit of the Wise Men. Hundreds of artists have painted the scene, including Botticelli and Fra Angelico. In Ghirlandaio’s ‘Adoration’, painted in 1487, the eldest magus kneels before the Christ Child who coyly parts his loincloth to let the old man see that God has indeed become fully man.

So much has been made about this story, about which we know very little. They weren’t kings, of course, and we don’t know for sure that there were three of them. We don’t know who they were, where they came from , or how long it took them to get to Bethlehem, or how old Jesus by the time they got there. We’re not even sure about the nature of that famous star.

Over time, tradition has added colour to the pencil sketch of a story that Matthew offers us. It’s turned the Magi, into three Kings, and given them kingdoms, nationalities, different colours of skin and names. They’ve become Balthasar, the king of the Chaledeans, usually portrayed as a white man; Gaspar, the Ethiopian King of Tarshish, usually represented with brown skin; and Melchior, the black king of Nubia.

 

Tradition has them arriving at the stable hot on the heels of the shepherds, but the text’s ambiguous about that assumption, and whatever light led them to the stable or cave or house, to find the newborn, or toddler, that Jesus was, it’s unlikely to have been the beautiful but enormous star we see depicted on our Christmas cards. Nor, I’m guessing, would the Christ Child have been sitting up in Mary’s arms, ready to hold court, as he’s so often portrayed in renaissance art.

 

But even when you strip away the layers of accretion that have embellished the story over the years, Matthews’s account has more than enough magic all of its own, both in terms of plot and theology.

 

These men read something in the heavens – a sign that awakens something within them. They set off on a long journey to find out what it means. They travel on, through uncertainty and mistakes – not guided nearly as precisely as tradition might make us think – finally arriving at a strange destination to welcome an unlikely king. And to their credit, they’re not put off. They worship, they offer their gifts, and they return home by another way.

 

These Gentile men, looked at with suspicion through Jewish eyes because of their religion and their practice of stargazing, were among the first to bring their worship to the Christ. And to the theologically literate, that would have stirred memories of an ancient promise God had made to Abraham – the promise that through his seed, all the nations of the world would be blessed. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, the arrival of the Magi is a powerful sign that this Christ will be the saviour not just of the Jews, but of the world.

 

So there’s more than enough magic to be getting on with in Matthew’s simple account. But my advice this morning is don’t get too preoccupied with the facts of this story, or the paucity of them. It’s not that the facts don’t matter. It’s just that they don’t matter as much as the truth that’s behind them. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way “You don’t have to do archaeology to find out if the stories are genuine, or spend years in the library combing ancient texts. There is another way home. You just listen to the story. You let it come to life inside of you and then you decide on the basis of your own tears or laughter whether the story is true.”

 

So in the spirit of Epiphany story-telling, let me bring you these words from the work of Frederick Buechner – a short reflection simply called the Wise Men – and may God help us hear the truth it brings us.

"'Beware of beautiful strangers, '" said one of the magi-astrologers, the wise men, "'and on Friday avoid travel by water. The sun is moving into the house of Venus, so affairs of the heart will prosper.' We said this to Herod, or something along those lines, and of course it meant next to nothing.

To have told him anything of real value, we would have had to spend weeks of study, months, calculating the conjunction of the planets at the precise moment of his birth and at the births of his parents and their parents back to the fourth generation. But Herod knew nothing of this, and he jumped at the nonsense we threw him like a hungry dog and thanked us for it.

A lost man, you see, even though he was a king. Neither really a Jew nor really a Roman, he was at home nowhere. And he believed in nothing, neither Olympian Zeus nor the Holy One of Israel, who cannot be named. So he was ready to jump at anything, and he swallowed our little yarn whole. But it could hardly have been more obvious that yarns were the least of what he wanted from us.

'''Go and find me the child,' the king told us, and as he spoke, his fingers trembled so that the emeralds rattled together like teeth. 'Because I want to come and worship him,' he said, and when he said that, his hands were still as death. Death. I ask you, does a man need the stars to tell him that no king has ever yet bowed down to another king?

He took us for children, that sly, lost old fox, and so it was like children that we answered him. 'Yes, of course,' we said, and went our way. His hands fluttered to his throat like moths.

"Why did we travel so far to be there when it happened? Why was it not enough just to know the secret without having to be there ourselves to behold it? To this, not even the stars had an answer. The stars said simply that he would be born. It was another voice altogether that said to go - a voice as deep within ourselves as the stars are deep within the sky.

"But why did we go? I could not tell you now, and I could not have told you then, not even as we were in the very process of going. Not that we had no motive, but that we had so many.

Curiosity, I suppose: to be wise is to be eternally curious, and we were very wise. We wanted to see for ourselves this One before whom even the stars are said to bow down - to see perhaps if it was really true because even the wise have their doubts.

And longing. Longing. Why will a man who is dying of thirst crawl miles across sands as hot as fire at simply the possibility of water? But if we longed to receive, we longed also to give. Why will a man labour and struggle all the days of his life so that in the end he has something to give the one he loves?

"So finally we got to the place where the star pointed us. It was at night. Very cold. The Innkeeper showed us the way that we did not need to be shown. A harebrained, busy man. The odor of the hay was sweet, and the cattle's breath came out in little puffs of mist. The man and the woman. Between them the king. We did not stay long. Only a few minutes as the clock goes, ten thousand, thousand years. We set our foolish gifts down on the straw and left.

"I will tell you two terrible things. What we saw on the face of the newborn child was his death. A fool could have seen it as well. It sat on his head like a crown or a bat, this death that he would die. And we saw, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to share that death, and that is why we left-giving only our gifts, withholding the rest.

''And now, brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?"

Amen