Epiphany, January 8 2012
Is 60:1-6; Eph 3:2-3, 5-6; Matt 2:1-12
Brookdale, also January 12 2015 at Longview

Good morning.  You ladies probably know that if the wise men had been wise women, they would have arrived on time for Jesus’ birth, brought useful gifts, cleaned up the stable, and prepared a hot meal for Mary and Joseph.

We’ve all heard, many times, the story of the magi who bring their gifts to the baby Jesus.  But this is not just a nice story about baby Jesus.  It sets out some key themes of Matthew’s Gospel.

After a genealogy of Joseph, Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s discovery that Mary, his betrothed, is pregnant.  Now the genealogy includes three or four women with a somewhat dodgy history—and here is another dodgy woman.  Joseph knows he isn’t the father.  But an angel tells him to accept Mary as his wife and gives the child the name Jesus, meaning “He will save his people.”

Then comes the story of the magi.  The point of this story is to declare that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah, the successor to King David who will reestablish the kingdom and make it great among the nations.  Matthew begins his Gospel with this story.  And at the crucifixion he repeats the same claim: Jesus is crucified with a sign above his head announcing his crime: he is the king of the Jews.  In the story of the magi, foreigners come to do homage to Jesus as king; after the resurrection, Jesus sends his apostles to make disciples of all nations.

If we read the story in Matthew’s Gospel carefully, it’s quite different from the one we used to perform in Christmas pageants.  First, do the magi worship the baby Jesus at the stable with the shepherds?  Not in Matthew’s story, where Jesus is almost two years old when the Magi arrive and find him in a house in Bethlehem with his mother.

Second, how many magi are there?  In the middle ages, people in western Europe assumed that three gifts must mean three magi.  In the Orthodox tradition, there are twelve magi.  Matthew’s Gospel just doesn’t say.

And then, what was the job description of a magus (that’s the singular of magi)?  The magi were not kings.  The only kings in this story are Herod and Jesus.  Herod was a Roman puppet ruler, but he was known as Herod the Great.  He had greatly expanded the temple in Jerusalem, which was known as Herod’s temple.  He had carried out other major building projects, and no doubt levied taxes to match.  And he was jealous of his power.  He had already killed his wife and two sons in order to keep power for himself.  Herod’s power can tax and kill.  Jesus wields a very different sort of power, one that draws the magi to him.  The true King of the Jews was the one sent by God with power for good, not the one appointed by the Romans with power to kill.

So the magi were not kings.  They were also not wise men or sages.  They were astrologers and magicians, the sort of people who search the skies for signs of coming events on earth.  Our word “magic” is related to the Old Persian word magus.

But there’s a deeper question.  Why introduce astrologers into the Gospel?  Why a star?  At planetarium Christmas shows, presenters used to speculate about which star or comet the magi might have seen and what that tells us about the date of Jesus’ birth.  But this story is not about astronomy, or even astrology.

The star is not for navigation either.  The magi don’t need a star to get to Jerusalem.  They go there because their astrological studies tell them a new king has been born in Israel, presumably the son of the current king, Herod the Great, who lives in Jerusalem.  In Jerusalem they ask and find out that the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem.  So the real king is not in the big capital city, but in a small out-of-the-way village.

Now Bethlehem is six or seven miles southeast of Jerusalem, maybe a three-hour walk.  The magi don’t need a star to get there either; they can follow the road signs.  And nobody—certainly not the author of the Gospel—believes that you can find a particular house in a village because it is located directly underneath a particular star.  So why the star?

Many people in ancient times believed that when a great person was born, a new star—his star—would appear in the sky.  But the main reason for the star may be a prophecy from the book of Numbers that was commonly understood to refer to David and his descendant, the Messiah:

“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near—a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.”[1]

The star is a sign to Jews that Jesus is the promised Messiah.

We don’t believe in astrology these days, and we know a lot more about where stars come from.  But we can still appreciate what the magi learned on their journey.  True power is not the power to kill.  True greatness is where you find it, which may not be where you expect it.  And when you find it, you bow down before it, even if it’s a little toddler in a house with his dodgy mom in a small, out of the way village.

[1] Num 24:17.