When you get used to two artists as a famous double-act it can be very odd when you see one of them working on their own. Think of Bert without Ernie, Laurel without Hardy, one Ronnie...
We're used to the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke working as a double-act. We blend the two together to make the nativity story and yet sometimes in doing so we lose the individual flavour of either writer by blending them. There's a reason why single malts are often valued more than even the best blends. The total is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
Reading Matthew without Luke, as his original readers would most likely have done, we are struck by his frankly odd choice of what to prioritise. What we think of as the "nativity story" with angels, shepherds, Mary, Joseph, stables, census, Bethlehem, and so on, is contained in this one phrase, "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea."
He spends much more time looking at our International Men of Mystery, these Magi, "from the East" than he does talking about the details of Jesus birth. This is almost the exact opposite of what we do around Christmas when our "Wise Men" have little more than a walk-on part. But who are they, these strange astrologers from who knows where?
In Christian tradition they go under a variety of different and sometimes contradictory names. They are the Three Wise Men, Astrologers from the East, The Three Kings; they are given individual names in Western Christianity, Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar. In Syrian Christianity they are given the names, Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas, the Ethiopians and Arminians have their own names for them (again widely differing from the Western ones) and in many Eastern traditions there are twelve of them and not three.
Indeed if we were to take one of their traditional titles, The Three Kings and break it down by looking at what the Bible actually says we would discover that we don’t know if there were three (we only say that based on the number of gifts) and they are certainly not kings. The term the Bible uses for them is Magoi, the word that we get our modern word magicians from. It appears in two other places in the Bible. In the Greek Old Testament it is used in Daniel to talk about people who are translated as Enchanters and in Acts where it is used of man described as a “Jewish Sorcerer.”
Our translations therefore get awfully polite (as they often do) when in Matthew they either call them “wise men” or indeed give up on the idea of translating it at all and call them Magi. This seems to be born out of embarrassment, and frankly it is a little embarrassing, that these people, however many there were and wherever they came from, were clearly not Jewish and not followers of the Law of Moses. In that Law in Leviticus 19 we are told not to practice fortune telling or sorcery.
In the book of Isaiah those who predict the future by looking to the stars are ridiculed by the prophet and proclaimed to be people who waste their lives chasing after false hope. Time after time in the Law and Prophets God forbids Israel from practising fortune telling and astrology, he assures them that it is wrong and lets them know that it will lead them to disaster.
Why then, if astrology is so bad, do we have these strange characters turn up within two years of Jesus being born to bring him gifts and cause all sorts of trouble for him with the local authorities? Why does God seem to use the very tools of their religion to help them to find Jesus? It does seem bizarre to say the least that God shows them the way to his son using stars and signs in the heavens. Is this God saying that astrology and horoscopes are great in certain circumstances and bad in others?
One thing he is certainly not condoning here is the notion of, “Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun.” Packing up your whole life and setting out on a four year, very dangerous, journey does not count as just a bit of fun. What these men saw in the heavens changed their lives. Astrology is not seen in the Bible as something merely to be toyed with. It is powerful and only here and only once in the scriptures is it ever noted that its power is good.
Secondly given their behaviour towards Jesus and the gifts that they bring to him they seem to have developed a fairly deep understanding of who it is that they have come to see. They come with a desire to worship him. Now, worshipping kings was normal practice in most cultures in those days with the notable exception of the Jewish world but it is still striking that it is the foreigner and outsider who is the first to recognise the divinity of Jesus.
The gifts they bring speak powerfully of who they expect him to be and grow up to become. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh each have their own meanings behind them that, even with the rich accrual of meanings that they have developed over the years as legend has been added to history they still, in their most basic form carry three simple meanings.
Gold is fairly straightforward; it was as valuable then as it is now. It is not the gift the kind of gift that a visiting dignitary would travel for two years just to bring to anybody. This is someone that they regard as being very, very important. You do not hear of journeys like this being made in antiquity for just any old king. The gold and the journey say that these Magi saw Jesus as a great king.
Frankincense, like gold, is something that we are familiar with. We know the smell of it from using it at home, Roman Catholic Mass, High Anglican Services, etc. From those last two contexts we also have some understanding of its use in antiquity. It was used as part of the rituals of Judaism along with a great many other religions. There was a certain practicality about its use as it covered up a lot of the smells and sights involved in the mass gathering of people and the mass slaughter of animals. The Frankincense therefore carries with it the idea of priesthood and sacrifice. It would not be that odd gift to give to a child born to royal, noble or high ranking parents but to give it to a child so poor that his mother gave birth in a stable would be very peculiar indeed.
The third one is by far the strangest. Myrrh is an odd word at the best of times, just try spelling it to see what I mean but to give it to a newborn baby is just perverse. What do I mean? Myrrh is an oil used in embalming the dead. Not the note you want to strike normally when visiting a new born baby and his parents. It is the equivalent to turning up to visit a newborn at the hospital with a funeral bond or a voucher for a very expensive made to measure coffin. You can just see the look on the faces of Mary and Joseph. Gold comes out - big smiles all round. Frankincense, a very expensive gift - Oh you shouldn't have! Myrrh - No, really, you shouldn't have.
Whilst the gold and the frankincense speak of the special life that this baby will have, the myrrh says that not only his life but his death will also be special. This much we know because we know the story of Jesus from beginning to end. These men did not know the story as we do and yet their guesses seem to be spot on.
They may be foreigners and non-Jews but they seem to have a keener understanding of the Jewish Messiah than most of the Jewish people involved in this story. But having seen this, we are then faced again with the question of why they are here at all and why God allows them to discover Jesus by the means that they do. Why does he use astrology to bring people to Jesus?
I think we need to bring Saint Paul in at this point, in his sermon to the philosophers in Athens Paul talks about how God overlooked the sins of the past before people found out about Jesus. Not only that but Paul himself uses the statues of the gods in Athens to point to Jesus. Because of our sin and our disobedience human beings find themselves in all sorts of bad and ungodly places. God does not stand outside of our sinful situations and shout at us from a safe place. God’s way is that he steps in and meets us where we are. This is, in fact, the whole message of Christmas.
God opens the conversation with the Magi in language that they understand and a religious culture that they feel comfortable with. If I do not know your language and you do not know mine then we attempt to communicate using things that we both know. I could start by pointing to me and saying, “William, my name is William. William is Ainh Dom” or I could hold out a familiar everyday object to you and we could tell each other our names for it.
God is communicating with people who in a very real and spiritual sense are foreigners to him. He speaks to them in words that they will understand. He uses religious imagery from their own home culture. He starts in the dangerous place of astrology where they live and brings them on a huge journey that leads them to the living embodiment of the truth and life. He starts with the stars and through them brings these star gazers to the very person who made the stars.
At the start of our journey with God he does not expect us to have every one of our theological “I”s dotted and our “T”s crossed. He reaches out to us in our weakness, he appears to us in our darkness but he is never happy to leave us there. Just as he took the Magi on a two year journey that, I am sure, was only the start of a lifelong quest, so he comes to meet us where we are and calls us to take the first steps on a journey to where he is.
We each in our own way have to make that journey to Jesus. We each must come to him to bow the knee as the Magi once did, bringing the only gift that he wants and, in fact, the only gift we can bring to him - the gift of ourselves. If you have never made that journey in your heart I urge you strongly to do that this Christmas, turn from your old ways and put your trust in the God who trusted Mary to cradle him, Joseph to bring him up, the untrustworthy shepherds to bring the news of him to the world and these outsiders, these strangers, these Magi who had no share in the physical Israel to be the first of the new Israel made up of people from every tribe and tongue, who have little more than their love of Jesus in common, people like you and me.
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