Stars & Scriptures

  

Lections: The Epiphany of the Lord, AD 2025 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Holy Gospel According to St Matthew is generally considered the most Jewish of our written Gospel accounts. Every book of the Bible is, of course, a Jewish document. But Matthew assumes a Hebrew audience well-versed in the Hebrew Scriptures: the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms. An old tradition goes so far as to claim that Matthew’s Gospel, as we have it now in Greek, is based upon an older Hebrew Gospel no longer extant.

Matthew starts off by tracing Jesus’ lineage back through David to Abraham. He’s very concerned that we understand that Jesus is the rightful Davidic King. This emphasis on Jesus as the Jewish Messiah makes Matthew’s account of the Magi all the more remarkable, for the Magi are emphatically not Jewish. Yet he has them come to Jesus, long before anyone else.

Before John baptizes Him, before His Apostles gather, before the crowds acclaim Him, before Pilate can condemn Him, wise men from the East appear in order to do Him homage, bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. From the very beginning, Matthew wants us to know—and he’s very clear on this—that Jesus is both the Christ of Israel and the Savior of the world. God has come, as a Jew, for the Gentiles.

Now, Matthew’s community would know very well what a magus is: a magus is a priest of the Zoroastrian faith. And honestly, I don’t think that these guys get nearly enough credit. By traditional dating, the prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, arose in Iran just before the time of the Babylonian Exile. He preached monotheism, proclaiming one all-good God, who opposed the evil corrupting our world, and one day would redeem it.

The Zoroastrian faith spoke of angels, and a devil, and a final Endtimes battle. And all of this was spreading whilst the Jews lived right nextdoor, exiled in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq. Then of course the Persian Empire arose, under the Zoroastrian Emperor Cyrus, who overthrew the Babylonians, ended the Exile, and—like a second Moses—freed God’s people to return to the Promised Land of their ancestors. Unsurprisingly, the Bible speaks very highly of Cyrus, calling him an unwitting servant of God, and even God’s messiah.

How much the Zoroastrians influenced the Jews, or the Jews influenced the Zoroastrians, remains some matter of debate. Suffice to say it proved a fertile cross-pollination. The Magi were the priests of the new imperial faith, sometimes at odds with the throne. They studied the stars, seeing in the celestial firmament the ongoing battle of darkness and light, goodness and evil. And they tended sacred fires, which they held as their preëminent symbols, or even sacraments, of God—not unlike how our Scriptures sometimes portray the Holy Spirit, as tongues of flame.

It makes sense, to Matthew, that Magi would be drawn to Christ’s Nativity. The Torah, after all, predicts that a Star will arise from Jacob, which first-century Jews anticipated as a sign of the Messiah. The Magi already looked to the stars to discern the will of God; and the Magi were plenty familiar with Jewish religious beliefs and expectations. What the Star might have been remains a source of fascination: some claim a planetary alignment, or a supernova, or a comet, depending how literally one might interpret the story. I’ve long liked St Augustine’s speculation that it was a ball of coagulated air, infused with light, and dragged across the atmosphere by angels. Why not?

Thus come the Magi from the East, bearing their famous gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Certainly this is an allusion to the Prophet Isaiah, from whom we read this morning. But the symbolism is the bit that means the most to us. Gold is so universally valued that its inclusion seems obvious even 2000 years later. Shining like the sun, impervious to rust, infinitely malleable, gold is a gift best suited for a King.

Frankincense is a tree resin, with a piney, citrusy scent. One harvests it as pretty little pellets of sunshine yellow. In the time of Christ, frankincense was worth its weight in gold, and, more significantly, was used almost exclusively as incense in the worship of deity. Jews burned frankincense in the Temple at Jerusalem, Romans in the temples of their gods. We associate it with divinity; here, the divinity of Christ.

And finally we have myrrh, another gum resin, but this one worth seven times its weight in gold. Myrrh produces a bitter, earthy, smokey scent. It smells like haunted houses, and looks like dark red scabs. Jews dissolved myrrh in oil with which to anoint their dead, whilst Romans threw it on funeral pyres, the better to cover the smell. Myrrh, then, is a scent associated with death. You may recall, in the Book of Proverbs, that Lady Folly perfumes her bed with myrrh—because it is a deathbed.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have interpreted these gifts of the Magi just as we do in the famous song today: “Glorious now, behold Him arise: King and God and Sacrifice.” Matthew has Gentiles proclaim this, even from His birth.

The Magi continue to captivate. Our Gospel never says that they were kings, nor tells us how many of them arrived. We typically depict them as three: because the known world of the time consisted of three distinct continents; because the peoples of the earth were understood to have descended from the three sons of Noah; and because life itself consists of the three stages of youth, adulthood, and dotage. Artistically, then, the Magi represent each and all of us.

This, for St Paul, was the great mystery of Christ, hidden to former generations yet revealed now to His holy Apostles through the Holy Spirit: that in Christ, all nations are one; that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs with His chosen people, the Jews. Note that the Magi are led to Christ first by their own religious understanding: by their study of the heavens, their interpretation of the natural world, and the words of their own prophet.

As they then draw nearer, they turn to the Jewish Scriptures, with which they are not familiar. They must humbly ask the scribes where the Christchild would be born. Next, the Star which had led them thus far reappears, and they rejoice, for it is in precise concordance with what they have learned. Jewish and Gentile knowledge, Israelite and pagan religion, reach their mutual fulfillment as the Magi come to Christ.

At last they see the Child for their very own, and they lay before him the gifts that they have brought, bowing down to do Him homage, to worship the newborn King. Almost as an afterthought, they are warned in a dream—presumably by the same angel who has led the dreamer Joseph—to defy King Herod and return to their country by another road. They trust in God over worldly authority, and they go back to their homeland, to their own culture, bearing the Good News that the prophecy is fulfilled: the Christ is born.

There comes a point, I do believe, in every Christian’s journey, and at a certain level of spiritual maturity, when we begin to see Jesus in everyone, and in everything around us. We find Him here in Church, in Word and in Sacrament. We find Him in our neighbor in her need. But we also start to recognize Jesus in the sciences, in philosophy, in literature, in art, even in other faiths. Centered in Him, we have no fear of the alien or the other.

Because we are the other! We are the alien. We are the Gentiles, who have been made His fellow heirs; the wild branches, as St Paul puts it, grafted onto the cultivated tree of Israel. And Christ claims us as His own, allowing us, freeing us, to bring gifts unique to our inheritance. Jesus rejects no-one, but resurrects us as better versions of ourselves, fulfilling our potential as members of His Body. For when we are one in Christ, then we are one with God; and thus we become individuals for the very first time.

Wise men still seek Him, in both the Scriptures and the stars.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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