Preached at St John’s Devizes; my final sermon as curate there.
Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12
“Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’”
We know nothing about them, really. They are only mentioned once in the whole of Scripture, in the part of Matthew that was read as this morning’s Gospel. We don’t know what made these men wise, or whether they were learned at all in the conventional sense – the Greek word used to describe them, ‘μαγοι’, is the root of our own word ‘magician’. Bible translators have always struggled with it. I explored some modern translations of this passage when preparing my sermon – a German translation called them astrologers, all four French translations I checked called them magicians, while the Spanish New International Version opted for “some wise men”.
The Wise Men as depicted in the an illuminated Armenian Gospel of 1391 in what is now Akdamar Island in Lake Van, Turkey; the Gospel is now kept in the Matenadaran in Yerevan.
That last is particularly interesting, because we don’t even know that there were ‘three’ Wise Men. In the churches of the West, that has always been taken as read given that they left three distinct gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But the Bible doesn’t say how many of them there were. In fact, in parts of the East, and especially in Syriac Christianity, known to have particularly deep connections to the Church of the earliest times, they are adamant that there were twelve wise men bearing those three gifts.
All sorts of other things we take for granted about the Wise Men weren’t reported for many centuries after Matthew wrote his Gospel – that their names were Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, or that Balthasar was Black. Indeed, while we in the West have linked Balthasar with Africa for more than a thousand years, in Armenia – another Eastern land with a very ancient Church – they identify the Wise Men as Caspar of India, Melchior of Persia, and Balthasar of Arabia.
Wherever they’re from, once they’ve played their part in this morning’s Gospel reading, they walk off the biblical stage, never to be mentioned again.
It’s obvious why Matthew makes the Wise Men a significant part of His story of Christ’s early life – he wants to show us that even while still in a makeshift cot, this little baby is already not merely King of the Jews, but destined to be worshipped by peoples from every nation.
Pay attention also to the fact that these wise foreigners were from “the East” specifically. The East was the direction from which clever and sophisticated philosophers and thinkers came. It was in their bitter exile in the East, centuries before Christ’s birth, that the élite of the Hebrew people encountered the sophisticated philosophies and myths of Mesopotamia and Persia. When they returned to Jerusalem, they adopted and adapted some of the best of those ideas to create the genius of religious thinking that was Second Temple Judaism. So for us, a crucial part of this story is that Christ is not only for people of every nation, something we in our time and place take for granted, but that Christ is also for the wise and learned. Falling down and worshipping the King in the cradle is not only for the simple and those who find faith simple – although certainly for them – but also for the clever and sophisticated.
Here’s another interesting thing – the Wise Men set out having seen a star rising, without knowing what they’d find. When they arrive in Jerusalem, they still don’t know what their final destination is. It is, in fact, Herod who sends them to Bethlehem.
To fall down and worship Christ is, for many, something comes at the end of a long and arduous journey, perhaps having been sent in his direction by some very unlikely people. Indeed, it is perhaps the cleverest and most sophisticated who find that they can come to Christ only after exhausting all other credible possibilities.
And this is, for all its super-naturalistic elements, like the star which defies all laws of physics, a grimly credible story. There is some difference between the sanitised version we might have absorbed from primary school nativity plays and the biblical original. As is the case with Matthew’s infancy narrative generally, this is a brutally realistic story, far more like a Ken Loach screen-play than a Disney animation. Herod is a despot so paranoid, that on hearing some foreigners repeating an odd story about a child born to be king, he murders on an industrial scale, killing any baby boy that might remotely fit the bill. Well, that’s certainly true to life. We have plenty of despots in the world of 2024 willing to kill an awful lot of babies to keep themselves in power. The miraculous parts of this story are set in a world that is fully, horrifyingly, real. Whatever this story and the whole of Matthew’s Gospel are about, they aren’t naïve escapism for people who can’t handle how tough the world is.
And here’s a last little observation on this well-known story. When the Wise Men finally see this child with his mother, “they were overwhelmed with joy”. Worshipping Christ brought overwhelming delight to these clever men from the sophisticated East. Now, we’re a parish that rejoices in taking an intelligent and sophisticated approach to faith, and we’re rightly sceptical of over-emotionalism in worship. But we should be overwhelmed with joy when we pray together, at least sometimes, and we should be overwhelmed with joy when we make our Communion. The pandemic and the restrictions on worship that came with it had a very bitty end, so we never had a moment where we celebrated with joy that we could worship freely again. Perhaps we should have one in the near future.
Like my sermon this morning, the story of the Wise Men is a bit fragmented. It often seems that God only ever gives us little fragments, glimpses of His Truth. Sometimes that’s frustrating, but when I look at the world, at the mess we make of it with our knowledge and power, God’s frustrating decision to leave us with nothing more than fragments makes plenty of sense.
And, for all our flaws, we are loved by God – each of us individually loved by God just as we are, and the whole human race loved by God so much that to save us, God came into the world in the form of a tiny baby, in a poor family, in a land ruled by a despot who was about to massacre babies. That baby would grow up to save the human race, not through knowledge and power, but by allowing the world to do the worst it could to Him, brutally and unjustly killing Him so that He could… open the way to eternal life for us all? The Christian Gospel is a very strange story, full of paradox. Familiarity can blind us to that. If Jesus Christ really is the Truth that the Wise Men set out on that great journey to find, then that Truth in its fullness must lie some way beyond the human capacity to grasp. If it is true that the baby in an ox’s stall is also the maker of the stars and sea, then human language must fall short of describing it fully just as human minds must fall short of grasping it fully.
Your job and mine is not to be masters of God’s Truth but to look for His star rising, and then to follow it. As I leave you to follow the star to the next stage of my life, thank you for sharing the last 3½ years with me, years which certainly had their dark parts for all of us. Thank you for your kindness, and please keep me in your prayers.
And now let glory and honour, dominion and power, be ascribed to God the Father the creator of the universe; God the tiny baby in the manger at Bethlehem; and God the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary; as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top banner image — Epiphany, 1940, by Max Ernst.
