Epiphany A 2007 Matthew 2:1-12

Some commentary and some observations on the Epiphany: From the earliest days of the Church there were many legends told about the birth of Jesus. One is a beautiful old legend about the star in the East: When the star had finished its task of guiding the Magi to the baby, it fell from the sky into the city well of Bethlehem. According to other legends, those whose hearts are pure can see it.

Other legends concern the wise men from the east. For many centuries in the east, they believed that there were 12 Magi who made the journey. Nowadays we are agreed on three, but only because there were three gifts given. Another tradition tells us the names of the three: Melchior gave the gold. Balthasar gave the myrrh. Casper gave the frankincense. Other legends say that the three then journeyed as far as Spain, spreading the good news about what they had seen. (1)

The trouble, of course, is that the best evidence we have about the Wise Men is in this brief description given us by Saint Matthew. There isn’t any more. Just legends. But what we learn from these Gentile Wise Men is important. They were the messengers of the birth of Jesus the Messiah to the ruling class in Jerusalem, specifically King Herod.

After all, the shepherds had simply gone back to their sheep. This particular group of shepherds disappears from the Gospels – they aren’t heard of again. One wonders sometimes what happened to them after they had seen the angels singing in the sky and the stars dancing across the heavens. They seem not to have told anyone else anything about what they had seen and heard.

Mary and Joseph pretty much kept quiet about the whole thing. Mary did a lot of pondering in her heart but she certainly didn’t rush around announcing who her son really was. After all, who would have believed this maybe twelve year old mother that her son was God incarnate – can’t you just hear the gossip around the village well in Nazareth about how wacky Mary had become. And Joseph – Joseph has no speaking part in the gospels anywhere. Joseph become the forgotten man, the silent one who simply does what he has been told to do.

The only beings running about making announcements and giving orders were the angels – they certainly were busy during this whole time of the infancy narratives: They frighten poor Mary out of her wits announcing that she was pregnant. They browbeat Joseph into marrying Mary anyhow. They send shepherds running to the manger in Bethlehem as the very first humans to visit the holy family. Shepherds of all people – down at the lowest rungs of society. No wonder the shepherds were afraid to say anything.

It was the Gentile Wise Men who first publicly announced the Good News. Hence Epiphany – more correctly, theophany: the Manifestation, the Revelation of God to the world in the Christ Child. It was the first of many connections between Jesus Christ and the non-Jewish world: His healing of the Roman Centurion’s servant, the preaching trip through the Greek Decapolis, his retreat to Tyre and Sidon and healing the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman, and Peter’s Confession in Caesaria-Philippi, among others.

The trouble was, they announced it to the wrong person and before they had seen the Christ Child and his parents. And so the Wise Men, however many or few there were, travel on to Bethlehem, really an obscure unimportant even insignificant little town, certainly to the naked eye. Can you imagine what they thought when the arrived. They came looking for a new born king in a palace, and they found what was, to all intents and purposes, the peasant child of peasant parents, living in a manure piled stable of all things. A stable. What sort of king indeed. No wonder they didn’t go back to glorious Jerusalem and tell King Herod of their foolishness in making this long trip and not finding what they really were looking for. And they may well have felt ashamed to return to their homes.

How does the Epiphany work for us in the 21st Century, this revelation of God in Jesus Christ?

In the 21st century since the first Epiphany, the only way people will see Jesus is in us. They will see how Christian we are in the way we treat each other and them. They will see that we are not ashamed to follow the Crucified One. They will see the joy we have in carrying on his work.

AMEN



1. “The True Story of the Magi”, in John B. Jamison, TIME'S UP!, C.S.S. Publishing Company, 1992, 1-55673-423-9, at eSermons.com