Summary: The people we call the "wise men" were moved to make a difficult journey to discover divine truth. What they found when they finally made it past Jerusalem - and the lying king there - and got to Bethlehem was a different king: one who was, himself, the truth. We can search for the Christ child today and discover his eternal truth for ourselves and others.
In many Christmas pageants, acted out by children, everything seems to happen at lightning speed. The two birth narratives in the New Testament get compressed into one quick story.
For instance, details of the long and difficult journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judah either get ignored altogether or barely get mentioned in passing.
Same with the trip - also long and difficult - made by people we commonly call the "wise men." It was a wintertime trip from what probably was Persia to Jerusalem and then southwest to Bethlehem.
The wonderful poet T.S. Eliot recognized how the traditional epiphany story pays so little attention to that journey, and in his extraordinary poem called "Journey of the Magi" he describes the troubles he imagines the travelers encountered, conjuring up the Magi's own voices:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.1
Yes, that's a pretty long quote from an even longer poem, but it raises for us today this crucial question: What are we willing to go through, to sacrifice, to pay, to give up so that we can find the source of eternal love, find the One who wants to be in eternal relationship with us, find and accept the divine gift of abundant, flourishing life that Jesus brings?
That is not an easy question. For excellent reasons, Christianity talks a lot about grace, the term that refers to God's free gift to us of such a life. There's nothing we can do to earn that grace. If we had to earn it, we wouldn't call it grace. Rather, we'd call it what theologians call it - works righteousness. Our relationship with God would be transactional in nature, not rooted in divine love and generosity.
But that is not to say that grace is cheap even if it's free. "Cheap grace" is a term that the German Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer used when he wrote about the idea of grace given to us without us being moved to respond to it. Grace is free, but if we really accept it, our lives change and we are obligated to give ourselves away to the requirements of love. In other words, once we say yes to God's grace, the hard part of Christianity begins.
And what is that hard part? We oblige ourselves to love not just our neighbors but everyone, even people we don't like. We oblige ourselves to remember that the person we dislike the most bears within him or her the image of God. And we are required to remember that such a person is always and everywhere cherished by God, as are we.
So when we dehumanize people the way European invaders dehumanized the indigenous people they encountered on this land or the way slaveholders dehumanized those fully human people who were stolen from Africa and shipped here like disposable cattle or the way the males who wrote our U.S. Constitution dehumanized females by considering them unworthy of the vote - whenever we engage in such behavior we tell God we didn't really mean it when we said we'd follow Jesus.
And when we confess that, we minimize the effort the Magi went through to find the one to whom the star guided them.
But wait. Was there an actual star in the actual Middle Eastern sky that guided the actual men to a specific spot in Bethlehem? The Bible story says so, but not all Bible stories are historically, literally and scientifically verifiable, nor were they meant to be. Sometimes there can be more truth in metaphor and allegory than in historically verifiable accounts.
(And remember that in Christianity, "truth" is not a dogma, not a doctrine and not a particular Bible story. Rather, truth is a person, Christ Jesus.)
All of that said, the old Scottish theologian William Barclay, in his commentary on this part of the Gospel of Matthew, writes this: "There is not the slightest need to think that the story of the coming of the Magi to the cradle of Christ is only a lovely legend. It is exactly the kind of thing that could easily have happened in that ancient world."2
Barclay also quotes the ancient Greek historian Herodotus as saying that people identified as the "Magi were originally a Median tribe. The Medes were part of the Empire of the Persians; they tried to overthrow the Persians and to substitute the power of the Medes. The attempt failed." Herodotus also says, in Barclay's words, that the Magi "became teachers and instructors of the Persian kings."3
So maybe that's who the Wise Men were. We're just not positive.
In any case, let's not forget that the fascinating account of the Magi is simply one small part of a much larger story of God's plan to redeem the cosmos. That story does include the Magi's stop in Jerusalem to see King Herod, who, given the chance, would have destroyed anyone who was referred to even metaphorically as "King of the Jews." And it includes the Holy Family's escape to Egypt and so much more.
But at its vital center, the story is about the incarnation, God's gracious and astonishing decision to set aside God's own divinity and to enter humanity as a way of showing people how to live and how they can move from sin to redemption. That's the larger story. And we'd do well not to focus so intently on where the Magi came from or what their names were that we miss what's really happening here, which, as I say, is God's coming to live with humanity and to love people so fully that we feel moved to respond in gratitude and to love others in return.
There are a couple of other parts of the gospel story we read today that we haven't yet talked about, so let's briefly look at Herod's reaction to the news of the birth of a child called the King of the Jews and at Herod's instinctive use of deception as a tool of governing power.
Matthew writes that when Herod heard about this birth, "he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him." Why? Because he was an autocrat. He saw himself, even in the context of living under Roman rule, as the center of Jewish power in the region. And he wanted no competition for that.
But why does it say that "all Jerusalem" was frightened, too?
That's probably a reflection of the reality that any nation or any group of people tends to follow its leaders even when those leaders are frightened of others who may challenge them. Leaders set the tone for their people, and when people see a leader behaving badly, spouting lies, hungry for power and disdainful of the law and tradition, history tells us that their people may well follow the lead and behave in equally obnoxious ways. Can you imagine such a thing?
The reassuring news is that leaders who fail to inspire people to live moral, ethical, generative lives because they themselves don't live such lives may exercise power for a time, but those flaws eventually will destroy them - though perhaps not until much damage has been done.
So the idea that Jerusalem became frightened when Herod was frightened should make us think about how we choose our leaders and how we can hold them accountable when they fail to live up to the ideals of the nation, the state, the city or even the religious congregation of which we're a part.
In addition to Herod being frightened by divine truth, he also chose to lie to the Magi. As the passage we read today said, Herod sent the Magi to Bethlehem, "saying, 'Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.'" He didn't mean a thing he said about paying the child homage.
Herod chose badly. And all these centuries later he is remembered for choosing badly. The Magi chose well. And all these centuries later we remember them with admiration and curiosity.
The reality is that any encounter with Jesus - whether by the Magi at his birth or by you and me moved by the Holy Spirit to follow him - comes at a cost but with an eternal reward. T.S. Eliot, near the end of the poem we heard at the start of this sermon, quotes one of the Magi this way:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.4
On their journey, they had met not a clay god or an idol. They had met the eternal God in the flesh. And it did to them what such an encounter will do to us: It changed them and will change us forever and for good. May it be so. Amen.