Epiphany at Havant, St Faith, 6th January 2008
The wise men have had an interesting time lately. In a Radio interview before Christmas, Archbishop Rowan remarked that the story was a legend. This is all that came across in subsequent comment – which included what I regard as the biggest accolade of all, being torn to shreds in The Daily Telegraph. ‘Come back the old Roman Latin mass, and blow the Church of England’, I could hear in the distance.
Well, perhaps unfortunately, many of us have minds as well as hearts that have to be nourished along the way in the life of faith; and that includes the Scriptures, which provide us with rich fare at Christmas. But first, let’s take note of the ground-rules which they set. If you look at the four Gospels, you will find nothing about Jesus’ birth or childhood in St Mark, where Jesus comes in as an adult. And in St John, there is nothing about his birth either – instead there’s that great, cosmic drama of the Word made flesh. So that leaves us with St Luke and St Matthew – and how different they are! In Luke, the Virgin Mary is central, and shepherds are the first visitors, a nice touch from the old Israel, where King David started off looking after sheep. In Matthew, by contrast, the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream on several occasions, so he (not Mary) is the director of operations; and the visitors are these mysterious wise men – ‘magi’ – outsiders altogether.
Admittedly, there are unlikely bits to the story. Stars don’t just ‘stop’, as Rowan pointed out in the interview. Nor were there necessarily three of them, to correspond with their gifts. But magi were respected figures in ancient Arab culture of the time, a sort of combination of astrologers and scientists in our terms. They probably came on the scene by taking one of the trade-routes from Southern Arabia.
It is here that we have to confront the key question, which is not whether it’s all absolutely true, but what is Matthew trying to say in all this. Well, Matthew was the most Jewish of the four evangelists, so for him to signal right at the start that the good news is for everyone, outsiders included is to make a crucial point. Jesus is not to be the private property of devout Jews. He arrives and finds himself placed already at the edges of conventional society. It’s a kind of advance warning of all those rows the adult Jesus was to have with the Pharisees, and others, later on. Living with that essential truth is not easy. Part of us would much rather pack Jesus away with the wrapping paper, and not let him speak uncomfortable things that might shake us out of our religious complacency.
Finally, there are those mysterious gifts, which are not exactly what one would give to a new-born child. They take us into many different avenues of human experience. Gold speaks of wealth – and wisdom. Incense speaks of cleansing dirty, musty buildings, full of unpleasant odours, as well as the offering of prayer and sacrifice. And myrrh takes us into the world of healing and medical care, as well as embalming.
Taken together, these gifts represent a whole range of both experience – and hope. For this child, this Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, has the power to draw us beyond ordinary experience, in order to hope for a better world, where old divisions, racial or religious, disappear, where power is used to serve, not dominate, and where worship, so far from being a mere option, a hobby for the religious-minded, is recognised as a central instinct that is given its proper place in the work of salvation, as we walk the ways of God.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
