Second Sunday after Christmas
Epiphany – Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 60:1-6/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 2:1-12/NRSVUE)
One Christmas Eve when I was in elementary school we went over to my grandparents’ house, as was our family custom. This was an event I always looked forward to not only because we got to have a huge dinner (with the green pistachio cake my grandmother always made for dessert) and open presents, but also because it was one of the few times during the year when our relatives extended family happened to be in the same place at the same time.
One of my cousins is several years older than I am, so while I was looking forward to getting some Hot Wheels and GI Joes that night, he was hoping for some tools he could use to work on his car — specifically, a set of wrenches (to each their own, I suppose). And sure enough, they happened to be in the very first package he opened.
What my cousin didn’t know was that my dad and his brother — who always seem to act like they’re twelve years old whenever they get together — had a little prank in store for him. As soon as he’d set the aforementioned wrenches aside and moved on to open another present, my uncle surreptitiously grabbed them from underneath the tree, took them in the other room and rewrapped them, at which time my dad then snuck in and put them back on the unopened gift pile.
It took my cousin a surprisingly long while to catch on but, after believing that he’d be spending December 26th at Sears returning a whole bunch of extra tools, it eventually dawned on him that he’d actually opened the same set of wrenches three times. I guess he just got so caught up in all the gifts that he failed to see what was else was going on. Something similar is happening in today’s reading from Matthew.
Presents are, of course, a huge part of the Christmas experience. And while our modern society has definitely taken this concern with material things to levels that would have been unimaginable in Jesus’s time, it is hardly a new phenomenon. In fact, today’s gospel passage reminds us that the origins of our fixation on Christmas gifts can be traced back to the very first holiday season.
Ever since Matthew first told people that the magi showed up there in the desert bearing “gold, frankincense, and myrrh” to bestow upon the newborn Christ child — the occasion we celebrate today as the Epiphany — many interpretations of this story have focused upon these three unusual gifts and what they mean.
Now, I can’t speak for you, but the tradition in which I was raised always described this as the tale of the “three wise men” or the “three kings,” who came to give presents to the newborn Christ child. Heck, eventually these three would get actual names — Melchior (the King of Persia), Caspar (the King of India) and Balthazar (the King of Arabia), to be more specific. Call these guys from the East whatever you will, but there were definitely three of them in every version of the story that I ever heard.
Matthew, however, never actually says that these magi were kings or that they were wise. He also never says that there were three of them (though the word “magi” is plural, meaning only that there had to have been more than one). The idea that the magi were a trio is a conclusion reached by Matthew’s interpreters throughout history based mostly upon the number of gifts they bring to Jesus here.
In much the same way, the three gifts themselves have been given all sorts of meanings that Matthew himself never actually mentions, and most of these meanings came to be seen as evidence that supported Jesus’s status as the King of Kings, as God’s Son, as the Messiah and even as God incarnate.
For as long as anyone can remember, gold has been associated with royalty. Fragrant substances, like frankincense, were imported to the Near East from far-off lands at great expense and so also could only be enjoyed by kings. And myrrh, another expensive fragrance, is mentioned along with frankincense in a royal gift list from the Old Testament’s first book of Kings.
According to the book of Exodus, frankincense was also a component of the holy perfume that was used only in the ritual worship of God. Early followers of Jesus and students of the First Gospel would conclude that Matthew saw the magi’s gift of frankincense as foreshadowing the time when the risen and glorified Son would be worshiped as God.
And while myrrh was highly valued mostly because it smelled nice, Exodus tells us that it was also used to make the high priest’s anointing oil. So readers looking for signs in Matthew’s Gospel (as readers often do) thought it was only appropriate that the child who would come to be known as God’s “Anointed One” (which is the literal translation of the word “Christ”) should receive myrrh as a present at his birth.
On a far less festive note, the Gospel of John alludes to another possible symbolic meaning for myrrh. There we learn that Nicodemus brought “a mixture of myrrh and aloes” to prepare Jesus’s body for burial following his crucifixion. It is this use for myrrh that led interpreters to tie the gift of myrrh in the Christmas story at the beginning of the gospel to Christ’s crucifixion at the end of the gospel, thus linking the Messiah’s birth to his death. Jesus is, after all, the rejected king who actually dies before he will return to reign again someday.
Did Matthew actually understand the magi’s gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh in the same ways that we’ve come interpret their meaning over the centuries? It’s hard to say. Perhaps Matthew really did view these items as signs of Christ’s divine status but, then again, maybe he saw them as nothing more than gifts that were fit for a king.
Bible scholar Thomas Troeger believes that, because we have traditionally concentrated all of our attention on these three material things (which, incidentally, are mentioned only once near the very end of the story), we tend to miss something that is much more important to understanding this story’s bigger meaning. It appears three times here — at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end; it’s a single word in the Gospel’s original Greek that is translated as “worship” or as “pay him homage” in your pew Bible. This Greek word, proskyneō, is the source of our English word, prostrate, which describes the act of throwing oneself on the floor at the feet of someone in an act of deference and humility. The point is that these magi are coming all the way to Bethlehem in order to give themselves to Christ.
It is, after all, the one and only reason the magi actually give for undertaking their long journey in the first place; they arrive in Jerusalem asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” And that is what this Epiphany story is really all about.
Eventually, King Herod, who is very much perturbed by the arrival of the Jesus, will summon the magi and ask them to report back to him when they find the newborn king. “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,” is what Herod says to the magi. Herod, of course, doesn’t actually want to pay Christ homage, he wants to kill him because his existence here on earth is a threat to Herod’s own worldly power.
The irony of Herod’s lying declaration to the magi, though, is that it is completely correct. What Herod really should do is pay homage to Christ, what Herod truly needs to do is give himself completely over to God’s compassion and justice and grace that has now been made incarnate in this vulnerable, innocent child born in Bethlehem. But Herod definitely doesn’t do that. When the magi manage to slip away without telling Herod where Jesus lay, Herod orders the execution of every male child under the age of two in the entire city.
Herod must have been absolutely beside himself — what other reason could there have been for him to have acted the way he did? As we all know too well, powerful people can behave in awful ways when they see their power being threatened. Just think about it — you’re the current king, serving purely at the pleasure of the Roman Empire — and these strange guys from a far-off land show up on your doorstep after having undertaken an incredibly long and difficult journey just to pay homage to this new and newborn king purely as a matter of faith.
Now, Herod might not fully understand the enormity of all that’s going on here, but he’s clever enough to sense that the rules of the game he’s been playing for his entire life seem to be changing before his very eyes — which, of course, they are. But instead of paying homage as he ought, Herod opts to lash out — and suffice it to say that it’s a bad choice for everyone concerned; the people of Jerusalem were quite right to be frightened.
After having left Herod, the magi head onward until they eventually manage to find the newborn Christ child. And what is the very first thing they do when they arrive at the house and behold Mary and Jesus there? Well, I’ll tell you this: they don’t immediately start handing out presents. Matthew tells us that, “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and then they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold and frankincense, and myrrh.”
Presence before presents. That’s what this Epiphany story is all about.
Don’t you see? Showing up and giving themselves over to Christ — this not very flashy gift, this intangible gift, this not inherently valuable gift, this not often noticed gift that the magi brought to the newborn Messiah that day — was actually the first one they gave and greatest one they had to offer.
May it be ours as well.