Epiphany Sunday 8 January 2017
West Camel, Corton Denham
The visit of the wise men. This is the strangest and most wonderful of stories, and only Matthew tells it. It’s full of mystery and symbolism which our Christmas carols capture beautifully.
We’re only guessing there were three of them because Matthew doesn’t tell us - only that they pulled three sorts of gifts from their treasure-chests. Gifts full of meaning. Gold for a king, Frankincense for a God, and Myrrh for a death.
Why do we call them wise? As we chew that one over let’s take a look at the three gifts and their meaning. With the help of the carol we sang earlier on.
Born a King on Bethlehem's plain
Gold I bring to crown Him again
King forever, ceasing never
Over us all to reign [1]
Gold for a king. Question is, what wise men would want to honour a king? After all, the wisdom of the scriptures warns against our putting our faith in kings. When the people of Israel wanted a king so that they could be like all the other nations around them, this is what God told them:
‘A king will take your sons and make soldiers of them, or to labour on his farms, or to making weapons of war. He’ll take your daughters to work in his palaces. He’ll take your best fields, vineyards, and orchards, your prize workers and best animals for his own use. He’ll tax your crops to support his extensive bureaucracy. He’ll tax your flocks and you’ll end up no better than slaves’. [2]
And sure enough, from Saul onwards, Israel’s kings were each at best flawed, and at worst their lust for power, possessions and military might was satisfied at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land. When Jesus was born King Herod the Great, voracious for power and wealth, was embarked on a great city-building expansion programme fed by high taxation, land possession and slave labour, making this a time of great struggle for the mass of ordinary people in the land. And despite his great wealth and power King Herod’s insecurities made him fear the baby the wise men told him about, so much that he ordered all the newly firstborns in the land be killed. [3]
Gold for a king? A priceless irony. Unless these wise men’s wisdom was in looking for a king with no interest in gold or power games, who instead chooses to struggle alongside and for the mass of ordinary people in the land. For that is what they found in Jesus - the One whose kingdom embraced good news for the poor, whose idea of power was about giving it away, saying “The first shall be last and the last shall be first”, who put open-minded children before adults obsessed with their status, the One who said “The love of money is the root of all evil” and who warned about storing up treasure on earth, the One who went out of his way to question the ways of Empire, who mocked royal pretensions by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey while at the other end of town the king pranced around on prize horses, the One who only ever wore one crown - a crown of thorns.
Frankincense to offer have I
Incense owns a Deity nigh
Prayer and praising, all men raising
Worship Him, God most high [4]
Frankincense for a God. Question is, what kind of a God would these wise men honour? There were gods-a-plenty in the time these wise travellers made their westward journey. They tended to be angry judgemental gods, jealous gods, quick to accuse, quick to judge, quick to condemn anyone who wronged them in any way, and then quick to exercise their wrath in blood and fire and storm and other forms of divine rage. Scary gods, who demanded sacrifices from people to keep their wrath under wraps. Funny - these gods acted very like the kings of the nations, who also guarded their power jealously and exercised it viciously. Funny, because the kings of the time often demanded that they had godlike status - that the people should revere them as gods and make sacrifices to them, through taxes and hard labour - and on the battlefield, with their very lives.
Frankincense for a God? Something doesn’t smell quite right. Unless these wise men’s wisdom was in looking for a God who wasn’t like the other gods at all. One who could be found in the shape of a vulnerable little baby, One who could be seen in the form of a good shepherd, One who only had two commands, and they were both about love - to love God and love one’s neighbour, One who this little child would call his ‘Father’, the human God, the God who judges in compassion and grace. The One whose only relationship with wrath was to be on the receiving end of the wrath of the jealous powers of his day when they meted out their ultimate punishment on him.
Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes of life of gathering gloom
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb [5]
Myrrh for a death. Question is, why would wise men bring death ointment to a newborn child? Death was what people avoided, health-obsessed just like we are, anxious about their fitness with their Roman baths and spa treatments, food-obsessed just like we are, anxious about their diet with their olives, pears, figs and various vegetables, their lovely breads and honeyed wines, sex-obsessed just like we are, anxious about their social status with easily available divorce enabling men to move from partner to partner to ensure that children came along so that their family line would not die. The threat of death was one of the prime weapons in the armoury of the ruling powers. Death was to be feared.
Myrrh for a death? What were these wise travellers thinking? Unless these wise men’s wisdom was in looking for One who didn’t fear death, wasn’t threatened by death, who wouldn’t spend all his time trying to avoid death but who - over and over again - predicted his death and when it came, embraced it. Maybe they were wise enough to understand that this child was outside of death, this child held the key to what he later coined ‘eternal life’. Maybe they saw that this king-like-no-other-king would so rattle the actual kings and rulers of the land that they would use death to be rid of him, that this God-like-no-other-gods would so challenge the image of the wrathful sacrifice-demanding gods and replace it with the image of a loving all-embracing Father not at all affected by death but totally given to life, in all its fullness.
Now the writer of our carol uses this line: ‘Sealed in the stone-cold tomb’. But we know with hindsight, the good news that he wasn’t sealed for long. Could our wise travellers see, in their special wisdom, that in later life the child, though dead, would not be held by death?
One final thing about these wise travellers. They were outsiders. They came from a different place with a different set of beliefs and values. They brought their wisdom with them. With their symbolic gifts they offered their understanding of who this baby was now, and who he would grow to be. And they were welcomed by those they visited.
You may have heard me quote this before, it’s worth repeating. The great Hindu peacemaker Ghandi asserted that ‘Jesus belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world’, for the message of peace which he brings: ‘Love God, love your neighbours, love your enemies, pray for your persecutors.’ [6]
Question for those of us who think we know all there is to know about God and kings and life and death: are we open enough to hear what people from outside our worldview have to say? Believing that God might just be using them to open our eyes to whole new ways of seeing? [7]
Statement for those who do not regard themselves as having yet arrived, but like these wise travellers as being still on a journey of discovery - the baby Jesus is ready to welcome you, the adult Jesus is longing to walk with you, as you go on your way.
Notes
[1] John Henry Hopkins, Jr., We Three Kings of Orient Are, 1857
[2] 1 Samuel 8.11-17 (The Message, edited)
[3] This paragraph is based on part of my sermon, Jesus - killing the king, raising the Kingdom, preached at Llanasa, November 2013
[4] John Henry Hopkins, Jr., We Three Kings of Orient Are, 1857
[5] John Henry Hopkins, Jr., We Three Kings of Orient Are, 1857
[6] Walter Wink, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, p.336, note 3. See these other sermons for more on this: Becoming Human: the shepherds’ instinct, the magis’ hunch (Christmas 2015), The global enterprise with a different set of values (January 2016)
[7] Preached in the week of the death of John Berger, whose Ways of Seeing I pulled off my bookshelf to revisit after 30 years - a seminal book by the celebrated Marxist writer which opened my eyes to see life outside the constraints imposed by the rulers….
Comments