EPIPHANY 2006.

Lord, uphold me, that I may uplift Thee.

I shall be speaking on the Gospel, and you may find it helpful to follow the words closely in the Bible. Matthew 2:1-18*.

When I was young, which I am learning to say, there was a little window in the British railway-carriages with a length of chain visible, plus a notice stating that frivolous use of it would incur a fine of all of £5. If you broke the glass and pulled it, you pulled the communication cord, sounding an alarm in the driver’s cab. He would then try to bring the train to a halt. They told me a cautionary tale, about the man who sat opposite a palmist in his compartment, and had his hand read. The palmist pronounced that his life-line was abruptly cut short, and about now; whereupon the man jumped up, pulled the cord, and caused a bad railway accident in which he perished.

V. 1 After Jesus was born: it is easy to indulge in a little sentimental baby-worship at this time of year. But who is this really? Matthew has already established that this is Messiah, chosen to reign over the world; God come down to be with us, so that this is the Maker of particle physics, of the theorem which the great mathematician will say he has “discovered”, not invented, of a universe so vast and old that I can’t take it in, of the miles of DNA in my body, of time itself, that mysterious medium in which we live, even of other universes yet more complex, choosing to write for Himself and to act a walk-on part in our drama, choosing direct communication without media; and this is God coming to rescue us from all that is wrong, the Creator Himself taking the responsibility for the whole mess. This is the Creator giving to save us from sin and death ^{[Jn. 3:16]}, not an angel, disembodied, rational and perfect, nor an irrational animal, without imagination or anticipation, but Himself, and Himself made man, a Man, warm, witty, thinking, feeling, creative and physical.

in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod: This is not a fairytale, with funny things appearing overhead and three of this and that. The place and time are particular. Any legendary material in the Bible that there may be simply is not introduced as Matthew does this episode, with a note tying it to history “in the days of Herod the king”, that is during his reign. Matthew does it just like any ancient historian. Jesus was born between 40 and 4 BC, when Herod deceased.

A nasty bit of work, Herod. Like many of those who get “the Great” appended to their names, he had big ideas, for the execution of which all the little people paid. Perhaps the biggest scheme he wanted to his credit was the magnificent Second Temple, for which everyone was still paying a generation after his death. This is not the Herod who did for John the Baptist after Our Lord began his ministry; that Herod was just a chip off the old block. Cunning, ruthless and suspicious to the point of paranoia, Herod the Great was a consummate politician. The man who liquidated his Jewish wife, his sons and plenty of other people was quite in character when he got rid of a whole batch of Bethlehem toddlers because one of them would get in his way. The Romans found him useful enough as a puppet to give him a free hand and the title of King of the Jews, to which he hadn’t a shred of hereditary right. The title is a synonym for the Hebrew-based “Messiah” and the Greek-based “Christ”: all three mean simply “anointed king of David’s line”. Herod needed a plausible Messianic pretender like the proverbial hole in the head.

Magi^[[a]^] from the east came to Jerusalem ²and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east^[[b]^] and have come to worship him.” Herod has visitors: certainly more than one, perhaps a lot more than three. The Greek word μάγοι is a technical term for people versed in astrology. They are astrologers. They are the genuine article, such as today probably no longer exists at least in the West. They come from points further East. Perhaps they practised that austere form of religion known as Zoroastrianism and centred on the worship of the heavenly bodies. They ask, using a non-Jewish form of words “Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?”. They know something which Herod would rather not hear.

V. 3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. WHAT did they say? Horrors! A real king of the Jews? Herod is very worried. So are the people, who know what he is like when worried.

V. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ^[[c]^] was to be born. He’s not much of a Bible student. Never mind, the tyrant can say “Jump” to the equivalent of the Archbishop and the VST prinny and they jump.

V. 5 ”In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:
⁶‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’^[[d]]” That’s a nasty crack, underlining the fact that Herod milked his people for 36 years.

V. 7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. The visitors naturally looked first at Court in Jerusalem. Now Herod really knows where to look. All he needs is one more bit of information: when exactly did it happen? A good Jew wouldn’t touch astrology, or know the significance of a heavenly body’s being in the ascendant; “in the East” is not a better guess than “at its rising” for what had been sighted. But even if they are vague about the time, dithered a bit before starting out, spent weeks or months on the road, he can get enough of an idea for “two years and under” [v. 16] to give him a very safe margin. They follow their very different vision.

Again we see how very un-Jewish is Herod-Hitler. Not only does he give credence to astrology, believing that, “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / the heavens themselves show forth the birth of princes”, he is prepared to avail himself of such forms of divination. At most times and places people have believed in such arts, and as with the Magi mostly found them reliable. Two famous ancient examples of very long-lived industries based on human curiosity about the hidden or occult are the Sibylline and the Delphic oracles. Yes, it works. Even when fraudulent it works for the con-artist. So why does Scripture say of the whole caboodle “Don’t mess with it”? Because it does work, as Saul the king found out: he got the straight goods from the medium of Endor, and the knowledge sent him progressively round the bend. You can read all about it in the second book of Samuel. All such dabblings belong with paganism and idolatry. For the people of God they are off-limits and quite superfluous. Herod’s God has not told him anything about the hidden meaning of the past, the present or the future, Deuteronomy tells him that those things are not for him, but that doesn’t give him pause.

Nobody knows what his visitors had seen. Some points are clear: it said to them, birth, King, Judah. The spectacular triple conjunction of planets which is documented for 7-6 BC would fill the bill. It did not literally guide their steps like a Jack O’Lantern. If it had, they wouldn’t have needed to ask the way. Perhaps when they found the young child it came to a stop over where he was [v. 9] because it was at zenith.

V. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” To these earnest pagan men he parrots cynically their words about doing homage.

V. 9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east^[[e]^] went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. We must put out of our minds all those pretty pictures of the stable with the shepherds coming in the one end and the Magi at the other. They visited a young child, not a newborn, and Mary and her son are now in a regular house [v. 11]. It is not impossible that the house is back in Nazareth, as Luke’s narrative might seem to imply. They are full of joy –– relief is probably a part of it.

V. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. Wealthy, leisured and cultured, they do obeisance to the child of a simple Jewish girl, a child of doubtful paternity. They offer gifts, about each of which we could say with truth that it’s the thought that counts. What they intended, we can’t know; but the gifts correspond to the Evangelist’s threefold description of the Lord in his ch. 1, gold for his royalty, incense for his worship, and myrrh for his saving death. They are very expensive things. They will have come in handy in due course to meet the needs of a refugee family in Egypt.

V. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. Sometimes the cruel and treacherous are clever-stupid. Herod must have hoped for hard information, for example father’s name and occupation. He did not expect the honest foreigners to let him down. But the Magi, faithful within their pagan limits, now get one of the privileges of the devout Jew: a special dream-message. God speaks directly to them, and Herod is left in the dark. As Our Lord would constantly emphasise, those who are out can be in, and those who are in can be out.

V. 13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” ¹⁴So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, ¹⁵where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”^[[f]]

¹⁶When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. But not in accordance with his own Bible, which calls the liquidation of the inconvenient person, however small and unable to resist, murder.

V. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
¹⁸”A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”^[[g]] Power politics, that says that the world is full of insignificant people, whose tears matter to no-one. “He will be called a Nazarene.”

In 1960, before the Wall was built, I was privileged to spend some weeks in Berlin with my military cousin and his family. Because he was high up in the British Mission I travelled freely in both communist and free Berlin. I was 22 and quite naïve. So when I saw the telephone in their house marked NOT SECURE, I had to ask what it meant. The devil, who certainly wanted Messiah dead at once if not sooner –– it is a serious query in my mind whether the most corrupt human protagonists in this drama, Herod at this end, or Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate etc. decades later, really faced the truth-question about Jesus’ Messiahship, or just asked the politician’s expediency-question – the devil behind them is a tactician, not a strategist. He knew that this birth would come, but not exactly when. The lines between God and Mary, God and Joseph, God and the shepherds, God and the Magi, all were apparently secure ones. He gleaned nothing that way. Did God have a line to Herod at all? Herod seems to have been so far gone that he fell into the category of which our Lord would teach “They have Moses and the Prophets: let them hear them. If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither shall they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead”. Am I saying that all faiths lead to God? No; they don’t; but that would be a sermon in itself. But if we carry nothing else away from the example of the Magi, let us, who have the Bible, a longer one, and the Prayer Book, learn that God can speak to the earnest, generous, persistent Pagan with no book but the heavens far sooner than to the half-Jew, the half-Christian who refuses the light that he is given, hedges his bets, is neither hot nor cold. We do not know what the Magi hoped for when they set out. We do know that they returned with the voice of the one true God clear in their ears. Their deep hunger to see the Messiah seems to say that what is wrong with pagan religion is not so much that it is a farrago of evil and lies as that it leaves a hole which only Christ can fill.

The church has always seen these mysterious visitors as profoundly symbolic. They represent the epiphany, or showing off, of the Jewish Messiah to the Gentiles whom he was to bring into the covenant. Today’s Epistle is about the Gentiles and their inclusion in the people of God. We lose sight of the wonder of that, forgetting that at the beginning a Jewish church with a Jewish Bible preaching a Jewish Messiah had a frightful row over whether a Gentile, or someone in origin like most of you, could possibly qualify for membership. Can a Gentile be a Christian, can a Gentile POSSIBLY be a Christian, and if so on what terms?

The point of God’s communication to us is to get response. What is our response to God’s communication to us in Jesus? Which of these characters are we most like? Are we willing like the Magi to uproot ourselves, to labour and endure hardship as we pursue the light we have? Do we want to offer our best, to give as much as we know of ourselves to as much as we know of Him? If so, he has us in hand, and we may expect that He will very soon get ‘up close and personal’ with us. Are we like Herod, who had so often suppressed the voice of conscience as he pursued his own selfish aims? The Bible will be a dead thing to us. Do we appal by our ignorance of our faith and our vicious character sincere outsiders who come to us with questions? We must expect to be remembered, if at all, without gratitude. Do we hate Jesus as someone who would cramp our style? Do we oppose ourselves to Jesus? If we do that, He is going to win. We must expect the tears shed at the last to be our own, for a loss which is eternal. Do we dismiss the Christian faith as grossly superstitious, but read the cheap horoscope in the paper, just in case there’s something in it? Do we, like the religious leaders, have an understanding which is professional, cold and formal, and which we are prepared to sell, together with ourselves, to the highest bidder? Do we try to combine listening for guidance each day with an obsession with predictions about sex, money and power? Do we want to hear from the Lord for our sake, not for His? Are we terrified for our future, that we shall not be looked after? Do we loathe walking by faith? We must expect our present to be wretched, and faith to weaken in the long run to vanishing point. Have we given ourselves like Mary and Joseph, body and soul, to Jesus, even if that means lifelong public disgrace, or ridicule, or danger, or exile? We shall be hearing from the Lord clearly and frequently in His service, never lack the means to do His will, and be remembered for good wherever the Gospel is preached.

To hear from God in an audible personal way, as opposed to one significant dream, and some heavy hints, has happened to me only once so far. Jim Packer would say that even that is a bonus in a normal Christian life. I first preached on this passage early in 1989, when we were to go, as a Church and as individuals, through much unanticipated joy and sorrow. I said then, “When the black times come, as come they will, I hope for grace to resist the blandishments of the ladies in the small ads. –– ‘Be prepared in 1989: confidential readings on all life problems’ –– and to go through the darkness with my hand in the hand that made heaven and earth, though He say nothing to me at all.” I say the same about the Year of Our Lord 2007.

‘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 when 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.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wineskins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

[T.S. Eliot Journey of the Magi]

Endnotes:

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* Mt 2:1

Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ γεννηθέντος ἐν Βηθλέεμ τῆς Ἰουδαίας ἐν ἡμέραις Ἡρῴδου τοῦ βασιλέως, ἰδοὺ μάγοι ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν παρεγένοντο εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα 2 λέγοντες, Ποῦ ἐστιν ὁ τεχθεὶς βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων; εἴδομεν γὰρ αὐτοῦ τὸν ἀστέρα ἐν τῇ ἀνατολῇ καὶ ἤλθομεν προσκυνῆσαι αὐτῷ. 3 ἀκούσας δὲ ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἡρῴδης ἐταράχθη καὶ πᾶσα Ἱεροσόλυμα μετ’ αὐτοῦ, 4 καὶ συναγαγὼν πάντας τοὺς ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ γραμματεῖς τοῦ λαοῦ ἐπυνθάνετο παρ’ αὐτῶν ποῦ ὁ Χριστὸς γεννᾶται. 5 οἱ δὲ εἶπαν αὐτῷ, Ἐν Βηθλέεμ τῆς Ἰουδαίας· οὕτως γὰρ γέγραπται διὰ τοῦ προφήτου· 6 Καὶ σύ, Βηθλέεμ γῆ Ἰούδα, οὐδαμῶς ἐλαχίστη εἶ ἐν τοῖς ἡγεμόσιν Ἰούδα· ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ ἐξελεύσεται ἡγούμενος, ὅστις ποιμανεῖ τὸν λαόν μου τὸν Ἰσραήλ. 7 Τότε Ἡρῴδης λάθρᾳ καλέσας τοὺς μάγους ἠκρίβωσεν παρ’ αὐτῶν τὸν χρόνον τοῦ φαινομένου ἀστέρος, 8 καὶ πέμψας αὐτοὺς εἰς Βηθλέεμ εἶπεν, Πορευθέντες ἐξετάσατε ἀκριβῶς περὶ τοῦ παιδίου· ἐπὰν δὲ εὕρητε ἀπαγγείλατέ μοι, ὅπως κἀγὼ ἐλθὼν προσκυνήσω αὐτῷ. 9 οἱ δὲ ἀκούσαντες τοῦ βασιλέως ἐπορεύθησαν, καὶ ἰδοὺ ὁ ἀστὴρ ὃν εἶδον ἐν τῇ ἀνατολῇ προῆγεν αὐτοὺς ἕως ἐλθὼν ἐστάθη ἐπάνω οὗ ἦν τὸ παιδίον. 10 ἰδόντες δὲ τὸν ἀστέρα ἐχάρησαν χαρὰν μεγάλην σφόδρα. 11 καὶ ἐλθόντες εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν εἶδον τὸ παιδίον μετὰ Μαρίας τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ, καὶ πεσόντες προσεκύνησαν αὐτῷ, καὶ ἀνοίξαντες τοὺς θησαυροὺς αὐτῶν προσήνεγκαν αὐτῷ δῶρα, χρυσὸν καὶ λίβανον καὶ σμύρναν. 12 καὶ χρηματισθέντες κατ’ ὄναρ μὴ ἀνακάμψαι πρὸς Ἡρῴδην, δι’ ἄλλης ὁδοῦ ἀνεχώρησαν εἰς τὴν χώραν αὐτῶν. 13 Ἀναχωρησάντων δὲ αὐτῶν ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου φαίνεται κατ’ ὄναρ τῷ Ἰωσὴφ λέγων, Ἐγερθεὶς παράλαβε τὸ παιδίον καὶ τὴν μητέρα αὐτοῦ καὶ φεῦγε εἰς Αἴγυπτον, καὶ ἴσθι ἐκεῖ ἕως ἂν εἴπω σοι· μέλλει γὰρ Ἡρῴδης ζητεῖν τὸ παιδίον τοῦ ἀπολέσαι αὐτό. 14 ὁ δὲ ἐγερθεὶς παρέλαβεν τὸ παιδίον καὶ τὴν μητέρα αὐτοῦ νυκτὸς καὶ ἀνεχώρησεν εἰς Αἴγυπτον, 15 καὶ ἦν ἐκεῖ ἕως τῆς τελευτῆς Ἡρῴδου· ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, Ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐκάλεσα τὸν υἱόν μου. 16 Τότε Ἡρῴδης ἰδὼν ὅτι ἐνεπαίχθη ὑπὸ τῶν μάγων ἐθυμώθη λίαν, καὶ ἀποστείλας ἀνεῖλεν πάντας τοὺς παῖδας τοὺς ἐν Βηθλέεμ καὶ ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς ὁρίοις αὐτῆς ἀπὸ διετοῦς καὶ κατωτέρω, κατὰ τὸν χρόνον ὃν ἠκρίβωσεν παρὰ τῶν μάγων. 17 τότε ἐπληρώθη τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Ἰερεμίου τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, 18 Φωνὴ ἐν Ῥαμὰ ἠκούσθη, κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὀδυρμὸς πολύς· Ῥαχὴλ κλαίουσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτῆς, καὶ οὐκ ἤθελεν παρακληθῆναι, ὅτι οὐκ εἰσίν.

[a] Matthew 2:1 Traditionally Wise Men.

[b] Matthew 2:2 Or star when it rose.

[c] Matthew 2:4 Or Messiah.

[d] Matthew 2:6 Micah 5:2.

[e] Matthew 2:9 Or seen when it rose.

[f] Matthew 2:15 Hosea 11:1.

[g] Matthew 2:18 Jer. 31:15