Epiphany – The Wise Man’s Tale [Matthew 2:1-12]
Everyone assumes there were only three of us since we only
left three gifts – but try to imagine how many drovers, tent bearers, supply
keepers and camel-boys alone it takes to move the group of us all the way from our
home in the far east to Jerusalem, a journey of over 6,000 km! As wise as I may
be, one journey for the truth is so much like another that even I cannot
remember if there were 8 of us curious ones who spent 16 months getting there,
or whether there were 16 of us who took 8 months to arrive in Herod’s court to
ask for the final directions to go and see the one who was destined by the
stars to become King of the Jews. And even Herod could see we were not kings–
we were magi, star gazers, alchemists, philosophers, curious-ones; wise and
curious men and women were we. Oh yes, there were women on our journey to be
sure – some of the wisest among us I might add.
“Beware of beautiful strangers,” we told Herod. “The sun is
moving into the house of Venus so affairs of the heart will prosper.” We said
something along these lines, and of course it meant next to nothing. To have
told him anything of real value would have taken weeks of study, calculations,
and to research the births of the child’s parents and parents-parents back
several generations at least! Herod, of course, knew none of this and jumped at
the drivel we threw him like a dog at a bone, and thanked us for it as well. A
lost man, was he. Neither really a Jew nor a Roman, he was at home nowhere, and
yet was the appointed King of the Jews in Rome’s Empire. And he believed in
nothing – not the Olympian Zeus nor the Holy One of Israel, who cannot be
named. All he knew was power and how to preserve it and wield it. He had
others, priests and scholars of the ancient texts to determine where we were to
head next: “Bethlehem, in the land of Judah… no means least among the rulers of
Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
You could see he was not at all happy to hear what they had to say.
“Go and find me the child,” the king ordered us, and as he
spoke the rings on his trembling fingers rattled together like dry bones.
“Because I want to come and worship him,” he said, and with that his hands were
as still as the death he imagined would put an end to this pretender to his
throne. I ask you, does one need to consult the stars to know that no king has ever
bowed down to another king? He thought he could play us for foreign fools, the
sly old fox, and like the fools he took us for we nodded our heads and replied,
“Yes, yes, yes of course.” We knew then and there we would never return to this
sneering son-of-a-long line of Herods who would think nothing of ordering every
little child in Bethlehem to be killed if necessary, to consolidate his hold on
his job and his power in service of the Emperor of Rome.
Why, you might ask, had we traveled so far to witness the child’s
birth and drop off several rather odd gifts? To this neither we nor the stars
had an answer. Our charts and calculations only told us he would be born. It
was another voice that told us to go – a voice as deep within ourselves as the
stars are deep in the never-ending universe! I could not even tell you now, and
could not have told you then while we were on the journey of a lifetime. It’s
not that we had no motive, but that there were so many! Curiosity was one. To
be wise is to be eternally curious, and we were very wise. We wanted to see the
one to whom even the stars are said to bow down – and to see if it were really
true since even the wise have their doubts. Why, doubts are the ants in the
pants of faith, science and curiosity itself! And there was a deep longing. Why
will a person who is dying of thirst crawl miles across sands as hot as fire at
simply the possibility of water? But if we longed to receive, we also longed to
give. Why will a person labor and struggle all the days of one’s life so that
in the end one has something to give to one’s beloved?
When we finally got to Bethlehem, as Herod’s scholars had
directed us, it was night and it was cold. Very cold. The family was in some
sort of outbuilding behind all the others that made up the family compound of
those descended from David who had been a real king. The odor of the hay was
sweet, and the cattle’s breath came out in little puffs that hung in the air
for what seemed an eternity – for it was eternity that we were soon to enter.
There was the man, and the woman. Between them the king. So tiny and vulnerable
like any other baby that had ever been born. We did not stay long. Only a few
minutes as the clock goes, ten thousand, thousand years is how it felt. We set
down our foolish gifts in the straw before the manger and left.
I will tell you two terrible things. What we saw on the face
of that newborn child was his death. Swaddled as if wrapped in a funeral shroud,
death sat on his head like a crown, this death that he was born to die. And we
saw, as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to stay with him would be to
share that death. And that is why we left – giving only our gifts and
withholding the rest.
On our long journey home by another way than we had come, I had
time to contemplate what we had experienced in that little child. Was it
possible, I asked myself, that God is love, and in his infinite love God has
created us, and that in his love by dying, he will redeem us? And that to
return to God, we, too, must learn to love, but distracted and blinded as we
are by so much sin and greed and violence and falsehoods, that most of us can
rise to the spiritual love of God only through a simpler love for a God like
ourselves, who was born that day in Bethlehem as a helpless infant? And like
him, must we also learn to love one another, all others, neighbors and enemies
alike? Had we witnessed in that far away manger the easily comprehensible but
utterly astonishing moment when, quite simply, God became a baby?
And now I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I
ask it of myself ever since that day in Bethlehem, the City of David: Is the
truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, that to live without him is the real
death, and that to die with him is the only life?
Every night as I go to sleep, I look out of my tent into the
night sky, at the moon and the stars, wondering what, why and wherefore, and
always I see that child who was born for us all, for everything and everyone,
and I feel as if he is still with me right here and right now. Then I say some
words to the close and holy darkness, and fall asleep.
With apologies to Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent
Defeat, [Seabury Press, 1979] pp 68-71, The Wise Man; Neil MacGregor, Seeing
Salvation [Yale Univeristy Press, 200]; Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in
Wales [New Directions, 1959].
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