The Magi and the Meaning of the Epiphany

The Epiphany C     January 6, 2019

Is.60:1-6,9      Ps. 72:1-2,10-17

Eph. 3:1-12   Matt. 2:1-12

Lectionary Link

The Christmas Pageant director always encounters a dilemma when it comes to the Magi or the Three Wise-men or the Three Kings.

Directorial decisions have to be made and usually directors depart from the Gospel text when it comes to the three Wise-men.  Most Christmas Pageant and creche scene place the Three Kings at the manger even though in the Gospel story the three Wise-men were never at the manger.

One only has so much room for scenery in the chancel and so one takes license with the placement of the Three Kings.

By calling them Kings, we are already taking license with the text, because they were Magi, the plural of magus, the same word from which we get magician.  So, they were probably sages associated with the wisdom schools of the time in foreign countries including astrology as a prominent "science" of their time.  The Psalmist wrote, "the heavens declared the glory of God," and the Gospel writers believed the birth of Jesus to be an event of the glory of God to which the heavens and all creation responded.  The magi were also regarded to be kings because of references in the Hebrew Scriptures about Kings coming to pay homage to some exalted figure.  And the Hebrew Scriptures provided the template for telling the story of Jesus.

Beyond the pomp and pageantry of the Kings and Magi which they do add to any pageant, is the function of the Magi story in the Infancy Narratives that arose late in the development of the Jesus Movement.

The Magi Story is the theology of St. Paul placed in a story to emphasize that the Gentile mission was God's priority from the beginning.

Is God available to everyone?  Is the God of the Hebrew Scriptures available to everyone?  The very notion of God would imply that God is universal?  How could God be truly a God if God was only for one tribe or nation or group of people?

It is more important to say that we are God's people than to say that God is my God or our God, the God who specifically belongs to the Episcopal Church, or to any religion or religious group.  For God to truly be "catholic," God must be universally accessible to all.  

Are water, air and food necessary to human life?  Yes, indeed.  God must be regarded to be as necessary and as accessible to human life as water, air and food, to be worthy of the designation of God.

So what's the problem?  The problem is when people become such exclusive gatekeepers of God, that they make God in the image of their own small rituals and practices rather than let God be God.  Members of all religious group can be guilty of over-associating the Great God with their petty practices and they can end up misrepresenting God.

St. Paul, a Jew and a Pharisee, wrote a theology of Gentile Christians in his letter to the Roman churches.  Paul wrote that through Jesus Christ his Lord he had: "received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name."

To bring about the obedience of faith among the Gentiles.  This sums up the meaning of The Epiphany, which means the manifestation of Christ to the nations.

Jesus in his own time and place was much more limited within specific religious parties of Judaism even though the control of the Romans of Palestine brought Gentiles into his life. 

How did the leaders of the early church present the Gentile mission in a teaching narrative of Jesus of Nazareth?  They understood that the Gentile mission was a message about the universal accessibility of God's love to everyone.  The magi story represents that the meaning of the birth of Jesus is that God is available to everyone because God took identity with a specific person Jesus, to indicate that God takes identity with us all as our heavenly parent.

The early Christian leaders who were Jews, searched the Hebrew Scriptures for the universal themes.  They read that the Temple was to be a house of prayer for all peoples.  They believed that Abraham was a father of all faith before Israel and Moses and the Law even existed.  They noted that Jonah preached to the foreigners of Nineveh.  They noted that Elijah healed a foreign general Naaman.  They quoted Isaiah about God's salvation being brought to the ends of the earth.

Peter and Paul had to accept the fact that such a mission of universal salvation was not going to be quickly implemented within the existing religious parties of Judaism.  These parties had a universal message but their invitation was more limited; "you have to come to us to receive a proselyte baptism and begin a life of ritual conformity."  What Peter and Paul learned is that people were having spiritual experience without ritual conformity;  Peter and Paul adopted their theology to what was happening in the spiritual lives of Jews and Gentiles.  A person could receive the birth of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and still be a ritually conforming Jew or they could be a Gentile who did not observe all of the ritual practices of the synagogue.

The Season of the Epiphany is about the program of the universal salvation that was offered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The story of the Magi is a story for the Epiphany because they are placed at the birth of Jesus signifying that it was God's intention to expand the universal message of creation, the promise of Abraham and the messianic meanings of the Hebrew Scriptures to all of the peoples on the earth.

And we are the recipients of this expanded message of universal salvation.  It has given us a bit different mission than Judaism but what it means is that we believe that God is actively coaxing people to accept their belonging in God's family.

Let us rejoice in the message of the Epiphany.  God is manifest to all.  And God is love.  Jesus is an expression of God's love to us.  And it is our epiphany to experience God's love through the birth of Christ within us, and be received into the company of Magi, made wise by having an Epiphany of Christ.  Amen.