Epiphany 2020

A Familiar/Unfamiliar Story

At the start of every new year, the liturgical calendar calls us to celebrate Epiphany. It’s a holiday on the Church calendar, like many others, that often gets ignored. In fact, it often gets thrown in with, and therefore entirely overshadowed by, Christmas. So what is Epiphany? It is, simply put, the celebration of Christ’s revelation to the world. It is the celebration of that first moment when the world realized that a King had been born. It is a memorial to the story of the Magi, the wise men.

This story is no doubt one familiar to all of us. Everyone knows the story of the wise men, and every year, in yards all across America, you can see beautiful nativity scenes depicting the three wise men offering baby Jesus their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It’s a scene that has enchanted Christians for centuries, and that has invited all kinds of creative interpretations. Early Christians identified the Magi as three great kings of Persia, India, and Arabia. They even named them: Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar. Others insisted that the three gifts each represented something about Jesus’s life: Gold symbolizes Jesus’s kingship, Frankincense, an incense burned at offerings, represented his godhood or deity, and myrrh represented his death and burial. Some with more time on their hands have even tried to calculate the movements of the stars to determine precisely what the Magi saw in the sky that brought them all the way to Judea. Was it Halley’s Comet? A supernova? A particular constellation in the sky?

These are all fun, interesting, and creative interpretations of Matthew’s story. They’re all ways of making such a familiar story fill us with excitement again. As familiar as this story may feel to us, however, these interpretations of it are entirely unfamiliar to the real Gospel story. The Magi were likely astrologists, not kings. We also don’t know how many of them there were, it could have been anywhere between 2 and 100 Magi. And we certainly don’t know their names!

The gifts of the Magi don’t have special hidden meanings. They’re just good gifts to give to a king! And as much as we might want to, there’s really no way to match the description of a the star in this story to a historical astronomical event. Any star that moves through the sky and stops above a specific location is a miraculous act of God, and shouldn’t be confused with normal astronomical events like the passing of a comet or planets aligning.

Now, before anyone calls me a Grinch for ruining their favorite Christmas season Bible story, or for tearing apart everything they held dear from Sunday school, let me say that the real story of the Magi is far more interesting, and more challenging, than the pop-level stories we often tell.

King vs. King

King Herod

Idumean

Not well liked

Paranoid near end of life

News of a new king

Stars thought to show rise and fall of emperors/empires

Nero’s reaction

Magi vs. Herod

The Herod in Us