The Feast of the Epiphany (January 6, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, the celebration of the wise men’s visit to our Lord. The wise men, who are also called magi, were from a priestly class of Persians (comparable to the role of the Levitical priesthood in Israel). These men were knowledgeable in areas like philosophy, medicine, science, and what we would now call “magic.” It seems they observed the star spoken about by St. Matthew in their practice of astrology (though we aren’t sure how — whether this was Halley’s Comet, the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, or some other natural phenomenon or a miraculous event). Either way, they followed the start to Jerusalem where they met with Herod, the King of Israel at that time. Herod (who was often called Herod the Great) was a trusted puppet king of the Romans because he kept peace in Palestine, which was no easy task. he also built the Temple in Jerusalem and was responsible for a number of popular economic policies. But he was also severely paranoid and had his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons assassinated. His ethnic background was that he was only half-Jewish so he was overly sensitive to messianic movements that would have appealed to ethnic purists who would have sought to unseat him. For this reason, he was interested in the Wise Men’s mission: he wanted to eliminate threats to his power, a paranoia that would eventually lead him to commit the horrific slaughter of the Holy Innocents. But the wise men found the Christ child, worshipped him, and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh and then left by a different route because they were warned in a dream.

The actions of Herod here are those of a deranged man whose brain has been warped by the worship of the idol of political power. Literarily, St. Matthew’s description is designed to create a parallel between him and Pharaoh who slaughtered the male Hebrew children while Israel was enslaved in Egypt. In some ways, Herod’s actions are being presented to us as worse than Pharaoh’s because he was the King of Jerusalem and had an obligation to protect his people, not slaughter them. But also as a half-Jew and someone who had built the Temple and who had access to the Scribes and Pharisees, Herod should have known better: that the proper response was to welcome the Messiah. But instead, he pitted himself against the child, an act of pride that often comes when people idolize political power.

We are, then, to contrast Herod and his toxic behavior against the Magi, pagans who nevertheless followed the star to find the king of the Jews. The star which guided them hearkens to the prophecy of the gentile Balaam in Numbers 24:17-19: “a star shall come out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel…One out of Jacob shall rule.” Further, they magi themselves invite a comparison with the Queen of Sheba who came from far off to bring gifts to king Solomon (1 Kings 10:1-10). The Magi, then, are in introduction to an important theme in St. Matthew’s Gospel: Jesus is for all people, not a particular ethnicity, social class, gender, or any other social category. Where our culture so often seeks tribalistic divisions, we see an insistence here in St. Matthew’s Gospel (as well as in the writings of St. Paul) that, while those social categories are not eliminated, they are nevertheless subordinated to the call of the Gospel. And in response to this to the Christ child who makes this possible, what do the Magi do? They fall down and worship him and give him gifts. Going all the way back to the 2nd Century Church Father Irenaeus, each of the gifts has been laden with theological import:

The gold is considered a gift for a king, acknowledging Jesus as the King of the Jews and ruler of the world.

The frankincense is considered a gift for a priest, involved in sacrifice.

And the Myrrh, which was sometimes used as a perfume, was also used in the embalming of dead bodies, foreshadowing the Passion of our Lord.

Each of those gifts then serve as an impetus for why we worship him:

He is our king and our heavenly citizenship precedes all other facets of our identities: we are Christians before we are male or female, we are Christians before we are a member of a social class or race, we are Christians before we are Americans or any other nationality. And we subordinate all other aspects of who we are to the fact that we are Christians.

He is our priest, a high priest in the order of Melchizedek. What distinguishes him from the Old Testament Aaronic priesthood is that in him, the priest and sacrifice are one. He is the sacrifice and the sacrificer.

So we worship him because he died for us, a principle that was played out in the baptisms we witnessed today.

So let us heed the words of Gregory Nazianzen: “Let us remember in adoration; and to him, who, in order to save us, humbled himself to such a degree of poverty as to take our flesh, let us offer him not only incense, gold, and myrrh (the first as God, the second as king, and the third as one who sought death for our sake), but also spiritual gifts, more sublime then those which can be seen with the eyes” (Oratio 19).