Gifts of the Magi
Text: Matthew 2:1-12
Happy Epiphany! If you ever wondered what the song the twelve days of Christmas was referring to, you should have received your twelve drummers drumming yesterday! It is a rare occasion that those of us within the protestant traditions get to celebrate Epiphany on the actual day… so we’re probably best to make the most of it, because we won’t get another chance until 2013.
Twelve days after Christmas, on January 6th, is the day that Christians celebrate the visit of the Magi… the ones we often call wise men. It is the day in which we mark the revealing of Christ to the world… which is why we call it Epiphany… those moments in which God is revealed to us and to the world. The visit of the Magi or the wise men from the east, is the story of the light of Christ coming to the whole world.
The challenge is, we tend to take all those stories around the birth of Christ in such a way, that we try to stuff it all into one night… and the stable gets pretty crowded, with Magi tripping over shepherds…Yet as far as the story goes, Luke was the one who had the shepherds, Matthew tells the story of the wise men. The story of the wise men says they visited the child in a house… not a stable… and from the timeline, would have been well after the events described in the Gospel of Luke.
Even so, the visit of the wise men is very much a part of the Christmas Story. One of the favourite Christmas carols is “We Three Kings” which we’ve already sung today. Although technically, it’s not a Christmas Carol, it’s an Epiphany Hymn… Many of us know it from memory… or more appropriately, we know the first verse…
Verse 1
We three kings of Orient are;
bearing gifts we traverse afar,
field and fountain, moor and mountain,
following yonder star.
And, of course, we all know the Chorus…
Chorus
O star of wonder, star of night,
star of royal beauty bright,
westward leading, still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.
As much as like to sing about the visit of the Wise Men at Christmas, this story is the transitional point between the stories of Christ’s birth that moves us into the stories of his ministry some thirty years later. As a storyteller, Matthew evokes images from Isaiah, and yet at the exact same time foreshadows what is to come. The closer we look at how Matthew tells the story, the deeper and more powerful it becomes. It literally is an Epiphany moment that we suddenly see the light of God shining in a place that we would never expect. It’s why this carol is so appropriate for today.
We tend to think of “We Three Kings” as a children’s Christmas carol. Certainly when John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote it in 1857, he did write it for a Christmas Pageant… but it wasn’t a pageant put on by children… it was one put on by the General Theological Seminary in New York. In the short verses, he brings out the meaning of each gift with a poetic artistry that we so often miss, along with a number of very subtle references.
In order to make the Rhyme, Hopkins used “We Three Kings” in reference to those who traveled from the east to give gifts to the Christ child. The actual word in Greek is Magos or Magi. It’s where we get the word “Magician” or “Magic” from. The term was used to describe scholars or astrologers, particularly from areas of Persia… and they were considered to be the scientists of their day. Hopkins used the term “Kings” more in reference to the allusion that Matthew’s story makes to Isaiah 60:3 “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” Regardless of which, they were outsiders… foreigners… people who didn’t belong… and yet they are the ones who come to recognize the child for who he is.
While Matthew’s story doesn’t tell us how many of them there were, we’ve become content to say three, because there were three gifts that they gave. We know those gifts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Each of the middle three verse describes each gift, and in its original form, the king in question was to sing a solo.
Verse 2
Born a king on Bethlehem's plain,
gold I bring to crown him again,
King forever, ceasing never,
over us all to reign.
Of all the gifts that they bring, this is the one that we have the least problem understanding. Gold is valuable, it was then, it is now. Most important though is the symbol that it represented. Gold was the sign of a king. King forever, ceasing never, over us all to reign. We get that, and what it says to us about this child born in Bethlehem.
It’s when we get to the other two gifts that we get a bit confused:
Verse 3
Frankincense to offer have I;
incense owns a Deity nigh,
prayer and praising, voices raising,
worshipping God on high.
Why Frankincense? I’ll bet when we heard this as children we had no idea what this was at all. I’ll be honest, I think I first heard this as “Frankenstein” –which admittedly left me pretty confused with a rather odd mental image. For Presbyterians, we never use incense as part of our worship traditions… which is why it seems so foreign to us. Yet in many cultures throughout the ancient Mediterranean, incense was part and parcel of what it was to worship God. It was used regularly in the temple in Jerusalem. It was a way of engaging all of the senses in worship, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Frankincense is a special spice that when burned gives off an strong odour, with the smoke rising into the air as a visual reminder of voices and prayers rising to God. It helped to remind people of the presence of God in their midst.
As a gift to the child, like gold, Frankincense evokes the image from Isaiah, reminding us that the Christ child is more than a king. Incense owns a Deity nigh… the revealing of God in our midst.
Yet the last gift is perhaps the most confusing of all:
Verse 4
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
breathes a life of gathering gloom,
sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
sealed in the stone cold tomb.
Now I must admit that at Christmas time, this is a particularly cheery verse… and I hope you noted the sarcasm… sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone cold tomb. There’s a pleasant verse to sing! Myrrh is also not mentioned in Isaiah, so clearly Matthew is drawing on another source. It appears several times in the Old Testament, but it seems such an odd gift. Myrrh was an extraordinarily expensive ancient perfume that was used most frequently in embalming corpses, and would be the most common smell that one might find in funeral rites. Of all the three gifts given, Myrrh would have been far and away the most expensive… and the most symbolic… because it was so closely associated with Death.
Now you must be thinking to yourself, “what a horrible gift to give to a child!” Sure it’s expensive, far more valuable than either the gold or the frankincense… but that’s in awfully bad taste! Yet as a symbol it pointed toward something that was far more important than the birth of the Christ child. While the gold and frankincense tell us something about who Jesus is, the Myrrh tells us as to what Jesus is going to do. It reminds us than in the midst of this celebration, there is a cross that lies ahead on Good Friday… and it is not something that we can skip over… Without it Easter, and the hope of resurrection would have no meaning.
Taken together, the gifts of the Magi are symbols to us, reminding us who Jesus is for us. As the last verse goes:
Verse 5
Glorious now behold him arise,
King and God and sacrifice:
hallelujah, hallelujah,
sounds through the earth and skies.
King, and God, and Sacrifice... that’s what the three gifts mean. It’s a revealing moment. That’s what Epiphany is supposed to be. Someone asked me what the difference between Christmas and Epiphany really was. In some ways it’s best to think of it this way: Christmas is God coming to be with us, Epiphany is when we figure it out. It’s when we realize that God’s been here all along. The gift of the Magi to us is a moment of realization, and calls us to wake up and see that God has been with us all along. Sometimes it takes the gift of an outsider to open our eyes.
Amen.
Happy Epiphany! If you ever wondered what the song the twelve days of Christmas was referring to, you should have received your twelve drummers drumming yesterday! It is a rare occasion that those of us within the protestant traditions get to celebrate Epiphany on the actual day… so we’re probably best to make the most of it, because we won’t get another chance until 2013.
Twelve days after Christmas, on January 6th, is the day that Christians celebrate the visit of the Magi… the ones we often call wise men. It is the day in which we mark the revealing of Christ to the world… which is why we call it Epiphany… those moments in which God is revealed to us and to the world. The visit of the Magi or the wise men from the east, is the story of the light of Christ coming to the whole world.
The challenge is, we tend to take all those stories around the birth of Christ in such a way, that we try to stuff it all into one night… and the stable gets pretty crowded, with Magi tripping over shepherds…Yet as far as the story goes, Luke was the one who had the shepherds, Matthew tells the story of the wise men. The story of the wise men says they visited the child in a house… not a stable… and from the timeline, would have been well after the events described in the Gospel of Luke.
Even so, the visit of the wise men is very much a part of the Christmas Story. One of the favourite Christmas carols is “We Three Kings” which we’ve already sung today. Although technically, it’s not a Christmas Carol, it’s an Epiphany Hymn… Many of us know it from memory… or more appropriately, we know the first verse…
Verse 1
We three kings of Orient are;
bearing gifts we traverse afar,
field and fountain, moor and mountain,
following yonder star.
And, of course, we all know the Chorus…
Chorus
O star of wonder, star of night,
star of royal beauty bright,
westward leading, still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.
As much as like to sing about the visit of the Wise Men at Christmas, this story is the transitional point between the stories of Christ’s birth that moves us into the stories of his ministry some thirty years later. As a storyteller, Matthew evokes images from Isaiah, and yet at the exact same time foreshadows what is to come. The closer we look at how Matthew tells the story, the deeper and more powerful it becomes. It literally is an Epiphany moment that we suddenly see the light of God shining in a place that we would never expect. It’s why this carol is so appropriate for today.
We tend to think of “We Three Kings” as a children’s Christmas carol. Certainly when John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote it in 1857, he did write it for a Christmas Pageant… but it wasn’t a pageant put on by children… it was one put on by the General Theological Seminary in New York. In the short verses, he brings out the meaning of each gift with a poetic artistry that we so often miss, along with a number of very subtle references.
In order to make the Rhyme, Hopkins used “We Three Kings” in reference to those who traveled from the east to give gifts to the Christ child. The actual word in Greek is Magos or Magi. It’s where we get the word “Magician” or “Magic” from. The term was used to describe scholars or astrologers, particularly from areas of Persia… and they were considered to be the scientists of their day. Hopkins used the term “Kings” more in reference to the allusion that Matthew’s story makes to Isaiah 60:3 “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” Regardless of which, they were outsiders… foreigners… people who didn’t belong… and yet they are the ones who come to recognize the child for who he is.
While Matthew’s story doesn’t tell us how many of them there were, we’ve become content to say three, because there were three gifts that they gave. We know those gifts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Each of the middle three verse describes each gift, and in its original form, the king in question was to sing a solo.
Verse 2
Born a king on Bethlehem's plain,
gold I bring to crown him again,
King forever, ceasing never,
over us all to reign.
Of all the gifts that they bring, this is the one that we have the least problem understanding. Gold is valuable, it was then, it is now. Most important though is the symbol that it represented. Gold was the sign of a king. King forever, ceasing never, over us all to reign. We get that, and what it says to us about this child born in Bethlehem.
It’s when we get to the other two gifts that we get a bit confused:
Verse 3
Frankincense to offer have I;
incense owns a Deity nigh,
prayer and praising, voices raising,
worshipping God on high.
Why Frankincense? I’ll bet when we heard this as children we had no idea what this was at all. I’ll be honest, I think I first heard this as “Frankenstein” –which admittedly left me pretty confused with a rather odd mental image. For Presbyterians, we never use incense as part of our worship traditions… which is why it seems so foreign to us. Yet in many cultures throughout the ancient Mediterranean, incense was part and parcel of what it was to worship God. It was used regularly in the temple in Jerusalem. It was a way of engaging all of the senses in worship, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Frankincense is a special spice that when burned gives off an strong odour, with the smoke rising into the air as a visual reminder of voices and prayers rising to God. It helped to remind people of the presence of God in their midst.
As a gift to the child, like gold, Frankincense evokes the image from Isaiah, reminding us that the Christ child is more than a king. Incense owns a Deity nigh… the revealing of God in our midst.
Yet the last gift is perhaps the most confusing of all:
Verse 4
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
breathes a life of gathering gloom,
sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
sealed in the stone cold tomb.
Now I must admit that at Christmas time, this is a particularly cheery verse… and I hope you noted the sarcasm… sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone cold tomb. There’s a pleasant verse to sing! Myrrh is also not mentioned in Isaiah, so clearly Matthew is drawing on another source. It appears several times in the Old Testament, but it seems such an odd gift. Myrrh was an extraordinarily expensive ancient perfume that was used most frequently in embalming corpses, and would be the most common smell that one might find in funeral rites. Of all the three gifts given, Myrrh would have been far and away the most expensive… and the most symbolic… because it was so closely associated with Death.
Now you must be thinking to yourself, “what a horrible gift to give to a child!” Sure it’s expensive, far more valuable than either the gold or the frankincense… but that’s in awfully bad taste! Yet as a symbol it pointed toward something that was far more important than the birth of the Christ child. While the gold and frankincense tell us something about who Jesus is, the Myrrh tells us as to what Jesus is going to do. It reminds us than in the midst of this celebration, there is a cross that lies ahead on Good Friday… and it is not something that we can skip over… Without it Easter, and the hope of resurrection would have no meaning.
Taken together, the gifts of the Magi are symbols to us, reminding us who Jesus is for us. As the last verse goes:
Verse 5
Glorious now behold him arise,
King and God and sacrifice:
hallelujah, hallelujah,
sounds through the earth and skies.
King, and God, and Sacrifice... that’s what the three gifts mean. It’s a revealing moment. That’s what Epiphany is supposed to be. Someone asked me what the difference between Christmas and Epiphany really was. In some ways it’s best to think of it this way: Christmas is God coming to be with us, Epiphany is when we figure it out. It’s when we realize that God’s been here all along. The gift of the Magi to us is a moment of realization, and calls us to wake up and see that God has been with us all along. Sometimes it takes the gift of an outsider to open our eyes.
Amen.
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