The Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord
When I was little I thought the words to the song were, “We three kings of Orientarr”… as if Orientarr were a country somewhere. Turns out it’s “of Orient are…” Go figure.
Next to Christmas itself, the Epiphany is probably the next most recognized and celebrated feast day of the Christmas Season for the average Catholic. The traditional date for the Epiphany is January 6th, but in the United States we celebrate it on the Sunday between January 2nd and 8th, so this year it happens to be the 5th.
There are two Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, and each tells us about a different group of people. Luke’s Gospel tells of the shepherds that were visited by the angel and came to worship the newborn king, and Matthew’s Gospel tells of Jesus receiving gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the…magi? Wait, what about the three kings?
It turns out that not only is Orientarr not a country, but Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t tell us that these visitors were kings. It doesn’t even tell us how many of them there were! All it says is “behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem…” So where do we get three from? Well they bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Three gifts, three visitors? Maybe.
What’s more interesting though, is who “magi” were in the ancient world. Kings? Probably not. Wise men? Well, sort of. These guys would have been practitioners of astrology, which Google defines as “the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world.” So it makes sense that they would have been following the “star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright”, hoping to see this epic event that had just taken place in Bethlehem.
When they got there, they “opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” This wasn’t an ancient baby shower though; in Jesus’ time, this would have been seen as an offering of tribute, not so much as gift-giving. The magi were paying homage to Jesus as the newborn King of Kings.
The Gospel then tells us, “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by another way.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen, a famous Catholic author and speaker (who actually had a very popular prime time TV show in the 1950s), used to say that of course they departed for their country by another way; no one ever encounters Christ and leaves the same way he came.
You would think that God would have first revealed the birth of Jesus Christ, God made Man, to the Pharisees or some of the super religious folks of the time. But that’s not the way God works. More often than not, God works in very unexpected ways, through very unexpected people. The magi weren’t even members of the Jewish faith, yet by God revealing the Incarnation to them, he made salvation known to the Gentiles (the non-Jewish peoples of the world).
There are a million different things we can take from this Gospel, but I think a good one-liner to sum it up would be, “When you encounter Christ, expect the unexpected.” There’s not a single person involved in the Christmas story that thought, “This is exactly how I pictured it!”
Our God is a God of plot twists and surprise endings; but not the kind where the movie pulls a fast one right at the end. It’s rather the kind where you go back and watch it a second time and realize that the writer was setting it up that way the whole time.
*Special thanks to Dr. Scott Hahn for some of these insights about the Magi.
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