ARE WE THE WISE MEN?

Anna G. Edmonds

The wise men, the Magi, the kings.

Who were they?   What is their meaning now?   Well, superficially, we usually see these kings for the color they add to the Christmas story—their rich costumes, their exotic background.

Is their real purpose only for show?   Who among the people you can think of would be like the wise men?   Would they be professors?   Astronomers?   Rulers?    Astrologers?   Who among these people would drop their important work to travel for weeks and under personal hardships to see a baby they weren’t related to and probably wouldn’t ever see again?   Or even to see some miraculous event?

Probably Matthew expected his readers to understand that the kings didn’t travel alone.   But for me, I’ve usually imagined only Casper carrying a small box of gold, and Melchior a handful of frankincense, and Balthazar some myrrh—symbolic gifts.   Three lone men.   But, remember, neither kings nor wise men would travel any distance without their guards, their servants to carry their heavy presents, and their camp followers.   (And today without the reporters to tell the world about their exploits.)

Another question we could ask is, What did Matthew intend to convey with the presence of the wise men/kings in the Christmas story?   Was it the royal honor to Christ?   Was it the miraculous appearance of a star that directs these astrologers?   (Remember that an uncommon celestial event foretold misfortune then.)   Was it the aura of the fabled East?   The color and the richness of the kings’ trappings, and the piquant smells of incense that reminded people of a time of sacrifice and worship?   Do these images have more than a trivial meaning for you and me?

Maybe Matthew’s account implied that their visit completed the miracles of Christmas:   the birth of the baby Jesus to the Virgin Mary, the angels’ announcement to shepherds (who weren’t generally considered appropriate company for angels), and the miraculous, heavenly star guiding wise adults to visit a squalling baby.  Maybe Matthew wanted to show quite dissimilar groups of society involved in recognizing the value of this birth:   the virgin woman, the country hayseeds, and the great, important rulers.

There’s an old legend about these kings that’s told in Southeastern Turkey in the Syrian Orthodox Church community.   Let me give you a little background to this community before I recount their story.   The Syrian Orthodox are among the oldest of the Christian churches.   One of their traditions is that the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus traveled to their country and converted them to Christianity at the same time that Paul was being a missionary along the Mediterranean coast.   We in the West don’t know about Thomas and Thaddeus.   But, you see, the people of this area spoke the same language that Thomas and Thaddeus did—Aramaic.   The same language that Jesus spoke.   They still speak Aramaic; they use it every day; they use it in their church services.

The Syrian Orthodox community is scattered around the world now, but there are still several active monastic groups in Eastern Turkey .   Bill and I were privileged to stay a few days in the Monastery of St. Gabriel several years ago.   We were part of the daily life there.   The community is centered in a collection of buildings that are more than 1,600 years old.   (Some of the buildings seemed older to me.   The church where we worshiped at the four services a day had a dirt floor packed hard from the years of use.   The room was maybe half the size of this; the seats were simple wooden benches with wooden slats as backs.   The walls were the same drab color as the floor, and the room was cold and dark.   I had no trouble thinking that the service hadn’t changed over the centuries.)   It was in this Monastery of St. Gabriel that I found a tale that had been told by Old Joseph about his ancestor who had lived at the time of Jesus.

Old Joseph introduced his story with praise for God’s great goodness.   One day, he began, twelve kings came to King Hanna’s city with their heavy gifts and camel caravans and all their soldiers.   They were from Persia , far away to the east, and they had been following the guiding of the star of a king who was about to be born.   (Of course Eastern kings knew how to read the stars.)   By the time the travelers reached King Hanna’s city they were very tired from their long journey.   They bargained with King Hanna for a bit of level ground next to his lake where they could pitch their tents and water their animals.

Because they were all so tired, they decided to draw lots to choose three of them who should persist in following the star.   The lots fell first to a very old man, second to one who was middle-aged, and last to a youth.   These three then left the other nine to wait for them, and they journeyed on, guided by the star night and day, until they reached Jerusalem .

Old Joseph’s story at this point is the same as the biblical account.   Since these were kings, they were able to approach King Herod and get from him the information they needed to continue.

When the kings reached Bethlehem , one by one they went in to where the Christ child was.   First the old man entered.   He was bewildered that he saw the Babe as an old man just like him, and he backed out.   The second entered and stood in wonder before a Babe who appeared to be in the midst of his life span.   He, too, backed out, and the young man entered.   Like the others, he found the Babe reflecting his image of youth.   And he left abruptly.   Upon this, the kings decided to enter all together.   In the room they found Mary and Joseph and the infant Christ, at which they bowed down to honor him and present their gifts.

And, concluded Old Joseph, “We must all honor and praise God for his great goodness.”

It’s easy to recognize in the legend the moral that each of us sees reflected in the astonishing, wonderful story of Christmas our own image.   And that when we agree to look as a community at this miraculous event its fuller meaning becomes clearer.

I try to imagine myself being present with the shepherds or the kings at the baby’s cradle, and to imagine what I would have seen in the hay and the cows and sheep and horses (and smelled in that barn).   And, like my forgetting that kings don’t travel alone, I also forget that I probably wouldn’t ever have gotten close.   As a camp follower?   No.   As a woman?   Most unlikely.   Would any of us?   As strange foreigners?   As Gentiles?

Well, the foreigner, the Gentile parts of the story are ones that all of us may forget.   But the visit of the wise men is considered important in Christian history as the first instance of an encounter between Jesus and the Gentile community.   Epiphany—the Greek word means ‘manifestation’—is celebrated on January 6 as this first manifestation of Christ to those who weren’t Jewish like Jesus.   Not only were the wise men not Jewish, they were foreigners.   They had to ask the Jewish Herod and his scribes and chief priests to explain what the prophet had said about the birth of the Messiah.   (They may not have read Hebrew.)

Perhaps another of the meanings Matthew intended was not so much the miracle of the wise men’s visit, as that when they had a heavenly vision they went to work to clarify and value it.   Then, that their presence at the cradle added both glory and an increased dimension to the acceptance of the Christ child.

There are other dimensions that I see:   Each of the adults in the Christmas story gave something of her/himselves, and in so doing faced, at the least, ridicule for acting on what the angels or the star told them. The shepherds had no concrete proof that they’d heard angel voices that sent them off to see a baby.   Not only ridicule, Mary exposed herself to stoning as a prostitute.   And the wise men may have barely escaped Herod’s wrath.   But all were willing to risk—to go beyond—what was conventional and safe in their lives in order to discover something greater.

There’s more to this story:  Both the biblical account of the wise men’s visit and this Syrian legend have a darker side to them.   In Matthew’s words, “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men….”

This leads me to wonder that Christianity has built into it right at the beginning some of the conflicts and moral dilemmas we face today.   Are we the foreign wise men looking at the portent of some unusual event and finding in it a deeper meaning in our lives?   Or are we Herod filled with fear that this new event, or new force will destroy everything we value?   Do we honor the new idea, the baby, with both our worldly and our symbolic gifts?   Or do we kill everyone who has even the slightest relation to what terrorizes us?

Writing in his book, The Images of the Church in the New Testament , a modern wise man from the east—well, a contemporary New Testament scholar from New England and a good friend, Paul Minear—has added another dimension to my understanding of these biblical kings who journeyed to Jerusalem .

Those to whom the Messiah comes as savior and judge became members of the Holy City Jerusalem because of its image as a city of death, resurrection, and salvation.   Jerusalem was the center of the divine vocation of the kings.   The Messiah had been given the key of David, and he gave that key along with his kingship to his followers.

Was the wisdom that Matthew was intending in his account of the kings that they recognized in the birth of this baby the coming of the king-to-be?

To quote Minear:  “The story of the Messiah coming to Jerusalem was so told in all the Gospels as to demonstrate his continuing election of this city and his exercise therein of the final prophetic, priestly, and kingly work.   He was born as its king and therefore at his birth all Jerusalem was troubled.   He died as its king and therefore at his death many saints were raised from their tombs to go ‘into the holy city.’ ”   (pp.92-93)

When I put myself in the situation with the kings, I feel first the awe and wonder they must have felt to fall on their knees honoring Him.   Certainly awe and wonder at this event that is beyond my comprehension or ability to put into words.   Acknowledging both the awe and the imposed distance of time and situation, still I go on to search for the levels of meaning that I can find and can share in this story.

Let’s go back to the moral dilemmas of Christianity.   I find another dimension to the meaning of my response to this story and to Minear’s interpretation:   Am I one of the people of Jerusalem who was terrorized by this event?   Would I have reacted like Herod?   The entire value of Christmas—all its panoply, all its troubling miracles—depends in the final analysis on what happens at Easter in Jerusalem .   It depends on how we, today, behave in relation to this kingly baby’s promise of salvation, and the frightening demands of this promise to live, with God’s grace, in faith, following the mystery of God as revealed in Him.

Bainbridge, 31 December 2004