I hope I am not the only one who has been paying attention to the creche in the narthex. The creche is that small, beautiful scene that has been set up for us in the entry way of the church beginning since the start of Advent. You may have been here when I not only discovered the baby Jesus in the pulpit but boldly held it up and said to the gathered Church, “look I found the baby Jesus.”
You may know but any self-respecting creche will keep the baby Jesus out of the manger until Christmas Eve and we faithfully put the baby in place before our service on Christmas. But that wasn’t all that was going on. The Wise Men were on a journey around the church. We couldn’t put the Wise Men in place until time and if you will check, they are almost where they are supposed to be. Epiphany, when it arrives will signal us that the creche is now completed. Oddly though, we hear in the Gospel this morning that the Wise Men have already visited and if you’ll check the calendar, Epiphany is on January 6th. So if you’re a liturgical fundamentalist, you may be a little off kilter this morning. I understand. So am I.
But this doesn’t keep us from learning a lot about the Gospel this morning. We hear that the wise men have already come and gone and left the holy family with a bit of a start. Ironically the Wise Men, or better, the Magi, had delivered a message to Herod the Great that a special birth had taken place and wondered if he knew anything about it. What follows is rather dramatics scene full of intrigue and disaster.
Herod was widely known in the first century for his brutality and paranoia. He had one of his wives and several of his sons murdered because he thought they were plotting against him. Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor under whom Herod ruled, is rumored to have said that it was safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. As the would-be Jewish king, Herod could not eat pork, so his pigs were safer than his offspring!
So when Herod the Magi show up at the palace Herod hears the story of a baby born to be, according to the Magi, king of the Jews, Herod does what nearly every despotic leader has done since. He begins to plot how to get rid of this so-called King and implores the Magi to come back to him and report where he can find the baby. As someone has said, “when Herod is troubled, all Jerusalem is troubled with him.” This is just a way of saying that ruthless tyrants do what ruthless tyrants do. And since this is a good descriptor of Herod, we are repelled but not surprised that he plans on killing all the infant boys in Bethlehem in order to destroy the one the Magi said was a king.
Unfortunately, history is marked with the same kind of savage ways tyrants deal with those who would challenge them. That bright star that led the Magi to Bethelhem was not good news for Herod. You can almost hear Mary’s song in the background reminding us that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” Despite what Herod thinks, everything has been changed by Jesus’ incarnation. Those world leaders who think the world is something to control and manipulate and those who stand in the way can be easily removed are about to find out that God will not stand for that. “He has come to the help of his servant Israel, for he has remembered his promise of mercy.” Herod and Caesar and whoever would dare to stand in the way of God’s reign of love and mercy will come to know personally that God “has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.” Talk about being on the wrong side of history. Later to underscore who really is in charge, the early Christians introduced a saying, a title really, to stand in stark contrast to what Caesar demanded. Caesar required people to chant in his presence: “Caeser is Lord.” The Christians changed this and we’re pretty much in the dark about its origin. They chanted “Jesus is Lord.” We would be well reminded that no earthly leader is worthy of the admiration and honor that only God is due. Anytime an attempt to make someone else have that kind of authority and power, is just another failed attempt at anti-Christ. I can almost hear the chants of Holy Week when those who were asked if Jesus was their King, replied resoundly with a cry “Our only king is Caesar.” Herod was about to learn that this never turns out well.
But it’s not only the Magi that have alerted the Holy Family, but an angel gets in on the act. An angel appears in a dream to Joseph who is told to take his young family to Egypt and to stay there until it is safe to return. And so, Joseph, Mary and Jesus align themselves with refugees both before and since and leave their home searching for a safe place to avoid the disaster that Herod had planned.
It’s interesting how things change but how certain things remain the same. I was reminded this week that “the Hebrew Bible orbits around God’s subversion of the politics of Pharoah. The New Testament orbits around God’s subversion of the politics of Caesar. When we miss this, our religion cannot resist the gravitational pull of playing to Pharoah/Caesar politics.” Many people have fallen prey to this. We would be good to remember that Jesus is Lord and not Caesar. And our Lord is a dark-skinned child born to a scandalized mom and a poor stepdad. He spends his childhood as a political refugee, grows up breaking laws and is eventually executed for defying religious leaders. This is story we must tell over and over, lest we fall into the trap of forgetting the temptation of all the Herods and Caesars that continue to make their appearance and our temptation to make them Lord.
There is another problematic characteristic of these three Magi that needs to be mentioned. The magi were most likely astrologers, perhaps even Zoroastrian priests from Persia. They are certainly Gentiles; they come from outside of Israel, and they do not know the Scriptures. But they do know how to read the stars. God reaches out to them and leads them through what they already know. In the ancient world, stars and other signs in the heavens were thought to signal important events. In this case, a bright star rising leads them to discern that a royal birth has occurred in Judea. So they come bringing gifts fit for royalty – gold and frankincense and myrrh.
But did you hear that? They were outsiders. They were pagans. They weren’t believers. They didn’t come all that distance because they were biblical scholars and having learning about the suffering servant of Isaiah, they were simply making sure there biblical understanding was matching up with an actual birth. They were astrologers!
Sometimes it’s too clever by half to try and limit God based on doctrine or theology. Both doctrine and theology are simply our attempts to make sense of who God is and/or what God is doing. Sometimes it’s best to just put our Bible and Prayer Book down, look to the heavens and sit in awe. God is God and if God wants to use outsiders to protect the Holy Family, who are we to complain? Indeed, I learned a long time ago that the best we can do is to look at God and be driven to our knees about God’s vastness, God’s love and God’s desire to draw all people to God’s side. Sometimes God does things, and we seem to think that no self-respecting God would do it that way. But when you think about it, what self-respecting God would send God’s only son into the world as a innocent baby that would need the help of astrologers from Persia. And while we’re at it, what kind of God would bring salvation to the world through an actual crucifixion.
Before we leave this unusual story, the gift of gold for a king is not unusual, but frankincense and myrrh may be a little confusing. “Both frankincense and myrrh come from the fragrant resins of trees, and both have long been used in perfumes and in the making of incense for worship. Myrrh has some very distinctive properties. The name itself means “bitter” in Arabic. Its yellowish-white resin seeps from the trunk of a small desert tree when wounded and hardens into teardrop shapes, as though the tree itself were weeping. Once exposed to the air, its color deepens into gold, then amber, and then scarlet—like drops of blood against the bark of the trees. The resin is bitter to taste, but when ground into a powder or burned as incense, it releases an extraordinary fragrance.”
Myrrh has long been used for its medicinal qualities as an antiseptic or analgesic agent. According to Mark, Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh at his crucifixion (Mark 15:23). In the ancient world, myrrh was also a common agent used for embalming the dead, and according to John’s Gospel, it was used at Jesus’ burial (John 19:39). As such, myrrh seems a strange gift to bring to an infant, a gift more suited for the end of life than its beginning.
Yet it seems that the magi were indeed wise in their gift-giving. Their gift foreshadows what is to come. Myrrh is a bittersweet gift, but it is a fitting gift for King Jesus born into the world of King Herod, for an infant king born into a world where evil tyrants plot the deaths of innocents. It is a fitting gift for this humble king who will be put to death as a threat against the empire. It is a fitting gift for the shepherd-king who comes to lay down his life for the sheep. The fourth verse of the Christmas carol “We Three Kings” brings out this significance of myrrh very well:
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
breathes a life of gathering gloom,
sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
sealed in a stone cold tomb.
Even if we would rather not be reminded, the gift of myrrh reminds us that Jesus’ birth, like every birth, begins a journey toward death. This infant king is born to die, and it is for our sake. At the same time, the healing properties of myrrh remind us that in Jesus’ death and victory over the grave, there is healing for all our ills.” (Elizabeth Johnson). And so God moves directly into the lives of the Holy Family, Herod, the Magi and don’t lose this one, our own. Jesus is Lord and Caeser and Herod and whoever else, is not.