A somewhat scurrilous story that came my way while I was looking for jokes to tell at Christmas. Three kings are riding across the desert, following a bright star; says the first king, “I have brought gold to present to the new born king!” The second king says, “I have brought frankincense to present to the new born king!” Meanwhile the third king is looking down at his camel with some embarrassment. “What have you brought for the new born king?” enquire the first two. “Bath salts,” he mumbles. “Bath salts?” the first and second kings exclaim in unison. “Well,” says the third king, “you know what the shops are like this close to Christmas!”
I would be that king, I think; I always leave my Christmas shopping to the last minute, however much I try not to. Last Friday was the feast of the Epiphany, when we by tradition we remember those strangers from foreign parts who came searching for the new king. We may call them kings, or magi, or wise men; we may even give them names, Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar. The Bible doesn’t give us their names, nor for that matter does it say there were three of them, only that they brought three gifts. And it’s only Matthew who tells their story at all.
Whoever these people were who came to find Jesus, and however many there were, the important elements to the story are these - that a sign appeared in the heavens; that these men who came were foreigners, they weren’t Jews; and they gave gifts that were, as one of the hymns reminds us, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” Gold, frankincense, and (of course) myrrh. What connects those three elements together is the kingship of Jesus, not just the fact that this child is born to be a king, but the nature of his kingship. So let’s spend a short time reflecting on those three features of the story of the wise men, beginning with the heavenly sign they saw, and interpreted, and set themselves to follow.
Astronomers have speculated as to what the sign was the wise men saw, and when exactly it appeared. A particular conjunction of planets? I think that’s unlikely, myself - these wise men would have known the planets and their movements in the heavens, and while a conjunction would certainly have been a bright and amazing light, it wouldn’t have been a new light, and it seems this one was.
But whatever the light was, I don’t think it actually led the wise men across the desert by moving in the sky before them. Matthew suggests it did, on their final leg from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, but I think that’s a bit of storytelling. These were man who studied the heavens; they would have calculated their route and planned their journey beforehand. Even then they got it a bit wrong, heading for Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem. Why go at all, though? The world was hardly short of kings and princes, and new ones were being born all the time. This sign must have been something really special, and certainly Matthew expects us to see it that way. This is not a king like all the other kings - not even a king like Herod, who even in his lifetime was called “The Great”. The whole course of history was changed by this birth. That’s what they understood from the star; that’s why they travelled. And yet many other eyes must have seen that same sign without understanding or responding. From the beginning, we realise that the Christ is himself a sign that many will reject.
These men who did trek to see the new king were all foreigners - none of them were Jews. The nativity set at my first church had an Arab, an African, and a Chinaman, which is a nice thought but probably quite unhistoric. It’s most likely that they all came from Persia. There are significant Old Testament references - Isaiah 60 among them - which speak of the nations journeying to see the new light kindled among us, the glory of the Lord revealed.
In fact, it’s the reference to “kings journeying toward the radiance” in Isaiah 60 verse 3 that encourages us to sing of the three kings - there’s nothing in the story told by Matthew to suggest that they were kings, though they must have been men of wealth and standing and learning. We discover from this story that this child is born for something more than the mere kingship of any one people, even the Jews, and that there is in Bethlehem a new light, a new learning, a new wisdom that all the world’s wisdom should point towards.
The wise men who came to find Jesus probably didn’t come to a child in a manger in a stable. He could have been anything up to two years old by the time they found him - though the fact that the family was still in Bethlehem and hadn’t returned to Nazareth might suggest a fairly early date within that two year spread. He would not have been older than two: you can be sure that if there had been the slightest chance the child was older than two, Herod would have had even more male children killed than he did. As it was, every child of two years or less in age was put to death.
They came, though, these wise men, with gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh - all of it expensive stuff, all of it symbolic rather than practical, though it might just be truer to say that these were gifts to present in a palace before a throne rather than in a humble house in a small town. But the gifts are themselves prophetic, the story of this child is told in them.
Gold may seem to be the most conventional of the gifts, and the most immediately appropriate for a king. But gold is also a symbol of purity. The dross, the impurities, all of that is burned away when gold is refined, and once the pure gold is prepared it is there for always. It will not rust or decay. For an earthly king gold symbolises a mythical immortality that in reality will end, for even kings have to die.
For Jesus, the gift speaks of the true immortality of love, and of the light of love here born among us. And to gold we add frankincense, which is a symbol for relationship, for the holy relationship which is priesthood. One word for a priest is pontifex, which means bridge builder, bridge maker: a priest stands between the people and God, between God and the people, making and remaking and enabling the living relationship between the people and their God.
Kings are often accorded a priestly status; our own Queen is given the title “Defender of the faith”. But just as in reality kings are mortal and die, so also they are imperfect and sin, indeed all earthly priests lack the purity to be fully acceptable as priests. The priests in the temple in Jerusalem had to ritually purify themselves before they could offer the set sacrifices at the altar. Frankincense speaks of a priesthood that is different from that: the child the wise men came to see will as a worthy and unblemished priest offer his own self as perfect and unblemished sacrifice for our sins.
Which brings us to the third gift, the one that jars against the others. The myrrh. You might give gold and incense to any king, but would you also give myrrh? It’s special and costly stuff, but it speaks of death, and who wants to be speaking of death at a birth? I wonder how the kings themselves understood what they were doing, what they were giving, what its meaning was. But they of course had seen and measured and interpreted the star, and who knows what it had told them about what they were going out to find.
This is a king who is king for ever: the gift of gold tells us that. This is a king who is also a perfect and unblemished and completely worthy priest: hence the gift of incense. And yet this child is also born to die. Well, we all are - but this is his destiny, this is the road he travels from the beginning.
When I was singing “The Fourth Wise Man” with Welshpool Choral Society, the words given to the third wise man, the one who gave the myrrh, expressed his anxiety as he gave a gift that spoke so clearly about sacrifice. But in fact sacrifice is an appropriate image for even an earthly king - maybe not for Herod, whose mantra seemed to have been personal power at whatever cost, but words like duty and service are very much at the heart of what our Queen and her family stand for, recognised even by those who have little time for kingship as such.
But again, the myrrh here symbolises not just the favours bestowed by a king who may govern well and with the people at heart but still sits on a throne, but the complete and total surrender of the sacrificial lamb whose only throne is a cross of wood. He is, in a way no earthly king could match, the man for others.
“Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered” - as Graham Kendrick put it in one of his songs. The light of the world chooses to enter the darkness of our world, a king like no other king. The one who is eternal chooses to be mortal; the ultimate and only true priest, without blot of sin, will nonetheless cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And he will be anointed, and laid in a tomb. All of that is there in these gifts; but the offering of them tells us right from the word go that the grave is not the end of the story: not for this man, and not for those for whom he gives his all. A star shines in the eastern sky; and it shines for ever.
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