Scripture: Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2: 41-52

“‘Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.”

-- Matthew 2:11

Today we celebrate the twelfth and final day of Christmas, even though by the calendar that falls on Tuesday next. This is Epiphany Sunday and our symbols are the three wise men from the East who brought homage and gifts to the baby Jesus. I learned recently form a column on culinary matters that quoted the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, that until the 19th century, the English ate their special Christmas cake on the twelfth rather than the first day of Christmas. It was German custom that turned us all back to Christmas eve and Christmas day. I welcome twelve days of Christmas because I need all that time to give the gifts and greetings that I want to give, and that I never seem to get to before the season begins.   

The symbols of three visitors from the East are rich with meaning, and the early oral tradition of the faith embellished them to bring out some of this significance. The tradition made them kings because kings represent nations of the world, and OT prophecies foretold that at the birth of the Messiah the nations, that is, the Gentiles, would come to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel (Num 24:17; Is 49:23, 60:5f, Ps 72:10-15). Tradition also set their number at three, and later gave them the names, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar respectively. This symbolism of identity was further elaborated to make one African, one Asian  and one European. The NT text, however, says simply, “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the king, behold Magi from the East appeared in Jerusalem asking, “Where is he who is born King of the Jews, for we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him? (2:1-2).”

For Matthew they are not kings but Magi (or in later usage, “magicians;” cf. Harry Potter) and they represent not the political power of the world but its intellectual and spiritual resources. So, as we have seen so often, the OT prophecies are fulfilled and changed at the same time; the nations came to Jerusalem but they send not their generals and politicians but their scholars and scientists to worship the one God. Their representatives come seeking wisdom not power, which is why they do not hesitate to fall on their knees before a poor baby in a stable. Do you remember the old saying, “Wise men worshiped Jesus, and those who are wise still do”?

This point is pivotal to the Christian faith, for it breaks us out of the chauvinist vision of the prophecies of old Zion, and thus shows us again how we must read the OT through the NT. If we accept the OT prophetic witness without any NT interpretation we buy into the blood-soaked vision of the political and economic triumph of God’s chosen people in God’s chosen place, and thereby justify the displacement of other people from their ancestral homes, in the name of God. This way endorses everything that is wrong and shameful about religion; but this is not the way of the Magi.

They came from a place of science and literature, of music and art, guided by their scientific observations and its wise interpretation. Their astronomy discovered a star and their wisdom interpreted it as inviting them to follow it on a journey to the truth they had been working to understand all along. They came    from the great and elegant Persian Empire that shamed even the Greeks when they captured the Persian capital cities. In Persepolis Alexander the Great realized that he was not that great after all, just an ignorant soldier, more at home with horses than books, preferring horseplay to study. It is to his credit that he was able to accept this as a shortcoming to be remedied, after all he was only 33 years old at the time. Part of his remedy was to force all of his senior officers to marry highborn Persian women. He hoped that the women would civilize them and thus civilize the Greek world. This ruse was partially successful because one of his successors, Ptolemy the ruler of Egypt, built and stocked the great library of Alexandria, which flourished until the Christian Emperor Justinian burned it to the ground because its contents were pagan. Shame again on religion, this time our religion!

Justinian stood in the tradition of Rome, which stifled much of what the Greeks learned from the East. The Romans were Europe’s first totalitarian Fascists, and their mirthless rule was mostly a form of martial law. They were a race of soldiers and lawyers, who crucified rather than worshiped Christ because generally speaking they did not put science or wisdom high on their list of priorities. (I have read in authoritative sources that the Romans made no original scientific discovery at all, but were adept at using what the Greeks and other Easterners invented). So it is not surprising that our traditional story reported by Matthew identifies the worshipers who came from afar as Magi, the accepted titled of Persian scholars. These extraordinary visitors are “wise men” not kings, even if that fact troubles gender sensibilities. They represent the world class of intellectuals, scholars and scientists, rather than generals, politicians and power brokers.

As sometimes happens, I seem to have been sidetracked from the announced topic of this sermon, namely gifts and giving. The point that wisdom not power came to worship Jesus grabbed my attention as I started to write and so here we are late in the day and not a word has been said about gifts. Perhaps we can make the transition by remarking that wisdom or understanding is itself a gift and that a teacher who helps us understand something entirely new, or something old in a fresh, new way is giving us a gift.  Let us reflect on the wise men giving gifts to Jesus in the hope of learning something about human and divine nature and their relationship, something that we might count as wisdom.

Gift giving is a fundamental characteristic of human nature. Many of the early anthropologists interpreted social and cultural relations by means of the phenomenon of gift giving. Gift giving and receiving is central to the ritual and reality of power. The gift giving ceremonies of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest have been richly documented and at their climax stands the Potlatch ceremony. Roughly speaking the Potlatch was a gift giving that expressed and established the social status of the giver; some were ruinous, all were contests of power. The ceremony has ceased in the Pacific Northwest but continues in our culture as, for example, weddings and bar mitzvahs. In a residual sense such public displays of wealth and exchanges of gifts are socially important to the status of the giver, and I hear that some young couples start their married lives with big credit card debts incurred by the wedding.

So gift giving is integral to the power rivalry that goes on all the time in human groups. It reveals not only the fact of rivalry but also the fact of rivalry’s symmetry, that is, how one action copies another. If you give me a sumptuous gift I must give you a comparable one. Or the opposite: If you do something negative to me I must do something negative to you. Revenge is a powerful form of this exchange of gifts and it too shows the power of symmetry. Gifts must be of equal value, whether they are negative or positive. The one thing not permitted is not to play the game. If you won’t reciprocate you cannot continue as a member of the community; you are driven out.

What do the gifts of the Magi tells us about this cultural complex? The Magi are presumably honored, exalted scholars and scientists. They follow a star, from which fact they are justified in concluding that the person they are going to see is very exalted, even nature takes note of his birth. They find the opposite to be the case; he is not exalted but humiliated. Do they recoil because of the asymmetry between themselves and him, between their proffered gifts and his crude birthplace? No they are true scientists and very wise. They follow through on their interpretation of their scientific observation, the star, and their interpretation, that it points to this little baby. They offer sumptuous gifts, but this time in a context where there can be no obvious reciprocity, and they do not feel that they have won a contest of power, rather they are on their knees with their foreheads in the mud; and Mary and Joseph do not feel humiliated by these rich gifts, because already they know who their son really is.

Amen.