The Feast of the Epiphany, Year B

Isaiah, 60:1-6,9
Ephesians, 3:1-12
Matthew, 2:1-12

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The more I learn about the practice of Judaism the more I admire it, the more I think that we have to emulate it. The Diaspora and the horror of centuries of persecution have produced suffering beyond calculation, but also much fruit. Due to necessity, if not from original design, Jewish customs are extremely domestic, largely focused on the family table. They promote family life and teach the faith at the same time. When their customs are observed, faith grows organically with identity; faith becomes who they are.

The Church has many similarly healthy customs, but some have been lost. This morning we are observing one. During the procession, the children carried gold, frankincense, and myrrh to present to our Lord, and they also carried chalk. We blessed the chalk. The chalk is now at the back of the church, and after mass please take a piece home, inscribe on the lintel of your front door the line commemorating the magi and marking this year, and say a prayer asking the magi to help to protect your home, to help to make your home a place where the Lord of peace and joy and love resides. The prayer and the inscription is in the front of your service bulletin.

As you inscribe your lintel and in coming weeks when you see it, you might think of Jews who have mezuzahs on the doorposts of all the inner doors of their homes. A mezuzah is a small waterproof box containing scrolls inscribed with the shema. The shema, the Jewish confession of faith contained in a few verses from Deuteronomy and Numbers, is to be recited every morning and evening. The shema reminds Jews of God's presence and his commandments. Many observant Jews when they enter or leave a room or when they leave their home will touch the mezuzah and then place their fingertips upon their own lips. It is similar to a priest or a deacon who before reading the gospel crosses the text and then his mind and lips and heart. It connects us with God's word, with God's presence. Mezuzahs and inscribing your lintel with a reminder of the magi are ways we sanctify our comings and goings. We want our home life, as well as our church life, to be full of God's presence.

I also have great regard for the Jewish observance of Shabbat, the sabbath. ⁽¹⁾ It scares us when we consider observing the ritual strictly, but it deserves our reverential regard. Most of us think of it as being full of stifling prohibitions, as hardly being a day of rest and fun, but a day of burdens. We are probably wrong. It is the only ritual mentioned in the ten commandments. That should impress upon us its importance. We have a hard time imagining its observance. It prohibits starting the car, using or dealing with money, doing any kind of work, or even turning on a light or any appliance - like a television! The effect, however, is to make the day holy, to set it apart as a special time, one day every week, to focus on God and on higher things in life, to be with family and friends, to talk and to think about ideas. It is a highly civilizing institution.

Shabbat commemorates both creation and Exodus. On the seventh day, God rested from his labours. We follow the divine example. If God set aside his work for a day, we would be foolish to argue that our own work is too important for us to take a rest. By its connection to God's act of creation, Shabbat helps us to be grateful for the universe, to appreciate its beauty and splendour. Shabbat also reminds us that God freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt. In Deuteronomy, while pronouncing the commandment to observe the sabbath day, Moses explains, "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you forth from there with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day." (Dt 5:15) In the ancient world, leisure was the privilege of very few, and slaves in Egypt certainly did not get a day off. Keeping Shabbat reminds us that God sets us free. Keeping Shabbat frees us, albeit briefly, from our deadlines and pressures of day to day life. During the rest of the week, we are, at least to some extent, slaves to our jobs, to community organizations, to our creditors. Our lives have countless responsibilities. Shabbat is a bit like Christmas Day, except it happens once a week, a day when everything stops, calms down, relaxes, and turns and focuses on God. Shabbat is about freedom.

And, strangely, liberation is also a theme in the story of the magi. S. Matthew's gospel argues that the life of Jesus recapitulates the history of the Jews. So Matthew's story about the magi coming to worship our Lord has many parallels in the Old Testament. The reason Moses and the Hebrews were in Egypt in the first place was Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Jacob. Joseph brought the Hebrews to Israel. Joseph was a dreamer, and his dreams both taunted his brothers and helped Pharoah to save his people from famine. S. Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was also a dreamer. Matthew's Gospel tells us that Joseph had three dreams in which he receives directions from an angel of God. The first one tells him not to divorce Mary, but to take her as his wife even though she is pregnant with a child that is not his. In the second dream, an angel warns Joseph of King Herod's intent to murder Jesus and orders Joseph to take his family to safety in Egypt. Herod couldn't find Jesus, but he went ahead and slaughtered the Innocents, all of the children of Bethlehem and all of that region who were under two years old. In the third dream, an angel notifies Joseph when it is safe to return to Israel. The words spoken by the angel to Joseph - "go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead" (Mt 2:20) - are almost exactly the same words spoken by the Lord to Moses in Midian, "Go back to Egypt; for all the men who were seeking your life are dead." (Exodus 4:19) Moses had originally fled from Egypt out of fear that he would be killed by Pharaoh, a wicked Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. The wicked Herod who slaughtered the Innocents sounds a lot like the wicked Pharaoh who murdered the male children of the Hebrews. (Exodus 1:22) The one child to escape Pharaoh's cruelty was Moses, the liberator who would lead his people to freedom in the Promised Land. Likewise, the one child to escape Herod's terror was Jesus, the liberator who would free people from sin and death. ⁽²⁾

Another Old Testament character lurking behind the magi is Balaam. (Numbers 22-24) While Moses was leading the Israelites to freedom, to the Promised Land, they camped on the plains of Moab, and their presence threatened Balak, the wicked King of Moab. So King Balak engaged Balaam, a diviner, a magus, a visionary from Mesopotamia - from the East, and Balaam worked with two assistants. As Herod had tried to get the wise men to conspire with him, so Balak hired Balaam and his assistants to curse the Israelites in order to assure Moabite dominance of Israel. Balak took Balaam to four different places to make ritual sacrifices and to pronounce a curse on Israel, but Balaam greatly incensed King Balak by pronouncing four oracles of blessing upon Israel. Just prior to these blessings, we read the story of Balaam's ass. It is not merely a humourous interlude. Its moral is that Balaam must only speak the word of the Lord and not what men want him to say.

In his fourth oracle of blessing upon Israel, Balaam proclaimed, "a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel." (Num 24:17) Balaam predicted that an exalted king would rise up from Israel and rule many nations, a prediction which was realized during the rule of King David. Centuries after King David, several Jewish sects understood Balaam's oracle to be an early prediction of the messiah, and perhaps more interesting, Balaam became widely regarded as the founder of the order that produced the magi mentioned by Matthew. It follows that since Balaam was a gentile who recognized God's presence with Israel, the first gentiles to recognize Jesus as the messiah would have some relation to Balaam. ⁽³⁾

A third incident influenced Matthew's story about the magi. ⁽⁴⁾ In 66 A.D., shortly before Matthew wrote his gospel, a group of magi from the Middle East journeyed overland to Rome to meet the Emperor Nero. It was a significant enough event to be recorded by great Roman historians like Pliny, Seutonious, and Dio Cassius. The leader of these magi wanted to become the king of an oriental nation. So he and his cohorts paid homage to Nero, falling at his feet and declaring, "I have come to you, my god, to worship you as I do Mithras." Typically swayed by flattery, Nero made this magus King of Armenia. Having obtained their objective, the magi returned home by sea, that is they returned home by another way.

Matthew, as would any Christian, found Nero repulsive, along with [the] Roman emperors who succeeded him, not only because they arrogated to themselves divine status, but because they persecuted those who refused to participate in Roman civil religion. [They persecuted Christians. Matthew] saw those rulers as contemporary expressions of the tyrannical Pharaohs and the sinister Herods of the past. The moral is transparent: a king worthy of a heavenly sign and earthly worship is altogether different from the haughty rulers of history. He is one who rises from humble circumstances and triumphs over persecution with a Gospel of love. ⁽⁵⁾

Matthew's magi do not worship oppressive kings like Herod, Balak, and Nero. Rather, the magi fall down before the true king, the king who would offer life and salvation to all people: Jew and gentile, slave and free, rich and poor. The wise, powerful, cosmopolitan magi come to worship a simple, fragile, rustic baby. The magi perceive the truth, and it has set them free from the lies and wickedness of Herod and Caesar. It has set them free from serving worldly kings. The truth rests in ordinary, everyday life, in common, domestic life. That is where true happiness, true peace, and true wealth are to be found. As we say in the prayer to mark our lintel, the door of our own homes is the gateway for the Kingdom of God.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. My source for much information about the Shabbat is the article on it at Judaism 101: www.jewfaq.org

2. Most of this paragraph lifted from my sermon of 98-01-06.

3. Most of the paragraphs about Balaam from my sermon of 98-01-06.

4. William E. Phipps, 'The Magi and Halley's Comet,' Theology Today, Vol 43., No. 1, April 1986, pp. 88-92.

5. Ibid., pp. 91-92.