Thoughts on the Epiphany of Our Lord

“…we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” (Matthew 2:2)

I think one of the things that gets in our way when we look at these Bible stories is our own familiarity with them. We kind of know the story so well that it doesn’t seem to have any surprises left for us. What can I tell you about the Epiphany story that I haven’t already told you and you don’t already know?

Well, for one thing, you probably should know that Matthew’s telling of the birth of Jesus doesn’t exactly match up with Luke’s version. Over the years we’ve tended to mash the two versions together and make cute Christmas cards with the three Wise Men kneeling at the manger along with Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds; however, if you look at the details and read what smart scholarly folks say about these stories, you’ll see that there’s a bit of disharmony between the two accounts.

But that’s cool. If you insist on the stories matching exactly and your faith in the Bible is destroyed by any lack of agreement, you’re missing the point. You’re also thinking like a modern person, and you’re not quite getting the idea that our Christian ancestors weren’t all hung up on empirical data like we are. They told stories to make a point, and Matthew and Luke each have their own points to make which are still valuable to us today. So—please—take each story for what it is and get over yourself.

(Okay. If you’re into the details, Luke times Jesus’ birth when Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). According to the Roman historian Josephus, Quirinius didn’t become governor until some years after the death of Herod the Great, under whose reign Jesus was born according to Matthew (Matthew 2:1). That’s the contradiction, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over this if I were you.)

What makes Matthew’s version so cool is a couple of things. Just as Luke chooses to make the first worshipers of Jesus poor folks (the shepherds), Matthew makes the first worshipers foreigners. Matthew starts the story out on a note of evangelism. Jesus came for everyone in the world. People from the East who aren’t even familiar with the Jewish tradition and aren’t even looking for a deliverer from Roman tyranny are still looking to find this special baby. There is a universal hunger for who Jesus is and for what Jesus can do.

(Please excuse another digression, but, as I’ve written earlier posts about the Epiphany of Our Lord, tradition has numbered these seekers as three because of the three gifts they brought mentioned in verse 11. Matthew doesn’t really say how many there were. Early Christian iconography always depicts them as a young man, a middle-aged man, and an elderly fellow to symbolize that Jesus came for all ages. They’re also depicted as a European, a swarthy Middle-Easterner, and a black African to symbolize that Jesus came for all people. They received their Western names, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, sometime around 500 AD, but they’ve also been known by other names.)

Another cool Matthean detail is that the Wise Men have come to worship. In verse 11 they “knelt down and paid him homage.” They followed this sign in the heavens to find something bigger and grander than themselves, and the child fills them with humility and generosity. I think this image speaks universally to us. Isn’t our life just one long journey to find that which fills what a seminary friend of mine called “the God-shaped hole in our souls?”

Matthew also introduces us to that insidious character from history, Herod the Great. Herod, like a lot of politicians, feigns a certain piety (verse 8), but his heart is far from God. Historically, he was an ambitious and murderous s.o.b. who wasn’t above assassinating his own children in order to secure his power. He isn’t sure when this baby was born so, to be on the safe side, he plans to kill every baby boy under the age of two who was born in Bethlehem.

Granted, no history besides Matthew’s gospel records this outrage (Matthew 2: 16-18), but it’s certainly something this vicious guy might’ve done. The inclusion of this plot point should remind us that we live in a world of genocide, a world that has produced Adolf Hitler and Bashir Al Assad, and innumerable tyrants who have put their own position of power and wealth above the value of innocent life.

Matthew says that Joseph is warned in a dream to take the child and his mother to Egypt to escape the murderous rage of Herod. I’ll bet Matthew knew his Jewish readers would remember the story in Genesis 39 of another Joseph who went down into Egypt and wound up rescuing the whole nation of Israel. For me, listening daily to the stories of those fleeing violence in Syria, Myanmar, and other places, I am struck with the idea that Jesus was a refugee.

So why do we celebrate the Epiphany? I always ask myself who I am in this story. Am I a seeker who longs to find something I can worship, or am I a jealous fool who wants to put Jesus out of the way so I can get on with the business of glorifying myself? Where is this Jesus to be found, and what kind of star can we follow to lead us to him?