“New Ways For The New Year”

“New Ways For The New Year”

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

© January 6, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

Did you hear the news? Biblical scholars now say that the magi who came to visit Jesus after he was born weren’t three wise men. Instead, they were three wise women. Oh, yes! How did they reach that conclusion, you might wonder. Well, they note that in the story that we just listened to from the Gospel of Matthew, in the process of following that star that they saw in the sky, they somehow ended up in Jerusalem and had to ask King Herod for some guidance about where they should go to find Jesus. And so Bible scholars say that’s definitive proof that the magi had to be women, because three men never would have stopped and asked for directions like that!

Were the magi who came to visit Jesus a group of men, a group of women, or a combination of both? The truth is that’s one of many things that we just don’t know about this story. That is just one of many things that this story in the Bible doesn’t answer for us. You see, it was about 700 years after the time of Jesus’ birth that the tradition arose that said that the magi were three kings, and that their names were Melchior, king of Persia, Gaspar, king of India, and Balthasar, king of Arabia.

But even though virtually every Nativity scene you ever look at has three wise men, or three kings, in it the Bible itself doesn’t tell how many there were. Instead, people have just assumed that there were three visitors because three gifts are named. And over the ages people have just assumed that one person brought the gold, one person brought the frankincense, and one person brought the myrrh.

And when it comes to those three gifts, it’s a bit of mystery as to what, if any, meaning those gifts are supposed to have. Some have suggested that the magi brought gold because we associate gold with royalty, and that gift might have been meant to symbolize the fact that Jesus was a special kind of king.

Frankincense was a gummy resin that oozed out of certain trees – something like sap – that was taken and ground into a fine white powder that gave off a pleasing aroma when it was burned. And since frankincense was used in the Old Testament when the priests offered their prayers to God, some have suggested that the gift of frankincense was meant to symbolize the way that Jesus was a priest, a special mediator between us and God.

And finally there was the gift of myrrh. Like frankincense, myrrh was also a fragrant substance that was made from the sap-like substance that came out of certain kinds of shrubs and trees. And one thing that myrrh was used for was that it was mixed in with the olive oil that was used to anoint people as prophets. And so some have suggested that the gift of myrrh was meant to symbolize how Jesus also was a prophet, a spokesperson for God. But still others point out that myrrh was also used when preparing bodies for burial, and so maybe the gift of myrrh was meant to be a kind of grim foreshadowing of Jesus’ eventual death.

What was the actual meaning of those three gifts? Or did they have any special meaning? Although we might wonder, the story as it’s presented to us in Matthew’s Gospel just doesn’t give us the answers that we’re looking for.

Or what about that star they saw? What are we to make of that? Some theorize that it was Halley’s Comet. Others suggest that it was an alignment of several planets. Or some even say that what the wise men saw in the sky was a UFO. What was it that the wise men saw? Again, based on what we’re given here in the Bible, we just don’t know.

And there are many other things that we don’t know about this story. For instance, how long did it take the wise men to get to Bethlehem – was it a matter of days or weeks or months or years? Or when the wise men get to Bethlehem, why does it say that they found Jesus with his mother – where was Joseph? Why wasn’t he mentioned? Or what exactly were the magi? Were they kings like some believe? Were they some kind of magicians as others believe? Or were they some sort of astrologers? Were they the kind of people who wrote horoscopes for their hometown newspapers? The truth is that we just don’t have simple, clear-cut answers to any of those questions. We just don’t know.

Well, then, as we look at this story, what do we know? Well, one thing we know for sure is that at the end of the story, the wise men didn’t go home the same way they came. Once they found Jesus, they came to realize that going back on the same road that they had come on just wouldn’t do. No, once they found Jesus, they came to realize that God wanted them to head out in a new way, in a new direction.

On one level, on the very literal level, the story is saying that the wise men couldn’t go back the same way they had come, because if they did, that meant they would have had to return to King Herod and fill him in on all the details about Jesus; and the result would have been that Herod would have immediately sent out his death squads to kill Jesus, because the last thing that Herod wanted was for there to be another king in his kingdom.

But on another level, on a somewhat symbolic level, the story is saying that once you find Jesus, once you encounter Jesus, once you experience Jesus for yourself firsthand, going back to the old ways just won’t do anymore. No, once you find Jesus, once you encounter Jesus, once you experience Jesus for yourself firsthand, there’s no choice but to take your life and move forward, to move in the new way, in the new direction, that God wants you to go.

But a real problem today is that that’s not happening in the lives of many people who call themselves Christians. A real problem today is that many people who call themselves Christians aren’t undergoing changes in the way that they live. Their lives aren’t headed out in the new ways, in the new directions, that God wants them to go. Instead, even though they call themselves Christians, many people today are just continuing in the same old ways that they’ve always lived.

For example, last year a group did a study where they compared how Christians live and how non-Christians live. And the results were shocking, because they found virtually no difference at all between the two groups. What they found was that Christians today are just as likely as non-Christians to look at pornography, to steal, to fight, to gossip, to get drunk, and to use drugs.[1] What’s going on?

An old saying – probably you’ve heard it before – is that your life is the only Bible that some people will ever read. In other words, when people who aren’t Christians want to know what the Christian faith is all about, they’re not necessarily going to pick up and read a Bible. No, when people who aren’t Christians want to know what the Christian faith is all about, they’re going to take a look at a Christian they know and see what their life looks like. And so if we say that we’re Christians, but our lives aren’t headed in the new ways that God wants us to be going, what is that saying to the people around us? We can talk about God, we can talk about Jesus until we’re blue in the face. But if our actions don’t match up with what we’re saying, all those words are useless. It’s like they say: “What you’re doing speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

On Epiphany Sunday, which we’re celebrating today, one of the main themes is how it’s God’s great desire to reach out and invite all people to come and meet Jesus, just like God reached out to those wise men in a distant land with that star and led them to Jesus. But what we need to realize is that more often than not, God doesn’t reach out to the world today with twinkling lights in the sky. No, God reaches out to the world through people like us, through people like us who call ourselves Christians.

As God seeks to work through you to shine the light of God onto the people around you, what changes need to take place in your life, so that that can happen more fully? What old ways of thinking and acting do you need to say good-bye to? And what new ways, what new directions, do you need to be headed in so that your way of life will more truly match with what you say that you believe? As we begin this new year, what are the new ways that God wants you to be headed in your life?