Text:  Matthew 2:1-12                                                                                             Epiphany

You Only See the Stars at Night

            In the name of him still sought and worshipped by the wise, dear fellow members of the family of God:  The Christmas story just doesn’t seem complete without the arrival of the stargazing sages from the east.  Nativity sets usually include their little figurines so you can put them right there beside adoring shepherds at the manger.  And they are a popular theme on Christmas cards:  three guys on camels trudging resolutely onward; and in the distance, the picturesque town of Bethlehem basking in the light of a resplendent star.  It all seems to go together:  the wise men are just a natural part of Christmas.

            But what do we really know about them?  The truth is:  very little.  They come from who-knows-where in the east, they do their thing, and then they go back to their own country; and we never hear anything more about them.  They’re something of a mystery.  To fill the vacuum of information, creative minds have embellished their story and so have provided details that have become long-standing tradition.  It tells us that there were three of them, that they were kings, and it even gives us their names and countries of origin – one of them supposedly coming from Ethiopia (which would mean that he‘d have to come from the southwest rather than the east—but hey, maybe he took the long way around).

            Unfortunately, these fabrications tend to obscure what little we do know about the Magi from the east.  We not know their names; we don’t even know how many of them there were. The number three is simply assumed from the three gifts they presented to Jesus; but there might have been two or twenty of them.  We do know that they were not present at the manger.  They began their long journey sometime after Jesus’ birth, and probably didn’t arrive until young Jesus was old enough to walk, by which time Joseph and Mary had arranged more comfortable quarters in Bethlehem.

            And we know that they were not kings.  St. Matthew calls them “Magi” – it’s the word from which we derive the English word “magic”.  In the eastern empires of Babylon and Persia (modern Iraq and Iran), the Magi were a class of scholars and consultants who were expert in the interpretation of signs and omens.  They did things like astrology, dream interpretation, crystal ball gazing, and reading the entrails of sacrificed animals in order to divine the future.  Now, people who do that sort of thing today usually have shabby little storefront operations in the run-down section of town.  They are nothing more than fakes, and most thinking people don’t take them seriously.  But back in the ancient world, this sort of stuff was on the cutting edge of technology. The Magi would have been held in esteem like rocket scientists and brain surgeons today.  And they very seriously studied their arts – it was hard work – and they commanded high fees for doing it.  Usually only royalty and the very rich could afford their services.

            Not that there was anything to it, mind you.  It was all a bunch of nonsense:  the very idea that you could tell someone’s fortune by tracking the stars or looking at a goat’s spleen is laughable.  And the Lord God has specifically prohibited his own people from engaging in such activities; first because it’s completely worthless, but more importantly because the desire to know what the future holds finds its source in not trusting God.  The Lord tells his people, “You don’t need to know how your life is going to turn out.  All you need to do is listen to my Word and trust me to take care of you, and everything will work out just fine.”

            Of course, those who do not trust God’s Word, and those who don’t have opportunity to trust it because they’ve never heard it, have to find something else on which to hang their hopes and fears.  The world is a very dark, scary, and insecure place for people who do not know that there is a loving God who is in control of all things, and who yearns to embrace all people with his favor and give them eternal life.  For those who lack this understanding, everything in life is arbitrary, dependent upon dumb luck, or subject to the capricious whims of various gods, goddesses, and unseen spirits.  They are in trapped spiritual darkness, aching to find something that will give them hope and peace of mind.

            And so maybe it isn’t so surprising that some think they can find answers to their worries in the steady, orderly, predictable paths of the celestial bodies.  High above the chaos and despair of earth, the stars and planets pursue their timeless courses in complete serenity and with mathematical precision.  Here is something stable and reliably cyclic in a world of abrupt change and disorder.  Surely, they think, if there is any meaning at all to life, anything we can count on, it can be found in the stars.

Now, the eastern Magi had taken that idea and developed a whole science of it by compiling empirical information.  They had centuries of records that told them what positions the stars were in when certain events happened.  And by compiling and analyzing all this data, searching for patterns and similarities, they began to predict what kinds of events would happen when the same positions of the stars recurred.  And again, I want to stress that the idea is utter nonsense – but when you are in the total darkness of spiritual night, even the tiny little bit of light the stars give off is something to hang on to.

And the wonderful thing about the story of the Magi is how the Lord God used that tiny bit of light to reveal the truth of the Savior’s birth to these otherwise blind souls.  On Christmas night, God filled the skies with bright angel choirs to tell Judean shepherds that the long awaited Christ had been born.  They spoke the Shepherd’s language, and they told them about things they understood.  But now, to communicate to spiritually ignorant pagan scholars, the Lord bends low to give them part of that same message in a medium they can understand.  The psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the works of his hands”, and so God put into the stars a message he knew would be read and understood.

            We do not know what sign the Lord actually gave – though many Christian scholars believe that an extremely rare alignment of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces – something that happens once in several thousand years – might have been it.  One such alignment took place in the year the Lord is believed to have been born.  I won’t try to explain it all, but it’s very possible that eastern astrologers would have understood that to announce the birth of a great king, specifically one in Judea.

But there must have been something quite a bit more to it.  The birth of a Judean king, even a great one, would have hardly been anything to get excited about.  On the relative pecking order of nations, Judea didn’t even show up on the chart.  It was a Ping-Pong ball of a country, batted around freely in the games of power politics and conquests of the major empires like Egypt, Babylon, Syria, Persia, Greece, and Rome.  For the Magi, under normal circumstances, hearing about the birth of a Judean king would have been about like us hearing that president and first lady of Honduras have a new baby.  The polite response would be, “Oh.  That’s nice for them, I suppose.  What else is new?”  But what you’d really be thinking is, “Uh huh … and who cares?”

            So there must have been something else about the sign God gave.  Some guess it might have been a comet or another entirely unique phenomenon that appeared at the same time.  Whatever it was, it told these eastern Magi that not only had a king been born in Judea; but somehow, in a way that would have been impossible to understand given the political dynamics of the day, this Jewish king was going to be their king also.  Somehow, when they looked from their darkness into the glistening night sky, they said to themselves, “Though this doesn’t make any sense, this is really big. Bigger than anything that’s ever happened before.”  Why else would these wealthy, respected, highly sought after Magi select costly gifts, load up their animals, and make a hard and perilous journey of over a thousand miles (one way), to pay homage to the infant king of a nation that really didn’t matter?  These men stepped out in faith on only the weakest of evidence – but again, when you live in darkness, even a tiny bit of light is a hope worth pursuing.

            But now contrast their extraordinarily faithful response to that of the leaders and people in the city of Jerusalem.  This is the sad part of the story.  If the lands of the Magi were in darkness, then Jerusalem was the place where it was high noon.  More of the light of God’s revelation shined here than on any other spot on the globe.  Here the Lord’s word was preserved, studied, and memorized; here his worship was performed, and here his praises were sung.  And here, of course, the people longed for the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies:  they were expecting their great King to be born—and it’s happened not ten miles away in Bethlehem, right under their own noses, and they don’t know anything about it.

            The Magi arrive in Jerusalem and begin asking questions, “Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?”  It’s the logical place to look:  Jerusalem is the capital city; it’s where the royal palace is.  But the man sitting on the throne is not a Jew, nor was he born a king.  He is Herod the Great, an ambitious Edomite who through sweet talk, bribes, and cold calculation arranged to have himself named king of Judea by the Romans who had conquered the whole area.  Typically, the Romans appointed as political figureheads royals or nobles from the areas they controlled – as long as they professed loyalty to Rome.  It created the illusion that the nation was still more or less independent, making the people feel more comfortable with their subjection to Rome, and it freed the Romans from having to get too involved in the mundane chores of running the country.  Herod, some forty years earlier, was the right man with just the right amount of slime to weasel his way into the job.

At first the Jews hated him – “Who was this guy?  And what right did he have to be king of the Jews?”  But Herod was a shrewd operator.  He won support from the religious leaders by spending a fortune to expand and beautify the temple complex.  They liked that.  He even started behaving like a Jew, adopting their dietary practices and so forth.  They liked that too.  And he knew how to buy the favor of the people by improving the city here and there, and turning a blind eye to certain immoral goings on in certain sections of town.  He was a good politician.  But he was also a ruthless paranoid.  Especially now in his waning years, he was convinced that there was always someone more ambitious and slimier than he who was plotting to take the throne from him. He had spies all over the city looking for the slightest hint of a plot, and when one was “discovered”, the accused were swiftly done away with.  He had most of his own sons murdered just to be on the safe side.  And now he’s caught wind of this group of eastern Magi who have come from a great distance asking questions about someone who was born King of the Jews.

So old Herod is deeply disturbed.  “How is it that folks from a thousand miles away know about someone being born king here, when I haven’t heard even a word about it?  Unless”, he thinks, “this is something really big – bigger than anything that’s ever happened before.”  He knows it can only mean one thing:  that the Lord’s Christ has come.  But this is even worse for Herod.  He’s an upstart and he knows it.  His authority, such as it is, comes from Rome.  The one born King of the Jews has a much higher pedigree.  He is the legitimate king.  Herod is worried that his power is slipping away – and not only Herod, but all Jerusalem with him.  They’ve adapted to the status quo.  “Herod, for all his faults, knows how to give us what we want.  We’re comfortable with the way things are going. We do not want to change.”

And here’s the frightening part:  when Herod summons the religious leaders to get more information about the birth of the Savior, they conspire with him to use the light of God’s revelation to help him get rid of the new king.  They use their knowledge of God’s word to attempt to overthrow Christ and destroy him.  With Herod, they claim to want to seek him out and worship him – but you’ll notice that not one of them makes the three-hour walk over to Bethlehem to find him for himself.  They are happy with the illegitimate king they’ve got.  Only the Magi go, now that they have a little bit more of the light they seek.  And on the way they are rewarded by seeing the sign that drew them now at its zenith, directly overhead.  It confirms to them that they are on the right track.  They find the King and worship him, while those with the full revelation miss him.  It makes you wonder, despite the great light they have, who really it is that lives in spiritual darkness.

And this, I think, is the application to you and me.  Could it be that we who live in the full light of God’s truth are sometimes farther from the true King and worshipping him than those who have barely heard of him?  It’s very possible, because in each of us lives an upstart, illegitimate ruler who fears losing power.  It is our own sinful nature.  It sits enthroned there telling itself that, “I’m in charge – I can do whatever I want.” But it’s only self-deception.  In truth it is subject to more powerful forces that only let it pretend to be in control.  I speak of sin and Satan.  And to a degree, we’ve come to terms with the situation.  We are happy with the status quo.  We don’t want to be challenged – we don’t want to have to change.  Outwardly we can live like God’s people, but inwardly we can pursue the sins that give us pleasure.  This new King is a threat to all that, and deep inside we know it.

And I wonder if we don’t, at times, use the light we have – our knowledge of God’s truth – to try to overthrow and destroy the true King.  It happens when we want to continue in some sin or another.  We give ourselves permission to keep on in it, telling ourselves it’s okay, because after all, in Christ God forgives us all our sin.  But think about it:  this King has been born in each of us.  We know where to find him.  But when we think like that – and we all do it – can we say we are worshipping him? Well, obviously not.  In fact, we’re telling him we don’t want his leadership; that we ourselves want to be in charge.  And it’s worse than that, because outwardly we pretend that we are still his faithful followers – and that we’re going to come to him asking for his forgiveness like good Christians should.  But we know full well that the price of that forgiveness is his death.  Do you see it?  Do you see how that Herod in you seeks the life of the true King again and again so that he himself can keep his throne?  Do you see how great your darkness truly is?

If so, then see this morning how the Lord is shining his light on you. What’s going on here is big – bigger than anything that ever happens in this world.  The Lord is here guiding you to him with the light of his grace and truth. He’s calling you to come out of that darkness, to worship him with the Magi, and to return to your life on a completely different route:  one that steers clear of Herod and that part of you that constantly seeks the Lord’s life – a route that follows the Lord’s ways.

Here the Lord is shining his light on you.  Here, very shortly, he will offer himself again to you to be your Light, your Life, and your Savior from sin.  May we, with the Magi, rejoice to see that Light, and give thanks and glory to God for revealing it to us in his Son, Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and our King. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!