Epiphany Part Two: The Magi and Spring Church

POST BY MATT MCCOY

8 minute read

Throughout the Bible, most stories portray most religious leaders in a negative light most of the time. And that’s because religious leaders tend to deserve it. God delights in using people who are invisible to us in order to disciple us, and the religious leaders often take their attention away from God and get distracted by power, greed, ego, or something else. If our heart is a compass, and God is our North, stories in the Bible reveal how religious leaders get their compass pulled off of North by the magnets of their own desires. God uses invisible people to bring them back home.

And, now that, as a Pastor I’m officially a religious leader, is it any surprise that our Mission is “Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship”? I know we will have our compass pulled off of North, and I know God will use people invisible to us in order to bring us back home. And last week, with Part One of this blog post, we explored how the people of Bethlehem didn’t choose Ruth, the Religious Leaders didn’t choose the Magi, and maybe God is sending disciplers to Spring Church that we didn’t choose, too. Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship is, in part, a way that we try to cultivate the humility to listen to the voice of God in the lives of unfamiliar and unexpected people. (See last week’s post - part 1 - here).

So while I am often frustrated and saddened by the behavior of the religious leaders in the Bible, when it comes to the story we celebrate at the Feast of the Epiphany…

I’m willing to give those religious leaders a little bit of slack because this story is straight crazy!

But in order to bring on the crazy, we need to understand two Greek words. The first is “epiphany,” which is used in the Bible in a very similar way to how we use that word today. The Christmas season end on January 6th with The Feast of the Epiphany, and it celebrates the star appearing in the East. The word “epiphany” comes from Matthew 2:7, when Herod asked when the star “appeared.” In addition to “appearing/showing off/displaying,” the word Epiphany can also mean…

“an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.”

So the Feast of The Epiphany closes out the Christmas season by celebrating both the appearance of the star as well as the illuminating discovery of Jesus in the barn.

The second Greek word we need to understand, in order to bring on the crazy, is the word Magi. The Magi take the Biblical theme of God using invisible people to disciple us and kicks it up a notch. According to the Greek Lexicon (what language dorks call a “dictionary”) BDAG, the word “Magi” has two definitions:

A Persian, then also Babylonian, wise man and priest, who was an expert in astrology, interpretation of dreams, and various other occult arts. While they appear in other ancient texts from this era, they only appear in the Bible here in this story.
A magician. Our English word “magician” comes from this Greek word Magi. The two other places where the Greek word Magi appears is Acts 8:9-24 with a Magician named Simon was in Samaria, and in Acts 13:6-11 when a Magician named Bar-Jesus was struck blind (please notice how being struck blind is the opposite of “epiphany”).

In our modern era, I think we like to call them “Wise Men” because we like to think happy thoughts about the story of Jesus’ birth. Just like we don’t want to think about the actual conditions inside an actual barn, we also don’t want to think about the weirdness of sorcerer/scholars showing up. The ancient Israelites didn’t think too highly of people who receive messages from the stars, yet, as Dale Bruner observes, “The Magi were outsiders in both race (Gentiles) and in profession (astrology). Yet they were invited to the party…. God in his great kindness leads them to his son.” {1}

So, with those two words now properly understood, we’re ready to enter into this crazy story where God used the stars to announce that Jesus was born to astrologers from a different country.

There are 3 characters to this story:

King Herod
“Religious Leaders” that English bibles call chief priests and scribes
The “Sorcerer/Scholars” that English bibles call the Magi.

Now, imagine we’re part of the “chief priests and scribes” that Herod assembled in Matthew 2:4, in response to the arrival of these well-educated wing-nuts from a far-off land looking for the birth of the King of our religion. Like, nothing about this scene makes any sense at all, except that these foreign wing-nuts got Herod the wing-nut King all wound up for no reason. They asked where to find the child and we say “Bethlehem. About five miles south of here. Go get ‘em.”

As the assembly breaks up, and Herod has his secret follow up meeting with the Magi without us (verse 7), and we start walking home, I wonder, what would we be talking about? Well, I most certainly know what we would NOT be saying to each other. I would NOT look at you and say, “I wonder if God used astrology to reveal to these foreign sorcerers that our long awaited Messiah has come.” And I don’t think you would respond with, “Even though we have the Temple, and the Torah, and the Land, and we’re God’s Chosen special family, and there's all these ways that God has spoken to us in the past, and we’ve dedicated our lives to walking with God, you might be right and we might be missing something. Our long awaited King might have been born in Bethlehem, and we missed it, and maybe God chose to speak through an idolatrous religion to tell those wing-nuts about it, rather than tell us directly. We should hike over to Bethlehem and check this out, too!”

And we wouldn’t be saying that to each other BECAUSE THAT IS STRAIGHT CRAZY!!! If we were in their shoes, we would miss the birth of Jesus, for sure. After that assembly, we would walk home and talk a bit about how crazy those sorcerers were, how funny their outfits looked, maybe made a joke about their weird accents, and we would laugh about the sheer ridiculousness of God using astrology to talk to them, and I would say, “I’m grateful to not have to attend the secret follow up meeting,” and you would say, “Those wing-nut astrologers and wing-nut Herod deserve each other. What a pointless conversation they’re having about our religion.” We’d go home and forget all about it. {2} And we would forget until, a little while later, Herod started killing all the male babies in Bethlehem.

December 13, 2020.png — So, now that we can appreciate the insanity of this story a little better, let’s re-enter the story while using the lens of “Advent waiting” that we’ve been using this year. We’ve been focusing on how our waiting has three components to it:

Is this story of the Sorcerers / Scholars active?

These sorcerers/scholars traveling from Persia to Israel most certainly is active. Some traditions claim that the “12 Days of Christmas” is 12 days because that’s how many days they spent on the road getting to the barn where Jesus was born. We have no way of knowing that for sure, but it’s fun to imagine. And what do they do when they get together? They read the Bible together! One of the first Advent Small Groups, right here!

Is this with other people?

Here’s an incredible example of uncommon friendship on display. There are three main characters in this story, the sorcerers/scholars, the religious leaders, and Herod. They are from three different religions and three different ethnicities (Herod, as an Edomite, was a descendent of Esau) {3}, and here they are all reading the Bible together (Modern Christians would call it the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures). God delights in revelation {4}, and God revealed through the language of the stars that Jesus was born. Yet where does that revelation take them? To the best revelation possible: Scripture. God revealed through the Bible was the way these sorcerers/scholars understood their revelation through nature, and the Bible continues to be the way we understand all the other ways God continues to reveal himself to us.

Is this waiting to see where God shows up?

The religious leaders have been waiting for their King for hundreds of years, the sorcerers/scholars have been waiting almost two weeks, and Herod isn’t waiting for anything (he just wants to remain in control). But Jesus didn’t show up in the Temple, and Jesus didn’t show up in the Palace. Only the crazy people in this story had the imagination to go looking for a king in a place as crazy as a barn in a little town south of the capital. But God fills the spaces where there’s room, and we’re invited to participate with God in those spaces. And their efforts were rewarded with profound worship, with getting a glimpse of the joy of being together with Jesus, with their longings fulfilled. Going back to the analogy at the beginning of this blog, the compass of their hearts have found North.

But the religious leaders missed it.

And, as a Pastor and current religious leader, I don’t want to miss the ways God is speaking to us today. If God frequently uses people who are invisible to us to disciple us, how will we cultivate the humility to listen to what God is saying? {5} For Spring Church, this is what Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship is all about, and when I see a star hanging over a nativity scene, I’m reminded that God is crazy enough to use astrology to speak to astrologers, and I want to be open to reading the Bible with them, too.

FOOTNOTES:

Bruner, F. Dale. Matthew A Commentary. Volume 1: The Christbook, Matthew 1-12. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids MI, Revised Edition 2004, 57. And, in our modern context, I wonder if we might be similar. I cannot think of a modern leader in politics, business, the academy, or anywhere else in mainstream life who publically has an astrologer on payroll. In my daily newspaper, the astrology section is next to the comics and the crossword, not on the front page or somehow next to the reported news. Obviously, in a blog post about God speaking to people through the stars, I’m not saying that God does not or cannot speak through the stars. I am saying that people who pursue astrology as a vocation are outside mainstream life in ancient Israel as as well as in modern Bellingham. I am so very curious what mainstream life in modern Africa, Asia, and/or South America might think of this aspect of the story.
Obviously I don’t know what these meetings were like. Were the Magi in the same room at the same time as the chief priests and scribes, or were they assembled into different rooms? Did the “secret meeting” Herod had with the Magi mean that the meeting was kept secret from the chief priests and scribes, or was it kept secret from the people in Jerusalem and/or Bethlehem? We don’t know, because the story doesn’t say. While I recognize the hermeneutical risk in placing modern dialogue into an ancient story, I did so in this blog because I want us to feel the cultural gap between the Magi and these religious leaders, so that we can cultivate the humility necessary to live into uncommon friendship and common discipleship. God uses invisible people to disciple us, and invisible people are, well, hard to see.
Barbieri, Louis A. “Matthew” in Bible Knowledge Commentary. Volume 2. 22.
Provan, Iain. Seeking What Is Right: The Old Testament and the Good Life. Baylor University Press, Waco TX. 2020, 6-16. If you haven’t heard, Iain Provan came out with a new book a few weeks ago, and the first chapter talks helpfully about how God is revealed through nature, and how we understand those revelations through the lens of scripture. On the one hand, this is a major theme in Protestant Christianity, so he’s not covering anything new. On the other hand, it’s a major theme because it’s always relevant to our lives, and I love the way he connects the dots with our current cultural moment.
Let’s not be foolish here. 1 John 4:1 is still great advice for us: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”