The Epiphany of the Lord, January 8, 2023 – Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:2-6A, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

We all know who Dracula is. Not as many people know who Vlad Tepes is. He is a historical figure. A mighty defender of the eastern end of Europe against the onslaught of the Turks, but a great evil man, whose ways of killing were dreadful. Bram Stoker took that one fact about a historical figure and wove a whole tale around him.

Many of us were forced to sit through reading The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when we were in grammar school. Longfellow took a historical figure - Hiawatha was the one who engineered the union of the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy that lived across western New York State and were always feuding with one another – and he built on that one simple name a fabled character, from a different tribe, who was a sort of superhero for white people to read about instead of Indians.

Good authors frequently take a fact or an incident or a personage who is real and build a whole story around it. Which helps us to understand how Matthew came to write the story of The Magi.  He had two things to work with. The line in today’s first reading – that’s why it’s today’s first reading - that many will come from the East, bringing camels and dromedaries loaded down with precious gifts of gold and frankincense, and bring them to Jerusalem to honor the temple. And a little-known prophecy about a star arising in the East. He wove those two little pieces of information into the story of The Magi.

And so, we have to ask, who are the Magi then? It says they were from the East. They were from the area that once was the Persian Empire. It included all of present-day Iran, Iraq and Jordan. A huge empire. Extending at one time all the way to the borders of Greece. At the time of Jesus’ birth, it was a little bit narrower area, but it still comprised all of Iran and Iraq.

And so, the Magi represented the frenemies of Israel. Sometimes they were trading partners and political allies and military allies with the Persians against other countries. And at other times they were invaded by Persia and became enemies. So, the Magi represent a dangerous group of people. What else are they? They are Pagans.

At the time that St. Matthew writes this gospel, the Jewish people had nothing to do with Pagan society. They felt that the behavior, the morals, of those around them, plus the fact that they were ritually unclean, made it impossible for them to do anything with those people except occasionally trade with them for profit.

The Magi also are, from the point of view of the story, Astrologers. Back then, there was no difference between the science of Astronomy and the mysteries of Astrology. And so, anyone who had studied the heavens did all those things at once. The Magi are basically Astrologers. But the word that St. Matthew uses in Greek for them, magus, meant, for Jewish people, someone who dabbled in black magic. So these are not only Pagans, they’re also, by definition, sinners. They are a triple threat. They are politically, ethnically, and spiritually the enemies of Israel. 

St. Matthew is writing this story for Jewish Christians in the 80’s. By that time, a terrible sadness had descended on that part of the Church, because Jewish Christians were disowned by their relatives who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. And they were banished from the synagogues and from worship in the temple. Not only that, but they were forced to come to Eucharist with Gentile Christians, those who had formerly been Pagans, their enemies, those who were unclean. They felt that they were losing their heritage. They, from whom Jesus had been born, were being cancelled out of the experience of Christianity. Not only that, but they disliked the people they had to worship with. So, Matthew’s challenge is to bring a Gentile Church and a Jewish Church together by talking about the fact that only three Pagans came to visit Jesus in fulfillment of Jewish prophecies.

It is important to understand that, when Matthew depicts them bowing down before the baby, they do not know that they are worshipping God. Why do they come? They came looking for the newborn King of the Jews, hoping to make a political and military alliance with whoever would succeed Herod. And so, their gesture is not the gesture we understand today of worshipping the second person of the Blessed Trinity become a man. They were just making nice to someone that they might need to deal with when he grew up.

The key to the story is the very last line. They went home by another way. Who are these people? If they wrote today, we would call them them and outcasts, those on the margins of the Jewish periphery. Them. Today we also have a lot of thems in our society. We have political thems. We have ethnic thems. And we have religious thems. 

A couple of years ago, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical. There was a time when, if the Pope wrote an encyclical, the whole Catholic world paid attention. This encyclical was greeted with a great deal of indifference by large portions of Catholicism because of the terrible rifts in our society today. The encyclical was called Amoris Laetitia, The Joy of Love. The Joy of Love. And, in the encyclical, Pope Francis points out that there a great number of Catholics who are on the periphery of the Church because we have put them there, either because they don’t necessarily follow all of Church doctrine as well as they should, or because they are remarried after a divorce without the Church’s blessing, or because their sexual life in some other way doesn’t follow the norm, or for any one of a number of other reasons. He said, “We have to find a way to bring these people back in from the periphery.” And, in saying that, he turned to one of the favorite things he has talked about all during his pontificate. That the way to look upon our life as Christians is not to look upon who’s in or who’s out, who’s good and who’s bad, but rather that we journey together, very much like the story of Emmaus on Easter morning, where two disciples journeyed, not knowing they were journeying with Jesus, and Jesus gently explored the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection with them, bringing them to the point where they could understand better and bringing them to the point where they were willing to share their lives and their dinner with Him. Then He was able to share Eucharist with them. And this is Francis’ theme of journeying. That the way we move together through society - through our political society, through our ethnic differences and through our religious differences - is not by casting dispersions on one another, but by journeying together to learn gently why the other person thinks the way they think and sharing gently how we think. It’s journeying by another way.

As we come to the close of Christmas season, we should not try to place our understanding of Jesus into the narrow confines of what we celebrate now, but recognize that Jesus is bigger than all of our understandings of Jesus could possibly