Where is Jesus? Visit of the Magi
Epiphany 02.01.22: HT WB
Matthew 2: 1-12
Well, here we are, back in church in the middle of the Christmas season. I hope you’re managing to have a lovely time despite the restrictions and frustrations and illness which are all around us. I know it’s been tough for some people.
There’s always a lot of travelling at Christmas, isn’t there? Family coming from faraway places to visit. Or perhaps it’s you who has had to make a long journey, travelling from your home to visit children and grandchildren in far way places. I’m not a great traveller. I enjoy it when I get to my destination, but I find the actual journeying quite stressful. There’s something about process of moving out of my comfort zone, from the centre of my day to day life, to a new place which I find unsettling.
Well, today, it’s the festival of Epiphany; which means a moment of sudden and great revelation or realization. It’s the story of the Magi today and that’s a story of journeying.
Or perhaps you think of it as the Three Kings, or maybe the Wise Men? A lovely story of how strangers from a strange land travel far to worship baby Jesus in a stable. And it is a lovely story, but I wonder whether our familiarity with it, and its superficially simple story line, can blind us to some of the sharp edges which lie beneath the surface. It’s one of those stories which can act as a mirror for us, if we let it, and perhaps that can help make Jesus less of a tinsel-halo, cutesy Christmas Card image and more of a real person for us.
I have a question for you:
· Where do we find Jesus? Where do we find Him today?
Let's go back to our story and see if it can help us answer that question. We’re told that, quote, “wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”
Their question throws King Herod, and everyone around him, into uproar. Well, we know all about Herod and his court, don’t we? He was a monster, a brutal dictator. He doesn’t want a rival King in the neighbourhood and, more than that, he doesn’t want the Messiah arriving. That’s not good news for him.
So Herod gets his own wise people to do their research and they come up a location based on ancient prophesies: Bethlehem in Judea is the place. Herod sends the Magi on their way and waits for their useful intelligence to come back to him. We might refer to them as ‘wise men’ but Herod hopes that they will be his useful idiots.
Now this is the point in the story I want to stop at. There’s something funny going on here and if we stop and think about what’s happening then I think we might learn something useful.
I think it’s interesting that the Magi go and visit Jerusalem and Herod first of all. They've followed a star for mile after mile, trusting in it, but then they seem to need to ask the man in charge. It strikes me that this is often the way of the world. The powerful and influential, people like the Magi, know how to make the system work. They need something doing and they know who to ask. They need an answer and they know the guy who can give it. The Magi are cast as powerful people who know how the system works and who know how to get the answers they need. But they’ve got it wrong this time, haven’t they? Perhaps they’re not so wise after all.
Or perhaps they make a perfectly reasonable assumption: they believe that Jesus will be the King of the Jews so they head off to the palace in Jerusalem to talk to the King about that.
Well, rather than get the helpful information they need, instead they tip off a murdering monster that his time might be up. Not so very wise after all. It seems to me that their motive is good, but perhaps their view of the world is getting in the way. It’s no use going to the murderous king to find out about Jesus. About who God is, about how God will save us. He’s away, out on the outskirts, in the margins with the peasants and the ordinary people.
In the end, though, the Magi do trust to the messages from the scriptures and they head off to Bethlehem. It’s only in Luke of course that we get the details about Mary and Joseph and Jesus being in some kind of animal shed, ‘because there was no room at the inn’. Here in Matthew, the Holy Family are living in a house. But it’s fair to say that they’re some way from the centre of power at that time. They're invisible to the King and his court. They don’t know where Jesus is. In reality, He’s away with ordinary people in an ordinary town. And I want to say that this is an important point for us today.
At the start of my sermon, I asked where we might find Jesus today. It’s clear from our story that Jesus wasn’t with the powerful people in the powerful place when He was born. He was found with ordinary folk. With the marginalised, the poor. His parentage is questionable. There’s a sense, from Luke, of a lack of proper care and accommodation around His birth. He’s about to become a vulnerable refugee fleeing for His life to a foreign country because of a hostile environment. This is where the Magi found the Christ child and perhaps this is still where we will find him today.
This story might seem superficially glitzy and cosy on the surface but I think, with a careful reading, it can ask some hard questions of us. Where is Jesus today is one question it asks. And who are the marginalised, on-the-edge people in our society today? We need to think about that because this story helps us to understand that, if we want to find Jesus, then those are the places that we might need to travel to. Who is excluded or out on the edge in our society today? Perhaps homeless people or refugees. Perhaps black people or gay people. Perhaps people struggling after lockdowns or with benefits restrictions. What are they telling us about where Jesus is today and therefore who God is? How do we hear what they have to say?
It’s long been an important element of Christian theology that we hear God’s voice in the voice of the powerless, the vulnerable, the hurting. Think about Matthew’s great judgement story in Chapter 25, the separation of the sheep and the goats. Jesus says to those who met the needs of the por and vulnerable:
“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me”
As Christians, we understand that God still speaks to us if we have ears to hear and I want to suggest that this is one of the stories which illustrates that it’s in those margins with the least, the lost and the broken, where we might most clearly hear God’s voice.
At the start of my sermon, I asked a question. I asked where Jesus might be found for us today, here in Whaley Bridge. I want to ask it again. You don’t have to answer right now, but I’d love to have those conversations with you about it. What do you think? I’d love to know your opinions. Perhaps it’s in the needs of families who are struggling to make ends meet or finding it hard going with their kids in lockdown. Perhaps it’s older people who feel isolated and lonely. Perhaps it’s teenagers who are kicking their heels and who are finding it hard to make sense of who they are as they grow up in this sometimes strange and crazy world. I’m sure there are lots of places.
The story of the Magi is an important scene-setter in Matthew’s Gospel. It tells us that foreigners were the first people to honour and worship Jesus, not His own people. Not those who thought they were waiting for Him. It tells us that, to find Jesus, we might have to travel a long way; perhaps out of our comfort zones. And it tells us that Jesus wasn’t found at the centre of power when He was born, He was out on the edges. He took some finding, even for the wise people.
Now may the God of the margins and the marginalised bless us and gives us eyes to see and ears to hear so that our life’s journeys may all be towards Him who gives us light and life and hope.
Amen.