The Epiphany of Our Lord 2024

Jan 6, 2024

St. Matthew 2:1-12

Tribulation is a gift. It doesn’t feel like it at the time. Nevertheless, tribulation is a gift. It is a gift because it prepares us for the Gospel.

The journey of the Magi (“wise men”) to the Christ shows this to us. The Magi don’t find Jesus where they are looking (Jerusalem). Instead they meet a fiendish and duplicitous Herod. Led by the Holy Spirit, the path to Christ went through anxiety and need.

Do you have any anxiety? Do you have any needs?

Here’s the truth: Everyone is disabled. The problem comes when we do not realize it. Those who know their disability are prepared for their Creator.

To know our disability, God lays crosses upon us. He brings us to experience what the Magi must also have experienced. What was going through their minds? The star that rose was gone. It’s business as usual in Jerusalem. We can hear them saying to one another: “We fools have made this great journey and have not found anything that we were seeking. The star has misled us. Also, no one here in [Jerusalem] knows anything about this” [Luther]. Everything seems ruined and lost.

But the way things seem is not the way things really are. That is the lesson God is teaching the Magi … and us. Luther puts it this way: “But faith strikes out everything [the Magi] see and experience and clings only to the plain Word.” In Jerusalem the Wise Men were forced to ask questions. And the questions could only be answered in the Scriptures, the source of true wisdom. The prophets foretold the Messiah being born in an obscure nowhere-town south of the capital. “The wise men must set aside all their thoughts and everything they see and go forward to what they cannot see.”

Luther speculates that the Magi must have been weary and discouraged. T.S. Eliot agrees. “A hard time we had of it” is one line in his poem “The Journey of the Magi” that persists in my mind year after year.

The cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

“A hard time we had of it.” But then the Magi see the star again – and then what? “They rejoiced with exceedingly great joy.” This suggests they had lost their joy in the darkness of Jerusalem. Jerusalem glittered, but not with faith; it was the twinkling of artificiality.

Perhaps you know that darkness. We imagine it can be illumined with our own efforts, with money or booze or some showdown at a church meeting.

The Star shines for us in the Word. Scripture, liturgy, and preaching all cry out to us, saying, “Look! This Child is born for you, He is the Lamb of God, the government of the cross is on His shoulders, He is your Light that shines in a dark place.” That is the only Star that can illumine our valley of shadows.

We should say something regarding the gifts the Magi bring. Customarily the gifts are interpreted as symbolizing who the Child is: Gold to signify Jesus is a king; incense to signify He is God (because incense was used in the tabernacle and temple, as well as historically in the Divine Service); finally, myrrh signifies His human nature, but particularly His purpose: to dye for us, since myrrh was used in the burial anointing. Gold for a king, incense for God, myrrh for a corpse.

From ancient times these gifts have also provided examples for how Christians are to live. Our treasures are not our own, but gifts to be employed according to His commandments. Thus we give offerings of our gold, i.e., ten percent of our money, but the rest of our gold we also are to use wisely, not on vain things, but on that which builds up the household and serves our neighbors.

The incense signifies our own prayers, as the Psalmist says, “Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense.” We are called to pray daily, for our family, our church, our government, and even our enemies. Today is the day to start praying and reading the Bible at home, every day.

And as the myrrh signified the burial of the dead, so we are to die to sin, i.e., mortify the flesh. We must not indulge the lusts of the flesh, but crucify them.

This new way of life is indicated mystically by the new way home the Magi are warned to follow. For who is the way, but Jesus Himself? He is the Way, Truth, and Life. The Wise Men are not to return to the palace in Jerusalem. Why? It’s occupied by unbelieving Jews. The believing Jews, such as Simeon and Anna, are visited by the Lord Himself, as we heard last Sunday.

We’re also supposed to go home by a new and different way. The new way is the way of repentance, the way of obedience to God’s commands, and spurning the lusts of the flesh.

God Himself has put you on this new way. Today you are new, different, alive. You’ve seen the Star, the Light of Christ shining in His gifts to you. Go home new and different, and stay on that path. Holy Jesus, every day, keep us in the narrow way. Amen.