KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 January
We saw…we came…and worshipped
In complete contrast to the most disturbing story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, there is the most attractive story of the coming of the wise men to Bethlehem, though the two stories are connected. There is, after all, a dark note of deceit in Herod’s questioning of the wise men about where the child king is to be found, claiming that he wants to know so that he, too, can come and worship. In fact, he sees in the story of a child King a potential rival to his power. That leads to the horror of infanticide, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents in his attempt to annihilate a threat to his rule.
But the story of “the magoi from Anatolia,” the wise men from the East, captures our imagination and excites all manner of forms of ‘holy imagination’. Three Kings? There is no mention of how many came to Bethlehem or that they were even kings. All Matthew says is “magoi from Anatolia.” The imagery of kings, crowns, and camels all derives from Isaiah’s prophecy about “kings coming to the brightness of thy rising”, journeying by camels and presenting gifts of gold and frankincense to the Messiah. Matthew’s account adds myrrh, the ancient burying spice; hence three gifts from which comes the idea of three wise men. They follow a star suggesting that they were astrologers or, as we would say, astronomers. Anatolia is a rather broad term hinting at parts eastward, and things exotic.
The coming of the wise men marks the Epiphany, the making known of Christ’s nativity in principle to the whole world, a world outside the confines of ancient Israel. But where and how many and who they were is left unsaid and unknown. It is here that ‘holy imagination’ has gone to work and in wonderful ways, elaborating on the already exotic qualities of Matthew’s simple narrative. An Armenian tradition a century or so later gives the wise men names and places of origin: Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar from Arabia, Persia and India respectively. Nothing of that is in the biblical story. Other traditions keep the names but differ about the places of origin. Some imagine different races, variously treating either Balthazar or Melchior as black, for instance. Others think of them as representing different ages of life: young, middle-aged, and elderly, sometimes with and sometimes without beards! In short, a whole mythology develops out of the work of ‘holy imagination’ which informs later traditions such as the Drei König in Germany, the three kings, and other stories that build upon this simple narrative.
