by CCW | 8 January 2020 20:00
The Magoi of Anatolia, “wise men from the East,” are an outstanding feature of the Christmas story, perhaps its most iconic and familiar image across a range of cultures. They are the heralds of the Epiphany which marks the end of Christmas and inaugurates a new focus of interest. Epiphany means manifestation, ‘making known’. The ‘making known’ of what we may ask? The ‘making known’ of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. That ‘making known’ has a universal aspect. With the coming of the Magoi to Bethlehem, Christmas goes global. It is omni populo, for all people, which is why one half of the Christian world, the Christian East in the churches of Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian Orthodoxy (and others), celebrate Christmas on January 6th. Merry Christmas, then, to a number of our students!
No story perhaps illustrates the idea of the universal significance of the Christmas story more profoundly, more intriguingly, and more eloquently than Matthew’s account of the wise ones, the magoi, coming to Bethlehem and worshipping the child Christ with “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They are gifts that teach.
For centuries upon centuries, the Magi were a dominant feature of the Christmas story in art and song. It is not just that they have captured the imaginations of centuries of artists, which they certainly have, but that they concentrate for us something of the deeper wonder and truth of the Christmas story. It is for all. It is universal. The Magi are not from within Israel yet they belong entirely to the mystery of God revealed through the history and story of Israel.
The Magi are the original ‘come-from-aways’, we might say, as well as the original ‘Johnny-come-latelys’! They illumine so much for us about the mystery of God and his dealings with our humanity in the God made man, Jesus Christ. And the Magi speak powerfully to your life as students. For in every way at the heart of their story is the idea of worship, which is about what is worthy of your attention, and thus the concept of teaching and learning. The Magi belong very much to the nature of education. They provide the origin, too, of the Christian and cultural traditions of gift-giving.
“Love,” Aquinas says, “is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given.” The Magi come from afar; they are strangers. They follow a star, a natural wonder that speaks of things beyond nature. They come bearing gifts for the one whom they seek. What they seek is truth. They are really philosophers. Somehow that idea has had an enormous influence on history and story. The gifts they bring teach us about the one to whom the gifts are given. The gifts are given in spiritual honesty and generosity, as honouring the one to whom the gifts are given. The gifts teach us about Christ as King, as God, and, as sacrifice; gifts that illuminate the wonder of God with us.
The Magi are, in Matthew’s account, nameless and numberless. Their earliest representations in art are found in the 3rd century in the catacombs of Rome. There, and subsequently in the next century or so in a number of images, they are depicted as three and as presenting gifts to the child seated on Mary’s lap. Some of the earliest depictions, such as on an early 4th century sarcophagi, show them wearing ‘Phrygian caps’, a kind of toque but with a crown pointing forward. Such depictions locate the Magi from outside of Israel, from Phrygia, part of Anatolia in what is now modern day Turkey. The point is that they are Persian and not from within Israel. They come from afar in pursuit of truth as led by a star.
As Lancelot Andrewes suggests, there is really a star for all of us, some beacon of light that leads us to truth in ways that are appropriate to each of us. “There is,” he says, “no star or beam of it; there is no truth at all in human learning or philosophy that thawarteth [goes against or denies] any truth in Divinity, but sorteth well with it and serveth it, and all to honour Him who saith of Himself Ego sum Veritas, ‘I am the Truth.’” There is something here for all.
By the sixth century, the Magi have names and biographies and retain a sense of the exotic. Later they become kings as well as philosophers, signalling something of Plato’s concept of the philosopher-kings with its profound insight into the idea of the unity of wisdom and power. By the sixteenth century, the Magi have taken on another aspect of our common humanity by being represented in different ages: one young, one middle-aged, and one elderly. They have also become representative of different cultures and ethnicities. Giorgio Vasari, the inventor of art history, was very proud of depicting the Magi as brown-skinned, black-skinned, and white-skinned, symbolic of Asia, Africa, and Europe respectively, thus encapsulating the then-known world. In Chapel, we sang the Huron Carol written by Jean Brebeuf in the 17th century which places the story in the Canadian wilderness. All of these representations speak to the universal aspect of truth and of our seeking the truth.
But the earliest representation of the Magi is complemented by another image which contributes as well to a disturbing aspect of the Christmas story. The image is that of the three young men cast into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship King Nebuchadnezzar. It is a scene of persecution and of faith and courage in the face of persecution. The Magi story shows that through the figure of Herod who seeks to destroy any possible rival to his throne. The Magi “departed to their own country another way” so as to avoid returning to Herod. He undertakes a form of infanticide, killing all the little boys of Bethlehem. It is a most troubling scene yet belongs to the Christmas feast of the Holy Innocents. Somehow, “Christ was born for this,” as the carol, In Dulci Jubilo, reminds us.
Christmas is not about sentiment and coziness, a kind of hyggelig, to use a Danish term. It is about birth and death, about the grace of God overcoming sin and folly, about grace bestowed in humbleness and truth. It does not avoid the dark and difficult realities of the fallen human condition. The deaths of the little ones are not meaningless; for they too are Christ’s and honour him in their very being and even in their deaths. The truth of our humanity is found in God. It is a wonderful and compelling idea, perhaps, especially in the face of our own fears and anxieties. For such is a kind of wisdom.
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/01/08/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-8-january/
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