Saint Margaret’s
Anglican Church
Budapest, Hungary
Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew
2:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14
Wise men from the East came to
Jerusalem…
Soothsayers and travelling shamans, Wise Men, were undoubtedly a colourful and vibrant
cultural element of the ancient world, as we find related to us in our account this morning
from the Gospel of Matthew. Following a mysterious moving star, Wise Men from the East
suddenly arrive in Jerusalem and at King Herod’s Court no less on a mission to find the new-
born King of the Jews, of whom Herod apparently knows nothing. They bring with them gifts of
precious metal and aromatic resins, not exactly what you and I might think to get a little boy
for his birthday these days.
But then as now, people wanted to understand the deeper meanings of life, wanted to
understand, wanted to believe. Then as now, people turned to the influencers and social
media stars of the day for answers. Wise Men and Women and their wisdom after all are
perennially hard to come by. Perhaps the miracle of the Wise Men of Scripture is that they set
off in the first place on their quixotic venture to find this infant King of whom they could have
known little more than did Herod. Still, there is always greater wisdom, I suppose, in seeking
the real, the true, and the wise, rather than in believing oneself to already have them in
possession.
Most of us, if we look at our own lives, would have to admit that they are sometimes too filled
with the unreal, sometimes alas with things we know for sure which just aint so, as Mark
Twain once put it. But our own lives are likewise filled with our fair share of improbabilities,
events, and happenstances that we could hardly have predicted before their occurrence. Our
birth, for instance. Yet here we are in the flesh with our all-too-real contradictions and
accumulated paradoxes. So, a small troop of mystics or sages arriving from the mysterious
and mystical East might not be so odd or implausible as we at first think.
The Magi were, to be sure, outsiders in most every sense of the word, itinerant Gentiles, surely
as incongruous and out-of-place as anything or anyone could be in the heartland of the
ancient Jewish world, in Jerusalem, in King Herod’s court, in the little town of Bethlehem, as
the carol calls it. And, as the Greek term Magi implies, a word cognate with the English word
magician, they may well have been the clairvoyants and prestidigitators of the age,
practitioners of the occult arts, as magic is sometimes called. Who knows…? In any case,
they were filthy rich. How else explain those gifts, costly in any age? Yet for all that, their
agenda was and remained deceptively simple and straightforward: To find the King of the
Jews, to worship him, and to bring him their gifts. What could be more real than that...?The festival of Epiphany remains for us in our own age an astonishing moment of reality-
checking, or at least it should be; a manifestation of the hardly believable yet very much
authentic, of God’s wisdom and strength hidden beneath human weakness and vulnerability,
the vulnerability of a child. For, as we readily see, God’s eternal wisdom is found not at King
Herod’s magnificent court and among his sycophant courtiers, but rather at the hearth of a
humble village home, among parents and child. Perhaps it does take show-business-like
conjurers, themselves no doubt masters of surprise and the unexpected, to show us the real
in the impossible.
There is a fine line of course between the real and the impossible. All too often it is indeed the
impossible which inevitably comes to pass: A dictator suddenly overthrown in a land not that
far from where Jesus was born; an obscure American peanut-farmer becoming one of the
great humanitarians of the age, and US President besides. People across the globe taking the
dangers of a changing climate seriously. Who would have thought…? No one could have
imagined such things a few short decades ago. Hppily, there are wise men and women
among us still.
But if there is a fine line between the real and the impossible, there is sometimes an even finer
distinction to be drawn between true wisdom and our own self-deceptions and doubts, all of
which are magnified by the technological and communications developments of the age in
which we live. We must admire the perspicacity and persistence of the Magi making their way
methodically and sure-footedly across wilderness and desert, seeking an out-of-the-question
reality they were nevertheless certain had come to pass. Few of us today are so sure of
ourselves and our paths.
The Magi, their task accomplished, return home from their journey “by another road,” as the
Gospel tells us; and to the best of my knowledge, and despite medieval legends, they have not
been heard from since. For all we know, they may still be on their way. Caught in a traffic-jam
along the M1 perhaps. For all we know, they may be journeying amongst us here and now in
our congregation and community, bequeathing to us from time to time their precious gifts of
wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, gifts which remain as rare today as gold,
frankincense, and myrrh in any age.
Perhaps that is why the Evangelist Matthew has given us the story of the Wise Men from the
East, why the Church has given us this special festival day of Epiphany to celebrate the
wonder-filled and amazing in our own lives; and more than that, in God’s presence among us,
in Emanuel, if only we too follow in our day the Star of the Magi as it leads us, just as it did the
Magi, to Bethlehem and the Child Jesus, the King of the Jews.
If the Magi are not real, then who is?
Amen.
The Revd Canon Dr Frank Hegedűs
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