Epiphany (2015)

It is generally believed that Matthew was writing originally for Jewish people who had become Christians,

people with a good understanding of the Old Testament,

people expecting the Messiah to come.

This is one of the reasons Matthew stresses how the Old Testament foreshadows the events he describes.

We see this in today’s reading with the quote from the prophet Micah about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem.

For these people, Jewish people who became Christians,

the coming of the Messiah was the fulfilment of their history.

In their history the faithfulness of God is revealed.

This is Good News for them.

In His coming, the Messiah opened up God’s love to all people.

God is with us, in Jesus:

with all of us, because he shares in our humanity.

The faithful relationship of God with the Chosen people

is extended to all people.

This is Good News for us.

Today we celebrate the first place in the gospels

where those who are not from the Chosen people

are led to Jesus, and pay Him homage.

Matthew calls Jesus’ visitors ‘magi’, translated as ‘wise men’.

Well, undoubtedly they are wise, as their actions show,

but elsewhere, in the Acts of the Apostles,

‘magi’ is translated as ‘sorcerer’ or ‘magician’.

So it seems doubtful that the original audience

heard magi as a word with only positive tones.

For them, as Christians steeped in Judaism,

‘magi’ must have raised some serious doubts

about these men’s religious and philosophical outlook.

The word doesn’t just suggest ‘gentile’,

it surely suggested ‘gentiles with ideas totally different from ours’.

The idea that such people would reach the Infant King

through their observation of the stars

will have been unsettling to Matthew’s first readers.

I see ‘following the star’ as standing,

among other things,

for the use of our natural powers of observation and deduction

– for all the varied aspects of humanity’s search for understanding:

anatomy, archaeology, astronomy,..., all the way to zoology.

As I suppose many of you know,

I am a University mathematician.

So, for forty years, off and on,

I have spent my time exploring and explaining new mathematics within my specialist area.

It has been my privilege to follow that particular ‘star’.

Thus, though it isn’t actually better translation than ‘wise men’,

you can see why I find it both thought-provoking and attractive

to render magi as ‘academics’.

In doing that,

I don’t want to turn this gospel into a parable for academics:

Rather, I want it to work for all of us.

Our view of the world and how it works,

informed by science in particular,

is very, very different from the natural world in the bible.

The seeds for this change go back 500 years,

but in the last 100 years, though universal education,

there have been enormous changes in general human understanding of the way the natural world works.

For me, Matthew’s account of the magi’s quest

and its successful conclusion,

forms a scriptural assurance that

our understanding of the world,

though it is very different from that in biblical times,

can help us find the infant King.

By following their methods honestly,

with God’s help,

these magi get to the right place.

The sight of the star filled them with delight,

and going into the house they saw the child with his mother Mary,

and falling to their knees they did him homage.

The magi could not have expected to find the infant king of the Jews in the humble circumstances they did.

Matthew doesn’t make this explicit, but it is obvious:

that they expected to find him at Herod’s court.

Nonetheless they kneel.

Today, at Mass,

when we fall to our knees,

let us do so in conscious homage of our Lord Jesus Christ, our King.