What did the Wise Men really say?
 A
version of this piece was published in the Independent
on the 5th January 2002, under the headline ‘Enter
three unsavoury characters, bearing gifts’.
The Wise Men arrive disconcertingly late in the church’s
year. Like eccentric relations, they turn up on January
6th, long after Christmas proper, when our not-so-spruce
trees are shedding their last needles and our appetite
for turkey and chocolate is finally exhausted. Many
of us thought they had already been. Didn’t we
see pictures of them weeks ago, riding their camels
through improbable snow? Didn’t we sing way back
then of those exotic Three Kings of Orient Are?
Christmas is a complex and confusing business. The
odd rogue clergyman may tell the Today programme
we should separate the feast day of Jesus’ birth
from the orgy of consumption that the shops and the
media promote, yet for Christians and pagans alike it
remains a tangle of the religious and the anything but.
The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore suggests
that the church deliberately took over a festival of
the popular Persian god Mithras, known as the Birthday
of the Unconquered Sun; but the season we now celebrate
also incorporates elements of the Roman Saturnalia and
the Germanic Yule, as well as anything else that Walter
Scott and Charles Dickens – and now the Controller
of BBC1 – have decided is traditional.
Within this mix, the story of the Nativity has been
less and less prominent in recent years; but the Wise
Men have maintained their profile, not only for the
Eastern colour they bring to the party but also –
much more to the commercial point – because they
were the originators of the expensive (if often impractical)
Christmas gift.
Meanwhile, by a quirk of chronology, the decision of
the Council of Tours in 567 that the 12 days between
the Feasts of the Nativity and Epiphany should be an
extended religious holiday means that today our festivities
encompass the turn of the year. There is a pleasing
harmony between the declaration of peace on earth and
goodwill to all that brightens December and the rush
of fresh starts and fine resolutions with which January
begins – but there is also a clash between the
excesses of Christmas and the exigencies of the new
year. After all, how can you put your best foot forward
when the BBC is still tempting you to put both of them
up in front of the telly?
And now, just as the season is finally ending and everyone’s
calendars and agendas agree that it’s time to get
real and get back to work, these foreigners show up
and ask, ‘Where is the child who has been born
king of the Jews?’
It might be helpful to remind ourselves of some of
the details of their story. According to Matthew, an
astral phenomenon – the Greek word has several
meanings, and a plausible case has been made for a momentous
conjunction in 6BC of Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun and the
Moon in Aries – attracted a deputation of astrologers
from somewhere east of Palestine. The Gospel refers
to them as magi, a term translated elsewhere
in the New Testament as ‘magicians’ or ‘sorcerers’,
with very negative overtones.
These particular men were apparently wealthy and probably
members of a pagan priestly caste, though there is no
reason to think they were kings. How many of them there
were we are not told; nor do we know when they arrived,
though Matthew refers to Jesus as a little child, not
a baby, and specifies that Herod had all the boys under
two in the Bethlehem area killed ‘according to
the time that he had learned from the magi’.
Outlandish if not outrageous they would have seemed
to the Jews of their day; but far from being an ill-judged
attempt to revive the ‘magic’ of Christmas,
we commemorate these men now because they bring us back
to a profound reality that for most of us was buried
under mountains of presents and food. Matthew recorded
their homage to Jesus to emphasise that the ‘king
of the Jews’ born in Bethlehem was to be the saviour
and lord not just of the poor and the marginalised,
as represented by the shepherds who saw him newborn,
but of the whole world.
To our very different culture, they deliver two other,
equally important lessons. The first is that neither
the joy nor the hope – nor, indeed, the grief and
the pain – that the birth of Jesus brought into
the world were ‘just for Christmas’. In the
cold light of January, when the tinsel is going back
in the loft and life is returning to normal, the impact
of that birth is still spreading, and here are more
people, looking for the new king, wanting to pay their
respects – and bringing down the anger of tyrants
on innocent heads.
The second is that true religion is not a matter of
due observance or the proper form. It was God’s
official spokesperson, an angel, who told the good news
to the shepherds, but the magi discovered Jesus
through a practice the Bible both ridicules and condemns.
The disturbing implication seems to be that it may not
matter in the end how or where you search for the Truth
as long as you find him, and kneel before him.
Whatever else it is, the magi’s tale is
not a last shot of festive fantasy. It confronts us
with an uncomfortable reality that is still changing
the world – and challenging the church.
© The Independent 2002
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