The Feast of the Epiphany is about the shining forth of God’s light of salvation to every people and nation.  The light of the star of Bethlehem is not restricted to the sight of only a few; the radiance of that light will spread to every land and people of the world.  Christ’s salvation is for all.  The Church has always understood the wise men from the East, these mystics from a distant land, to be proof that God’s salvation is for all the world.  Not just a favored few, not just a family, not just a race or a nation; salvation is for all who are willing to accept.  

The interesting gifts that the wise men bring show just exactly what it is that we are accepting if and when we choose to accept and receive the salvation that this infant brings.  The magi would seem like real flatterers if they had only brought gold and frankincense, since gold is a gift fit for a King, literally, and incense a gift fit for a God, also literally.  They would really seem like smooth operators trying to ingratiate themselves for some reason, except that they also bring myrrh.  Myrrh wasn’t mentioned in Isaiah’s prophecy; only gold and frankincense.  Myrrh is not a happy gift: it was an oil used for burial, embalming fluid, basically.  That’s a surprising gift, but really all three gifts are pretty surprising for an unheralded, hidden, desperately impoverished newborn.  The magi didn’t bring diapers and formula.  None of these gifts are practical, and one of them is so weird, it’s almost creepy.  But here, in this odd assortment of gifts brought by these exotic philosophers, we have the entire life of Christ rolled into one profound act of homage and worship.  Despite his appearance as a weak and helpless baby, with unimpressive parentage, lying in a filthy cattle-trough, the truth is: this child is King, he is God, and he is the suffering servant who will lay down his life to fulfill his mission as savior of the entire world. 

This is what we’re saying yes to, when we choose to follow Christ as the Light of our lives.  We are following a King and a God who is willing to humble and abase himself again and again, starting right here and now, in helpless infancy lying in a messy disused corner of a barn, down through his hidden years, right to the moment when he will be reviled, rejected, spurned, and murdered by his own creation.  This irony, this paradox, this subtle magnificence: this is why Christ’s message of salvation spread to every corner of the world and continues to define billions of lives, even to this day.  Because Christ is not just another boring repetition of the same tired theme: just another small-town upstart who clawed his way to the top through sweat and guile, and enjoyed a modicum of influence and success before being tossed onto the scrap heap of obscure history and the slow drift into dilute legend.  No.  He’s different.  His message and his movement remain sharp, fierce, intensely motivating, and profoundly influential to minds and hearts across the world, 2000 years later.  Because in his identity, we find gold and frankincense, and myrrh.  Uniquely, the power he represents is not about avoiding or transcending or distracting from the difficulties of life; it’s not about somehow cheating the inevitable.  He doesn’t use his power or his divinity to avoid suffering and death.  He runs into them headlong.  He uses his power and divinity to enter into death and destroy it from the inside.  He uses his gold and frankincense to turn the myrrh from something gloomy and discouraging into sweet nectar of eternal life. 

This is what his promise is.  He doesn’t promise a carefree life of earthly success to those who follow him.  He promises that our difficulties and sufferings, and even our death, which we will experience and which will be real, will not be meaningless.  We are not fools to follow him.  We are not simpletons for following him as our king.  We are not idolators for following him as our God.  And we are not delusional for following him as one who can make our sufferings meaningful.  He is King, he is God, and he is himself the eternal sacrifice.  This is what the wise men saw, this is what their gifts to him acknowledge, and this is what was manifested to all the nations of the earth.  All of this profound meaning will come to fulfilment in the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, which we will have the joy to celebrate in the coming months.  As we now begin to pivot our religious imagination from the events of Bethlehem to the events of Jerusalem, we ask God to fill us with a spirit of faithfulness, of worship, and of love, that we may offer our own gifts of praise to the incarnate Word, all our life long.