Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, Sunday, 4 January, 2026, The Epiphany of Our Lord.
Readings for this Sunday: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
The first Sunday of Epiphany is a magical time in the church year because, in the afterglow of Christmas, we get those three wonderful and exotic figures that we call the Magi, the Wise Men. In the crêche they are the loveliest figures (well, next to the angel) with their lavish robes, turbans, and gifts. Some churches start the crêche figures of the Magi at the back of the church and move them forward gradually throughout Advent, until we get to this Sunday when they finally arrive at their destination (though sometimes churches will put them into their Christmas Eve nativity plays, and why not?).
We don’t know exactly who the Magi were, what they looked like, where they actually came from, or even how many they were (for some reason the number three struck, presumably because of the three gifts, but it could have been a whole caravan! In the Christian tradition, they represent the kings who Isaiah said would come from afar to worship the God of Israel, gentile rulers who show that Christ is born for the peoples of all the earth.
In popular art, they are often portrayed as three figures riding camels (which may have been their likely ride but certainly makes them exotic to westerners) at night, three figures shilouetted by the light of the star they follow.
I’m sure some of you got at least one Christmas card like this, though Christmas cards seem to be less of a thing these days as we send less and less paper mail. Often in these images it appears as if the Magi are travelling through am empty desert landscape, but this year in particular it seems like they are moving through a landscape that looks a lot like the world we live in.
Saturday morning we woke to find that a minor king was toppled by an Emperor. Now “king” and “emperor” aren’t really words that you hear in the news anymore, but they exist. Emperors have names like Trump, or Xi, or Putin. Kings today (not the nice ones like Charles) have names like Maduro, or Bolsonaro, or Kim Jung Un. When the Wise Men came to Jerusalem, they came to the court of one of these petty, vicious hireling kings. At Herod’s court, three learned travellers found themselves in a world of ruthless power politics, and rulers who, for all their strutting and blustering, were like their counterparts today, deeply anxious and insecure.
Herod was a king, but we might better call him a puppet, a stooge on the Roman payroll. His father came to power because he ruled Galilee for Julius Caesar and raised taxes for the Romans. Herod himself was useful to Mark Antony, and after the Romans captured Jerusalem the Roman senate named Herod king of Judea. So Herod wasn’t a king like David or Solomon. He was basically a small mob boss who worked for a big mob boss.
So for the Magi to come to Herod’s court and to tell him that they are looking for “ the child who has been born king of the Jews” (Mt 2.2), well, that is as one commentator has noted, “an extraordinardily naïve question”. We can imagine the buzz of conversation among Herod’s courtiers going dead silent at this point, and Herod’s face freezing.
Small wonder, as the gospel says, that Herod was “frightened”. He must have been wondering, “What do these foreigners know that I don’t know? Is there a rebellion against me, or worse, are the Romans going to replace me? I’ve got to get on top of this”. So Herod, who is a master of cunning, enlists the Magi as his unwitting spies, so they can tell him where this child is, so he can kill him. If you look at the histories of this period, Herod wasn’t reluctant to kill people. He had even had his second wife Mariamme executed for plotting to overthrow him, so he was as ruthless as they come.
The Herods and Caesars of today are as ruthless as Herod, even though they live with greater scrutiny of their actions and are a little more devious. Even so, one of the strange things about the times we live in is that no one seems sure how to stop bad powerful people any more. Ruthless, powerful people have journalists murdered, they enrich themselves and their families through blatant corruption, they invade other countries and they break rules, and it seems like all we can do is shrug. The 21st century seems more like the world of Herod than it seems like the world we grew up in, where rules and shame still mostly worked. So maybe we can relate more to these travellers who passed through a scheming, ruthless world, searching for their true king.
Something we might well ask is why these three men, wealthy and learned, would have left their comfortable, far away lives and made the long journey to seek Jesus. T.S. Eliot well imagines the discomfort of their journey in his famous poem. Herod’s advisors had told him that a king of Israel would be born in Bethlehem, and they were quoting the prophet Micah (Mi 5:1-6), but the Wise Men weren’t Jews, so why did they care?
Perhaps all we can say is what is often said about the Magi, that they were willing to be led by something far above the scheming kingdoms of earth, that miraculous, westward leading star. In all the scriptures around the Christmas story, the light breaking into the darkness is a sign of God’s revealed truth. For Isaiah it was the promise that a people too long used to darkness would see the dawn of a new light. For John in the prologue to his gospel, the light was the truth come into the world, a light no darkness or evil could extinguish.
The Magi’s trust in that guiding star is an encouragement to us to believe that there is still light and truth and goodness in the world, and that we are called to follow that light and truth and goodness as they did. The world can seem terribly dark at times, and the Herods can seem like the winners in the struggle between dark and light. Indeed, the frankinscense and myrrh of the Magi are gifts that look towards a tragic outcome.
In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi”, there is much foreshadowing of the cross, and indeed one of the Wise man asks, “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?’ Death is further layered onto Matthew’s nativity account in Herod’s massacre of the boy children of Bethlehem, and if history is full of anything, it’s full of massacres and atrocities. The birth of Jesus does not end the world of tyrants and massacres, but it does put the tyrants on notice. The mystery of the Incarnation is that Jesus is born to die, and in his dying and rising to life again, the slow but sure undoing of death and sin and tyranny begins.
Like the Magi before us, it may seem at times that we also travel through darkness, but we are never far from the light, the light of God’s truth and goodness and faithfulness. As believers, we follow a king who makes the kings and emperors of our time look like foolish and petty and doomed. Like the Magi, we follow the light of God’s truth and goodness, because we know that the light will lead us out of the darkness.
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