The birth of Christ was good news for the whole human family, and so God chose to let the whole world know about it. The name of today’s feast, “Epiphany,” means to manifest or to make known. The star that guided the three kings to find the Christ Child was God’s gift to all the nations of the world. Many pagan religions believed that the birth of a great king was of such monumental significance that the stars would align in such a way as to announce the birth. On this occasion, God allowed that pagan belief to be a form of leading all nations to find Christ.
In that description of today’s feast, I used the phrase “three kings.” I did so for a couple of reasons. First, that is a familiar image to us. In my Nativity set, the visitors certainly look like kings, and we do sing “We Three Kings” on this day. Matthew’s gospel, however, does not call them kings. “Wise men” is a better translation, though we often us an English version of the original and call them “Magi.” A “magus” was an astrologer who studied the stars in order to advise the king or other powerful people about the will of their gods. We can see the wisdom of trying to find the divine will, and those who came to find the true God in Bethlehem must have been especially wise.
So if they were not kings, we may ask why we have come to call them kings. The answer to that question comes back to the understanding that God was reaching out to all nations with Christ’s birth and that all nations would come to faith. Psalm 72:10 says, “May the kings of Tarshish and the islands bring tribute, the kings of Arabia and Seba offer gifts.” Further, Isaiah 60:6 says, “Caravans of camels shall fill you, dromedaries from Midian and Ephah: All from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the Lord.” Both of those passages would have influenced the way that Matthew told the story in his gospel.
There is another twist on the title of “three kings,” for Matthew does not tell us how many there were. For years we have settled on the number three because of the three gifts: gold (in recognition of Christ’s kingship), frankincense (Christ’s divinity) and myrrh (the salvation that comes through Christ’s death). In early Christendom, the number varied from two – the lowest possible since Matthew uses the plural – to seventy-two. Obviously, seventy-two magi would have made for a crowded house, but seventy-two represented the number of nations known to Israel and thus symbolized that Christ was coming for the whole world.
My one final note about this feast is less serious. In one parish, a volunteer was bringing out the figures of the kings on the Saturday before Epiphany, and I asked him if he knew in which direction our church faced. When he told me (without certainty), I asked him then why the kings were coming from a direction other than the east. It took him a few minutes, but he came back and told me that they came from that direction because the Parkway was under construction and they had to take a detour.
Father H
