Preached at St John’s Devizes; my final sermon as curate there.
Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12
“Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’”
We know nothing about them, really. They are only mentioned once in the whole of Scripture, in the part of Matthew that was read as this morning’s Gospel. We don’t know what made these men wise, or whether they were learned at all in the conventional sense – the Greek word used to describe them, ‘μαγοι’, is the root of our own word ‘magician’. Bible translators have always struggled with it. I explored some modern translations of this passage when preparing my sermon – a German translation called them astrologers, all four French translations I checked called them magicians, while the Spanish New International Version opted for “some wise men”.
The Wise Men as depicted in the an illuminated Armenian Gospel of 1391 in what is now Akdamar Island in Lake Van, Turkey; the Gospel is now kept in the Matenadaran in Yerevan.
That last is particularly interesting, because we don’t even know that there were ‘three’ Wise Men. In the churches of the West, that has always been taken as read given that they left three distinct gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But the Bible doesn’t say how many of them there were. In fact, in parts of the East, and especially in Syriac Christianity, known to have particularly deep connections to the Church of the earliest times, they are adamant that there were twelve wise men bearing those three gifts.
All sorts of other things we take for granted about the Wise Men weren’t reported for many centuries after Matthew wrote his Gospel – that their names were Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, or that Balthasar was Black. Indeed, while we in the West have linked Balthasar with Africa for more than a thousand years, in Armenia – another Eastern land with a very ancient Church – they identify the Wise Men as Caspar of India, Melchior of Persia, and Balthasar of Arabia.
Wherever they’re from, once they’ve played their part in this morning’s Gospel reading, they walk off the biblical stage, never to be mentioned again.
It’s obvious why Matthew makes the Wise Men a significant part of His story of Christ’s early life – he wants to show us that even while still in a makeshift cot, this little baby is already not merely King of the Jews, but destined to be worshipped by peoples from every nation.
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