Twelfth Night

Christmas is over for another year. We mark it with the festival of Epiphany, the coming of the Wise Men to see the infant Jesus, which is one I struggle with. Not that they forsaw the event and recognised it's significance and decided to go, that seems fairly clear-cut. I think the recent BBC Nativity mini-series portrayed that really well.

No, my problem is that we give it the significance we do. Surely it was one of man's great mistakes? I suspect that the writers and subsequent translators have white-washed that part of the story because it involved 'important people', just the same as we tend to do with royal stories nowadays.

The Bible counsels us in several places against astrology, there are verses in Exodus, Kings and Isaiah pointing us away from it but not because, as so many churches preach, it's rubbish and doesn't work. Rather the problem is that it DOES work at a 'global' level, although not necessarily at the 'you are going to meet a tall dark handsome stranger and lead a life filled with love and riches' level.

God created the universe as a whole, as part of Him. It is an extension of Heaven, which is in turn an extension of the Godhead, so it must reflect, albeit in a diminutive state, the perfect and complete nature of God in its structure, from the smallest atom to the biggest supernova. So it is reasonable to assume that if we look into the skies we can see the 'bigger picture'. That's what the Wise Men saw several months before the Nativity actually happened, and the fact that they turned up in the right place at more or less the right time demonstrates that the truth is in the heavens.

I firmly believe that Jesus' birth was planned to be a low-key affair. A baby is vulnerable and the son of God was always going to be a target, as we see from the reaction of Herod, prepared to commit one of the grossest acts of infanticide in history to try to get rid of him. The birth couldn't go completely unrecognised, so the only 'official' announcement of the birth was to a bunch of shepherds on a hillside. No-one respected them and anything they said about the events of that night would be largely ignored by the authorities, but the birth would have been marked, as any child's birth should be recognised and enjoyed as the special act of creation it so clearly is. From then, once Mary had recovered, they would have gone back to Nazareth and led a normal life until Jesus was ready to begin His ministry.

From the moment the Wise Men arrived on the scene, there was trouble. They told the King, with the awful consequences of his advanced paranoia, and had to be warned in dreams not to go back to him to tell him the location of the baby. Their actions meant that the holy family had to undertake the arduous journey to Egypt for their own safety. Because the Wise Men had disobeyed God's guidance they did what anyone who knows the future eventually does, they changed it, and then left others to pick up the consequences of that change.

The giving of gifts started as a recognition of the gifts they brought, so they are also, indirectly, responsible for the commercialisation of Christmas, something that makes it almost impossible to come to the birth of Christ with a quiet humility, in awe at the generosity and vulnerability of our mighty God; after all, there are cards to write and shopping to do, and all the wrapping...

So pardon me if I don't rave about the Wise Men.