Three precious gifts - Peter Steele

Epiphany

Matthew 1:1-12

The gospel tells us that the wise, or canny, visitors to our Lord’s birth brought with them gold, and frankincense and myrrh. We have all seen these wise visitors represented countless times—in Christmas cribs, on Christmas cards, and probably in many other places. Over the centuries, they have been sorted out: they have been thought of as three in number, they have been given different nations or races, and they have even been given specific names.
The gospel doesn’t tell us any of these things. What it does say, or at least imply strongly, is that the ‘Magi’ were ‘wise-men’. The bottom line is that they were wise to come and applaud this particular birth. Whatever their sins, follies, prejudices or obsessions, they got this bit right—where God took flesh among us, that was a good spot to which to have recourse. Our days and lives, even the fortunate ones, can have an air of the desert about them: but in that desert, a trampled Bethlehem stable can still be an oasis.
A very brief word, which may be relevant to us, about those ‘gifts of the Magi’.
The first of these is gold. Gold has many good things to be said for it, but one of the reasons why human beings have for so long made such a fuss about it is that it does not decay. Gold, in saintly paintings ancient and modern, stands for eternity—stands for a condition which endures over all the ups and downs of our lives, all our fears and misgivings and dispiritings and extravagant bouncings-back: gold is, as we say, as good as gold—we can rely on it.
And when the wise men bring the infant Jesus some gold in symbolic tribute, they are saluting the durability of God—God of our nights and days, of our childhood and youth and middle age and old age: God who is God for good, as we say: God who is golden, as good as gold: who is God for good, who is golden for good.
The second gift is frankincense—incense. Most of us have had a whiff of this, perhaps at Benediction, perhaps at other times. It is rich, savoury stuff: it has a reek of the royal about it. And so it is meant to have. As we sniff it up, we are meant in a sense to be sniffing up a sense of God’s fullness, his abundance.
Many of us are so busy that we don’t have the leisure to savour the plenitude of God’s action in his and our universe. The stars come out every night, and we can see even in the clogged night-sky of our cities, but few of us count them or wonder at them. Our bodies operate, more or less skilfully, every day, and our minds work, and our hearts respond, and there are prodigious miracles involved in every five minutes’ happening of these things in each of us each day, waking or sleeping: but on we go, as if this were not so.
I am not trying to agitate misgiving in saying this, only to remind you, and myself, that God is ceaselessly at work, copious and ingenious, on our behalf, on even the least remarked of days. The ‘Magi’ gave their name, in effect, to what we call ‘magic’, in the western world: and God truly is the magicians’ Magician, the master of daily magic. And this is one of the things saluted by the rich, haunting tang of incense.
And then there is myrrh. Myrrh is a resin which, in our Lord’s time, was used as a substance smeared on the bodies of the dead. The word itself means something like ‘bitter’, and the smearing-moment must always have been a bitter one. In the gospel story, the point of bringing the myrrh was to acknowledge, and to bless, mortality.
‘To bless’—that is the challenge: because when something is merely burnt-out, nobody attempts to preserve or to salute it; nobody kisses a dead match. At the beginning of a book whose words I teach each year, the translator has written a dedication—To the great dead, who will not die. Putting myrrh upon the ‘great dead’ offers the hope that they will not die, totally. And bringing myrrh to the vulnerable, mortal baby Jesus offers the hopeful claim that, even though he will die like the rest of us, he will still be deathless—and, in his case, be deathless in being raised up, and in carrying the rest of us up with him in his wide-flung arms.
These are among the things we celebrate today: that Jesus of Nazareth, like gold, will not wear out, however long the day, or the century, or the millennium; that he is copious, fruitful, and never drained-out; and that, although he consents to go our mortal way, he remains the great cup of vitality for all of us. These things, the church says, the Magi were signalling to us; and that is about as wise as you need to be.