God's Abominable Guest-List--January 6, 2025

God's Abominable Guest-List--January 6, 2025

"In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, 'Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at his rising, and have come to pay him homage'." [Matthew 2:1-2]

All the wrong people come to Jesus. At least, maybe that's how it looks from one vantage point.

You could also say that when God throws a baby shower, the list of invited guests sure looks unworthy and unacceptable to the eyes of Respectable Religion... and unlikely to everybody else.

Take the travelers who come here in the story we call the Epiphany (a festival marked by the church on this date, January 6, every year, following the Twelve Days of Christmas).  The visitors whom Matthew says have come "from the East," these ones he called "magi," are mysterious and slippery characters. Nobody is sure who they were or where they came from. Almost certainly they were NOT kings, despite what our hymns say, but they may well have had positions in palaces as royal advisors. The word "magi" goes back to the old Persian (modern-day Iran--yes, Iran) word for astrologers and sorcerer-priests in the Zoroastrian religion, but it's also possible that they were dignitaries from some other kingdom as well. We don't know how many of them there were (three gifts are mentioned later, but not three givers--the claims of most Christmas pageant scripts notwithstanding), and we don't know for sure how long it took them to get where they were going. They appear out of nowhere and disappear after this story, never to be mentioned again (so we have no indication that they ever came back to follow the adult Jesus or get baptized or pray to make Jesus their personal lord and savior, or anything). They have a moment in the spotlight and then vanish into thin air, like... well, like a magic act.

And beyond the long list of things we don't know about them, the little that we do know makes them all wrong for the moment. They are not Jewish--that much is certain. So they come from the "wrong" nationality. And related to that, they practice the "wrong" religion, and the Hebrew Scriptures have some pretty strict commandments against consulting the stars and planets for answers, even as a side hobby. In fact, in the eyes of the Torah's commandments, the magi would have been considered practitioners of witchcraft or augury, and they should have been stoned to death. These guys are would-be wizards, basically, (the word "Magi" is related to our word for "magic"), and despite the fact that the Law of Moses condemns all who practice sorcery or astrology as "abhorrent," "detestable," and "abominations" (all different translations of Deuteronomy 18:12, which is one of several places forbidding exactly what "Magi" do).  If the Law of ancient Israel were being followed to the letter, these foreign sorcerers would have been put to death before they ever laid eyes on the promised Messiah, because they are "abhorrent" and "repulsive" according to The Rules.

And yet, as Matthew tells it, they are the invited guests of none other than Almighty God, who has arranged a sign in the sky and the stars, seemingly with the explicit intent of communicating by means of this astronomical sign to get through to pagans who practiced astrology and believed they could divine the future from the movements of the stars--something clearly forbidden by the Law of Moses and punishable by death.  Let's be clear about that: despite the fact that "The Rules" labeled practitioners of astrology and magic--like the Magi--as "abominations," the Gospel wants us to hear that the living God specifically welcomed these astrologer-magicians, without first demanding that they repent of their "abominable" practices but in fact precisely through the very means of their star-reading, wizarding ways, in order to bring them to the Christ. (Remember that the next time someone tells you that "Those People" are not welcome among God's people--God seems to take such talk as a personal dare.)  This is the scandal of the actual story of Jesus, rather than our various sanitized versions of Respectable Religion: the Epiphany is the story of God deliberately drawing people who would have been labeled "abominations" to encounter the promised Messiah, in spite of what The Rules said about them, and exactly through the part of their identity that got them labeled "abominable." 

There's no way around it: the Magi are outsiders who are drawn to Jesus... but they stay outsiders. They are pagan foreigners, rather than devout children of Israel. And yet... there is a place for them to find the child. And yet... they are included.

By comparison, Luke's telling of the story at least has some well-deserving good faithful Israelites getting to see the child. There's Simeon and Anna in the temple, both of whom had been waiting all their lives long to get to see the promised Messiah. They had both devoted their whole lives to watching and waiting and praying for this child. And here, in Matthew's storytelling, there's a bunch of foreigners who get to cut to the front of the line and see the Messiah, too, even though they didn't know where they should be looking and they weren't followers of Israel's God. The magi are the wrong ones to get to be the first to lay eyes on the Jewish Messiah... and yet, as Matthew gives it to us, that is exactly whom God draws. "Abominable" outsiders. "Pagan" foreigners. "Abhorrent" wild-eyed wizards who believed in astrology and lucky numbers and, who knows, maybe even rabbit's feet and four-leafed clovers, too. But they are included as well. God has a way of gathering in all the "wrong" people and putting them at the top of the guest list.

And maybe that's just it.

The whole point of the Gospel, the whole point of the coming of Jesus, is how God pulls in everybody in order to bring everybody--everybody--to life. The insiders and outsiders alike. The devout and the ungodly. The "right" ones and the "wrong" ones. The folks who dub themselves "holy" and "pious" and "respectable," and the folks who get labeled as "abhorrent," "detestable," and "abominable." Without regard for worthiness or faithfulness. Everybody is drawn in close.

Even wild-eyed wizards who don't speak the language. Even you and me.

Lord Jesus, pulls us close, and use us to draw others close to you, too.