“The Word: The Star that Leads us to Jesus”
Matthew 2:1-12
1/4/09
The song “We Three Kings” is one of the
most popular epiphany carols in existence. You can almost count
on hearing it sung by carolers. You might be wondering, then, why
it wasn’t included in our hymnals. Well, in today’s
text from the Gospel according to St. Matthew we are given the
answer: First, nowhere does Matthew mention how many of them
there were. Second, he does not call them kings but Magi.
And third, he doesn’t even call them wise men (which,
unfortunately, is how the English Standard Version translates
Magi.) But this is where I want to focus our attention today,
because from this text we see that it is not the wisdom of men that
leads people to Christ, but the wisdom of God given through His Word
and His Sacraments (the Sacrament in this case being a Star, which led
the Magi to Christ in order that they might worship Him.) In this
way the Magi represent us, and how God revealed His Christ to us and
led us to Him, while were yet sinners, while we were lost in the
foolishness of the wisdom of our darkened reason, in order that we
might worship Him.
We have much in common with these Magi. To
begin with, like us they were Gentiles, not Jews, which is interesting,
because Matthew’s Gospel is written mainly for Jews, to show them
that Jesus is their Messiah. And yet, here we have an account
right at the beginning of the book about Gentiles being brought to this
King of the Jews, in order that they might worship Him as their King,
too. By including this in his Gospel narrative, Matthew shows us
that Jesus is not just the Savior of the Jews, but the Savior of the
Gentiles as well. And he makes this clearer still at the end of
his Gospel where he places Jesus’ command to His eleven to make
disciples of all nations. The Magi are a sign of the fulfillment
of God’s promise made to Abraham that in him all the nations of
the earth would be blessed.
Next, because the Magi were Gentiles, they were
ignorant of the O.T. Scriptures and the promise of a Messiah, just as
we were at one time. They were not raised in the community of
faith among God’s people. They were, as the Apostle Paul
puts it, “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth
of Israel and strangers to the testaments of promise, having no hope
and without God in the world.” They were Magi, and Magi
were priests of the false religion of Persia called
Zoroastrianism. Among other things, Zoroastrians believe in a
cosmic dualism (or struggle) between the good god Ahura Mazdah and the
evil spirit, Angra Mainyu. Human beings are caught up in this
struggle, as they must choose between good and evil, with the result
that they obtain either punishments or rewards based on which they
choose. So, it’s a religion of works, to say the least, in
service to a false god.
Now, this is where the Magi would have been
considered to be wise by human standards. These were the wise
men, magicians, enchanters, and astrologers that we read about in the
book of Daniel. The kings of Babylon and Persia went to them,
when they wanted to know the future or what their dreams meant.
Yet with all their worldly wisdom those Magi were not able to interpret
the dreams that Daniel was able to, since he had the Spirit of the true
God in him. According to this God, the wisdom of men is
foolishness. As the Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian
congregation, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the
world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know
God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach
to save those who believe.” The wisdom of the world, the
wisdom that comes from our fallen sinful reason by which we determine
what is or is not rational, does not lead us to Christ, but away from
Him. It considers the preaching of the cross of Christ to be the
utmost foolishness, and instead clings to its own self-invented
religions and gods, which appeal to our darkened understanding.
This, then, is the state in which the Magi
lived. They were hardly wise men in God’s eyes, being just
as foolish as you and I were at one time, before the Lord had mercy on
us and enlightened our darkened reason with His Word, revealing His
Christ, our Savior, to us. And this is just what He did for the
Magi, too. Lost as they were in their so-called wisdom, they were
not looking for Christ. Matthew himself was surprised at their
arrival. He says, “Behold! Magi from the east!
Can you believe it?? Who would have thought!” Blinded
as they were by their worldly wisdom and the religion of their false
gods, they were not looking for Jesus; Jesus came looking for
them. He did this by sending them His Word along with a very
special Sacrament for the occasion - a Star. I say Sacrament,
because the Word of God was connected to this Star (like it is today to
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper), in order to lead these men to
Jesus. Somehow, and we don’t know exactly how, upon seeing
this Star the Magi recognized it to be the Star of Christ, as they
themselves asked Herod, “Where is He who has been born King of
the Jews? For we saw His Star in the east and have come to
worship Him.” Now, the Star didn’t speak (although
David says in Psalm 19 that the heavens themselves declare the glory of
God and that, though there is no speech nor is their voice heard, their
sound has gone out through all the earth and their utterances to the
end of the world.) But one way or another, the Word of God was
connected to this particular Star, so that the Magi knew that it
pointed the way to the newborn King of the Jews, who, unlike the other
kings of Israel, was to be worshipped. That meant that this King
was God. It is very likely that, because years earlier the Jews
had been exiled by God into the land of the east from which the Magi
had come, that they had read or heard the prophecies about this King of
the Jews from the Jewish Scriptures, and therefore they knew something
about this Christ that the Jews were expecting. But how they were
able to make a connection between the Star and the Word of God, we
don’t know. It’s sufficient for us to know that God
made the connection and used both His Word and this Star to lead these
Magi to His Son. By these means God, in His wisdom, delivered
them from their wisdom, and brought them to their Savior.
But the Star brought them to a place where people
weren’t expecting to find their Savior, even though the O.T.
prophets had foretold where He would be. It didn’t lead
them to Jerusalem, which is where King Herod was and where all the
kings of Judah had reigned (including King David). The Star did,
however, take the Magi on a detour to this city, possibly because God
wanted both Herod and the chief priests and scribes to know that His
Christ had been born just as the Scriptures had promised. But He
wasn’t in Jerusalem. Instead, He was in Bethlehem.
There they would find Him. And so the Star went on from Jerusalem
and led the Magi to Bethlehem.
And this is what God’s Word and Sacraments do
for us: they lead us to the place where Christ is bodily present
for us, in order that we might receive His gifts and worship Him.
The Star led the Magi to a specific house where Jesus was. Today,
the Word and the Sacraments lead us to the Church, God’s
house. It was in the house where Jesus was bodily present that
the Magi worshipped Him - where they received Him as their own King
along with the gifts that He had to give to them, and where they then
responded by giving Him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and
myrrh. Today, we come to this house where Jesus physically
locates Himself in His Word, Baptism, and His Holy Supper, in order to
give us Himself and His gifts of forgiveness, life, and
salvation. We then respond with our gifts of faith, confession,
prayer, praise, thanksgiving, and the love that we show one
another. These gifts may not be of any value to the world, but
they are more precious to God than any amount of gold, frankincense, or
myrrh.
The lesson of the Magi, then, teaches us that none
of us can say we chose to come to Jesus, but that we were brought by
God’s grace alone as He led us to Him with His Word, in order
that we might receive the gift of salvation and worship Him. As
our Catechism teaches us to confess, “I believe that I cannot by
my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to
Him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel and enlightened me
with His gifts...” We must all confess that at one time
like the Magi we were lost in the darkness of our sinful wisdom, and
that had God not had mercy upon us, we’d still be worshipping the
gods of our own making, lost in our sin and doomed to hell. But
God did have mercy on us and delivered us from our wisdom by the Wisdom
of His Word. It is what enlightened you, revealing to you your
sin and your false gods, yet showing you your Savior.
The Word is the Star today that leads you to Jesus,
crucified for your sins, risen again from the dead for your salvation,
and through this Gospel works faith in your heart to receive Him as
your Lord and Savior. Like the Magi we who believe and are
baptized are now given to rejoice exceedingly with great joy in the
knowledge that God has been merciful to us and given us a King who has
laid down His life for us and taken it up again, that we might be His
own, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting
righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. May the Star of
God’s Word and the Sacraments of Baptism, Holy Absolution, and
the Lord’s Supper continue to guide and direct you to Jesus
today, that you like the Magi might receive His gifts and worship Him
with yours, now and forever. Amen.