Isaiah 60:1-6 / Ephesians 3:2-3, 5-6 / Matthew 2:1-12
By now we would have opened up all our Christmas presents. We won’t be able to curb that curiosity of tearing up the wrapper and see what the gift is.
Usually the presents and gifts are wrapped up. Presumably the more valuable the gift, then the wrapper would be adequately matching.
But it can be difficult to guess what the gift is from the wrapper, just as we can’t judge a book by its cover.
So now that we have opened up all our presents, some we will find useful and valuable, some we might think of “re-gifting” (but we have to remember not to give it back to the person who gave it to us).
As for the rest, we may want to put it in a bag and label it “For the church”. Somehow the church seems to be like a recycling centre.
And of course those wrappers would be thrown away and forgotten. They are not valuable anyway.
But those wrappers have an interesting purpose. They were used to wrap the gifts, and being so, they conceal a mystery of what the gift is.
So the wrapper may be nice and elegant, but the gift is ordinary. Or that the wrapper can be ordinary but a gift is extraordinary.
As we reflect on the mystery of the Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, we come to see what mystery really is.
In that Child sleeping in the manger, is the Word-made-flesh, Divinity wrapped in humanity, royalty concealed in poverty.
The wrapping is poor and humble, but a gift is the greatest treasure.
Today’s feast of the Epiphany is about mystery being concealed and revealed.
The main characters in the Epiphany story are the wise men from the East. They could also be kings as the hymn goes “We Three Kings of Orient Are”. And we can take it that there are three of them as there are the three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
They had seen a star beckoning them to a revelation of the infant King of the Jews. They had expected the infant King of the Jews to be born in Jerusalem, and presumably so, as Jerusalem was the capital.
When king Herod came to know about the wise men and their intentions, he was perturbed. If those wise men were some kind of wrapper, then Herod certainly didn’t like the gift.
Then Herod used another wrapper, a wrapper of deceit and manipulation, and used the wise men as his agents and informants to know the whereabouts of the infant King of the Jews.
But the deepest lesson that the wise men have for us is that when they saw the Child with His mother, they fell to their knees and did Him homage.
They saw beyond the wrapping and they saw the true gift.
They saw royalty concealed in poverty, that’s what the gold symbolized. They saw Divinity concealed in humanity, that is what the frankincense symbolized. They saw eternity concealed in the temporary, that is what the myrrh symbolized.
So in this feast of the Epiphany, the Lord Jesus is revealed as Saviour of the world, and the wise men represented the nations of the world who have come to do homage to the king.
We also learn from the wise men to look at the wrapping and to understand the gift. Whatever they had expected of the infant King of the Jews, when they saw Him, they saw royalty, divinity and eternity.
So whatever presents we got for Christmas, let us reflect on them and maybe see what the wise men saw in the Child in the manger.
A teenager was complaining to his uncle, that what he got from his parents as a Christmas present was a Bible.
The uncle, being a man with seen quite a bit about life, said to the teenager. “A book is the only gift that can be opened again and again. Open the Bible and that will be many gifts for you.”
Yes the Bible is a gift from God and will lead us to many gifts, just as the star revealed to the wise men the gift of the Saviour of the world.
But the wise men are not just wrappers in the Epiphany story. They are also gifts to us to help us understand God’s revelation.
And may we also be gifts to others, so that we will be the change that we wish to see in others.
When we can do that, then we have become gifts from God to others, we have become God’s revelation to others.