O Holy Night

Of the four Gospels, Matthew is the one most concerned with showing Jewish readers that Jesus is the promised Messiah of Israel. He opens not with shepherds or a manger but with a genealogy, tracing the line back through David to Abraham, and he keeps pausing the story to say, in effect, this happened so that the prophets would be fulfilled. So it is genuinely striking that so early on, after that very Jewish opening, one of the scenes he chooses is a group of Gentile travellers turning up to worship.

We should be careful about what we actually know of these visitors. Matthew calls them magi, a word for learned men from the East associated with the study of the stars. He never tells us how many there were, never calls them kings, and never gives them names. The three crowns and the camels are later tradition, not Matthew’s text. What he does tell us is that they came from outside the covenant, read the sky, and travelled. I find it bracing that the Gospel most invested in Jewish hope hands one of its first acts of homage to outsiders.

The hinge of the verse is the last phrase: they have come, they say, to worship him. The Greek word behind worship here, proskuneo, carries the picture of falling down before someone, the bodily gesture of homage you would offer a king or a god. It is the same word Matthew uses again a few verses on, when they finally see the child and fall down and worship him (Matthew 2:11). So the magi tell Herod their intention, and then they actually do it. The word is not a vague feeling of awe. It is a posture of the whole body going low.

Notice too the order of the question. They do not ask where the baby is, or where the family is. They ask for the one born King of the Jews. They are looking for a king before they have met a child. And they are sure enough of what they have seen to stake a long journey on it. What is easy to miss is the quiet courage in saying that out loud in Herod’s city, where there was already a king of the Jews on the throne, and a paranoid one at that.

Matthew is doing something the religious experts in Jerusalem could have spotted. When Herod asks where the Messiah is to be born, they answer from Micah 5:2: Bethlehem. They had the postcode. But the wise men’s own language also seems to echo an older promise. Centuries before, Balaam, a seer from outside Israel, had spoken of a star coming out of Jacob and a sceptre rising out of Israel (Numbers 24:17). It is hard to read of foreigners following a star to a newborn king and not hear that earlier oracle, spoken, of all things, by another outsider from the East.

That thread runs forward as much as back. Isaiah had promised a child on whom the government would rest, a son given to Israel and named for who he is (Isaiah 9:6). The wise men cannot have known the half of what they were kneeling before. The whole sweep of the story is that the King of the Jews was never going to be only for the Jews. By the end of this same Gospel, the risen Jesus sends his followers out to all nations (Matthew 28:19). The magi are the first instalment of that promise.

What unsettles me about this passage is the gap between knowing and going. The chief priests could quote the verse and did not move an inch. The visitors had far less and travelled for a long way. I recognise myself in the wrong group more often than I would like. I can tell you exactly what Scripture says about trusting God in a hard week, and still sit perfectly still, arms folded, waiting for the feeling to come first.

The other thing I carry from this is the worship. They did not arrive with a sermon or a strategy. They knelt. There are seasons when I have very little to bring to God except the willingness to get low, and this verse tells me that is exactly the right instinct, truer than the visitors themselves understood. You do not have to belong, or have it all worked out, or feel qualified. The magi had none of that. They had a long road and a fixed intention. When I am far off, or tired, or unsure I have any claim on him, it steadies me to remember that the first people in this Gospel to find Jesus were strangers who simply decided to come and worship.

• Where in my life do I already know what God says, like the experts in Jerusalem, but have not actually got up and moved?
• The magi came specifically to worship, not to get something. What would change if that were my first reason for coming to Jesus this week?
• They felt no right to this king and came anyway. What makes me feel too far off, or too unqualified, to come and kneel?
• What is the long road, the bit of real effort, that finding Jesus is asking of me just now?

If you want to keep travelling with this, you could read more verses in the Gospel of Matthew, or sit with a few verses for how you feel.