Those Wise Guys

Despite those decorations you see going up in October (or even earlier), Christmas only lasts for 12 days . . . beginning on the evening of 25th. Now that is is the evening of the 6th of January, a Grinch like me should be delighted, right? Wrong, because Christmas ends with the traditional celebration of my least favourite part of the nativity narrative: the arrival of the Magi. Oh my, where to begin.
First off, we don’t know that there were three of them. Second, we don’t know their names. Third, they weren’t kings. So just about everything popularly ‘known’ about them is wrong (or at least unbiblical). It’s appalling that the song “We Three Kings” makes its way into so many hymnals. Why not throw in other annoying inventions like Rudolph or Frosty? On second thought, that’s a dangerously probable suggestion.
Even allowing for what we are told about them, the arrival of these adorers really spoils the nativity, stylistically. Here we have the utter humility of the birth of the Messiah: in a manger, in swaddling, attended to only by shepherds. A modern analogy would be that the saviour of man would be born in a garage, in rags, attended to by migrant workers. It is hard to picture circumstances more stark, unadorned, and lowly. Balancing this, we have the host of angels singing in exultation of the birth of Christ. If we look at the origins of the words host and angel, we understand that an Army of Holy Messengers is shaking the rafters of Heaven with their proclamation. Something unfathomable is happening in the intersection of the spiritual and the temporal, and yet the effects are quite the opposite on either side of the firmament. And who comes along to upset this dichotomy? These magi with their fancy gifts.
We should now stress that these magi are totally out of place. The Bible only says that they came “from the east,” but the word magi, “is a specific occupational title referring to the priestly caste of a branch of Zoroastrianism.” I mean really, what are these Persians doing there? Not only are these guys from a different religion, but they found the creche using astrology, a prohibited form of the occult. This doesn’t make any sense. Imagine how odd their arrival must have struck the shepherds and Mr. and Mrs. von Nazaret.
Of course, they weren’t the only ones who knew the magi were there. Who is the first person they ran in to? Why, the infanticidal King Herod the Great. Bravo! Nothing like tipping off the local potentate about the newborn king and sparking the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. And it seems to me that this is the only religious significance of the visit of the magi: that they instigated the first evidence that a fallen world cannot abide the presence of the perfect Son of God, and that He will eventually be killed by the world. So why are they included in the Bible? They are not exemplars, rather, foreshadowing.