Wisdom for All

Wisdom for All

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 3, 2016

Scripture: Matthew 2:1-12; John 1:1-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

They weren’t kings, you know. Yes, we began our worship this morning with the hymn “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” but I put that hymn in our service because it’s a traditional Epiphany hymn that most people know not because they really were kings. They come to us from Matthew’s story that we just heard; and Matthew doesn’t call them kings, he calls them magi. That’s a Greek word that usually gets translated as wise men. The NIV that we just heard leaves it as magi and gives a translators note that says that the word is usually translated as wise men. So wise men it is. Just remember that no matter what the old hymn says, they weren’t kings.

Wise men it is, and I think that’s a very good thing. See, Matthew is trying to tell us something really important about Jesus in his story of the wise men. Probably the first thing that Matthew’s original audience would have noticed about the wise men is that they aren’t Jews. I doubt that anyone ever called any Jews, wise or otherwise, magi. The word just didn’t apply to them. Matthew’s wise men aren’t Jews, they’re Gentiles. They are foreigners in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the Jewish cities in which they appear in Matthew’s story. They didn’t worship the Jewish God Yahweh. They had some other faith tradition of their own, probably Zoroastrianism, but the only thing that really matters to us is that that tradition wasn’t Jewish.

Matthew pretty clearly wants us to understand his magi as Gentile spiritual seekers. They are, I think, seeking wisdom, whatever its source. Matthew has them say that they are looking for the newborn king of the Jews, but it doesn’t make much sense for them to have been doing that if they thought that Jesus was only an earthly king. Pretty clearly they didn’t think that. Their gifts to him of frankincense means that they thought of him as someone to worship, not just someone to follow. They saw him as a spiritual figure more than a political one. For them he wasn’t so much a source of earthly power as he was a source of spiritual wisdom. Moreover, they’ve come to worship him. That means they see him not as a source of mere human wisdom but of divine wisdom, and of course they’re right about that.

Matthew is telling us through his story that Jesus is a source of divine wisdom. He’s also telling us that he’s not a source of divine wisdom only for the Jews. Matthew’s magi aren’t Jews. Matthew is telling us through his story that Jesus is a source of divine wisdom for everyone. For Jews yes, but also for everyone else. It is perhaps hard for us to remember what a big issue that was in New Testament times. It is one of the major issues behind many of the New Testament texts. It’s not an issue for us. That’s because the early Christians like Paul who said the Gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone not just for the Jews won the argument. So we don’t worry about whether you have to be Jewish to be Christian the way Matthew and other New Testament authors did. Still, I think that Matthew’s point that Jesus is wisdom for everyone is still important for us. Jesus is, among other things, divine wisdom. He’s divine wisdom for everyone.

That’s also one of the things that the prologue to the Gospel of John that we also heard is trying to tell us. The message of John’s prologue is that Jesus is divine wisdom incarnate. Yes, I know. John doesn’t use the word wisdom. He uses the word “word.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John doesn’t use the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia, when he talks about Jesus. He uses the Greek word for word, logos, instead. But John is working here wholly within one particular tradition of Judaism that spoke of a female figure called Wisdom as being a manifestation of God. The patriarchal Jewish culture eventually changed the female image wisdom into the male image word, but word was still an image of the wisdom of God. Jesus is for us Lord and Savior, but he is also God’s infinite wisdom in human form.

Which of course leads us to ask: Just what is that wisdom that Jesus is? That of course is an immense and immensely complicated question. I can only scratch the surface of an answer here, and I think Matthew’s wise men can help us make that scratch. They are seekers of wisdom. Perhaps they sought it in the stars, as many ancient people did. Perhaps they had sought it in the religious tradition of Persia, which is probably where they’re from. Wherever they had sought it earlier, they made the arduous trek across hundreds of miles of desert seeking to find it in Jesus. They found it in a tiny baby that the wicked king Herod would soon try to kill. The Gospel of Matthew is telling us in this story that Jesus is divine wisdom.

OK, but just what is that content of that wisdom? Let me suggest that we see an answer to that question in what may appear to us to be a minor detail at the end of the story. The wise men are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, so they return home by a different route. Their movement in this story tells us a lot. They move from the east to Herod, then to Jesus, then away from Herod on their way back where they came from. Herod here represents the ways of the world. He’s a very worldly king. He is the way of wealth and violence. He is the way of subservience to the great powers of the world. He is a way that seeks to dominate others for its own benefit. Jesus turns the wise men away from that supposed wisdom. They go home changed. They go home different than they were when they first came to Jesus. I invite you think of that different route they took home as a symbol how they were transformed by an encounter with Christ.

A real encounter with Christ transforms us too. If we really meet him, if we do the work of trying to understand him the way the magi’s gifts say they understood him, as the one to be followed and worshipped and as one whose death would have cosmic significance, we’ll be changed. We will be turned from the world’s ways of living and toward God’s ways of living. Away from valuing wealth and power and toward God’s values of peace, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, inclusion, and love. We will be turned from a way of relying only on ourselves and on the world for what we need to the way to relying on God for what we really need—forgiveness, spiritual strength, hope, peace, and salvation. If we can let the story of the magi transform us, Matthew will have done his work for us. In the new year ahead let us then be open to the transforming power of God and Jesus Christ. Let us go home by a different road, the road of true wisdom for all. Amen.