Matthew 2:1-12
I don’t know if you ever think about why the books of the Bible are ordered the way they are. But I can tell you one reason Matthew is first in the New Testament.
Matthew is first because– of all the gospels – it most clearly and directly links the story of Jesus with the prophets of the Old Testament. Matthew is constantly saying things like, “as it was written by the prophets,” and “this was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet.” Matthew connects all the dots. He tells us what we need to know.
Yet, as pedantic as Matthew is sometimes, he is also full of surprises at other times. Take the genealogy in Chapter 1.
To which you might say, “No thanks, I’m good. You can keep it.” Nobody reads the genealogies in the Bible. They’re boring. Nobody cares about all those names. But if you read through Matthew’s genealogy in Chapter 1, you will find some interesting things, I promise you.
“Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers” – and on it goes. Typically, genealogies contain the names of the men in the line of descent – the patriarchs. And there are plenty of them in this list. So many that most readers probably don’t even notice that Matthew has thrown a few women in. Four, to be exact. And the women he chooses to bring to our attention – that is what’s most interesting. Who are they?
Tamar, the woman who posed as a harlot by the side of the road to ensnare Judah. Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who let the spies of Israel hide in her boudoir. Ruth, the Moabite woman who hustled her way into the family of a prominent Bethlehem man. And the wife of Uriah, otherwise known as Bathsheba, who bore a son for King David while she was married to another man.
Some families want to shove the black sheep of the family tree into the back of the closet, but Matthew puts them right in the middle of the genealogy of Jesus the Christ. You have to wonder: Why are they here?
No sooner do we get past this strangeness than we arrive at the scene where “wise men” from the east come to pay homage to the newborn king.
It is another mystery, really, that Matthew decides to call these men wise. Maybe they are knowledgeable about the stars, but they are dangerously naïve about people. They waltz into the court of King Herod, one of the most paranoid and ruthlessly violent kings ever, to ask for directions. “Excuse me, do you know where we might find the newborn king of the Jews? Oh, you’re the king of the Jews? Well, we meant the new king.” What could possibly go wrong here?
At any rate, they manage to get directions, although why they needed them, I don’t know. That star seemed to be as reliable as Google maps. They found Jesus. But I don’t doubt that by the time they did, everyone between Jerusalem and Bethlehem was talking about them. They were passing strange. They didn’t exactly fit in.
These men from Baghdad, or thereabout, were Magi – magicians. They looked different, they dressed different, they sounded different and acted different. Really, everything about them was different – scandalous and abhorrent to Israel. Yet, here they are with front row seats at the birth of the Jewish Messiah.
They were thoughtful enough to bring gifts – strange gifts, it must be said. I imagine Mary’s confused expression when they handed her their packages of Frankincense and Myrrh. She probably forced a smile on her face and said thank you, it’s just what we needed. Although she didn’t have to fake it when she saw the gold. That would come in handy. Even so, she must have wondered why they were there.
Do we wonder? Why are they here? We should.
We might discover that Matthew, in his unique way, is telling us something about who we are.
If you are someone who was carried into the church as a newborn babe like I was, then you probably think you have always known who you are, who your people are. If you first crossed the threshold of the church as an adult, then you know that you made a conscious, deliberate decision about who you are and who your people are.
But it is a risk of Christianity – or any particular religious identity – that we think of who we are in terms far too narrow. And too rigidly marked. Christians often define ourselves in opposition to everyone else in the world. We are not Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Pagan or Buddhist or Atheist or anything else you can name. We are different from everyone else, we want to say. We are better than everyone else – we might want to say. We’re the ones who got it right, we think as we give ourselves a little pat on the back.
And it’s possible that some of the folks in Jesus’ family tree felt that way too. They were acutely aware of who they were not, and who was not one of them. So they gave the side eye to Rahab, that woman who let the Hebrew spies into her room. They turned to their sisters and tsked Ruth when she just showed up in Boaz’s fields all by herself. They gave Bathsheba the back of their hand when she tried to start up a conversation with them at the market.
And when those ridiculous Magi showed up in their turbans and colorful robes, people whispered and tittered about those crazy foreigners. Don’t even know where they’re going.
Yet here they are – these crazy foreigners. The welcoming committee as we open the New Testament. Let us show you the way, they say to us.
And they might point out to us that when he grew up Jesus told his disciples that they would have to go to the back of the line if they wanted to be his. That he was going to turn the order of the world upside down. Outsiders would be brought inside, and they would teach the insiders a few things worth knowing.
We call this the Epiphany, which means revelation. The moment when the light bulb goes on and we can see something we couldn’t see before. When these strange characters from out of town came to bow down before the baby Jesus, to show the world who he was and what he would do. He would shake things up and turn things upside down. He would open the gates, tear down the walls and let everybody in. Come to the table. I am the bread of life. I am the cup of salvation.
He would rock our world.
Epiphany, in the year 2020 – the year of perfect vision. Get ready to have your world rocked.
