Today’s story from St. Matthew’s Gospel provides us with an insight into how men and women 2000 years ago would stargaze and learnt to plot the course of a journey in doing so. It is worth pondering just how challenging journeys in those days must have been. There were none of the modern means of transport and travel, and yet we know that men and women had by then migrated from one continent to another and trade routes were already well established. Beasts of burden, like camels and donkeys, carrying not only the travelers but their belongings, made long journeys possible.
St. Matthew was writing for his own Jewish people and one of his concerns was that they grasped the fact that Jesus, while He had come to liberate them, had also come to liberate all men and women of all time. Having helped his own people make the necessary connection with the prophecy about Bethlehem being the place towards which they were heading, he also links their journey with Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the nations seeing the light and traveling to pay homage with their gifts. The gold points us to the fact that Christ child has come to establish the kingdom of God. The incense reveals that He is no ordinary child but God’s Son, while myrrh warns us of the disturbing prospect of His passion and death: His body will need to be anointed after His death.
The Church has incorporated the wonderful symbols of the wise men’s gifts into its liturgy. Just think of how we use incense to remind us not only of the preciousness of Christ’s presence in the sacraments, but also of the preciousness of each and every one of us. In the funeral rite the body, which has been anointed in the sacraments, is incensed: a reminder that our mortal bodies are destined for resurrection. In today’s world the invitation to you and me is to be ever conscious of the need to reach out to everyone and embrace all people as God’s precious children. This feast of Epiphany provides a wonderful opportunity for us to think about the expansive and all-embracing nature of God’s revelation to the world, embodied in Jesus, and above all of what it means for us to respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters.