In the midsixties a Roman Catholic cardinal and a priest Scripture scholar found themselves seated at the same table at a dinner party. The cardinal immediately put forth his grievance. "You know, Father, there are some Scripture scholars these days who are saying we don't know how many Magi there were."
"I am not one of them," replied the scholar.
"I am glad to hear that..."
"There were six."
"Six!" blustered the cardinal.
"How do you figure six?"
"Well, in the reliquary at Cologne there are the heads of three wise men and in the reliquary at Milan there are the heads of three wise men. Three plus three equal six."
Although this anecdote is probably fictional, it gets big laughs when academics gather. I don't know if anyone has told it at a bishops' meeting.
The number of Magi is not given in Matthew's account. In Christian imagination they have ranged from two to a whole cohort. But in most of Nativity art, from earliest times to the present, there are three. It seems natural that three gifts should have three carriers. Can all those crib sets be wrong?
Of course, the original story in Matthew is the touchstone text. It is a tale steeped in irony, laden with symbols, and rich in theological associations. However, the popular Christian tradition never felt unduly tied to Matthew's text. The story became more a springboard for the imagination than an anchor for sober reflection. In a generous estimate, it might be said that the original story initiated a trajectory of concerns that later elaborations developed. However, a more accurate appraisal might be that the Magi of popular poetry and story are more indebted to the concerns of Christian faith in general than to the dynamics of the brief tale in Matthew. In Matthew's story the Magi came primarily to worship; in subsequent tradition they rode again, driven by desires not far from any human heart.
G.K. Chesterton wrote an essay on three modern Wise Men. They journeyed to a city of peace, a new Bethlehem. They wanted to enter this city and proffered their gifts as passports of admission. The first put forth cold gold and suggested it could buy the pleasures of the earth. The second did not carry frankincense. He brought instead the modern scent of chemistry. The scent has the power to drug the mind, seed the soil, and control the population. The third brought myrrh in the shape of a split atom. It was the symbol of death for anyone who opposed the ways of peace.
When they arrived at the palace of peace, they met Saint Joseph. He refused them entrance. They protested, "What more could we possibly need to assure peace? We have the means to provide affluence, control nature, and destroy enemies." Saint Joseph whispered in the ear of each individually. They went away sad. He told them that they had forgotten the child.
This tale is a critique of contemporary wisdom. The Wise Men come with the benefits of wealth and technology, and they think that those assets will bring peace. The story is suspicious of these gifts, but it does not deprecate them. It views them neutrally, suggesting that in themselves they will not provide access to the city of peace. The real problem is not what the modern Wise Men have brought, but what they have not brought. They have forgotten the child.
The enigmatic symbol of the child points to the missing ingredient of modern wisdom. The child image pushes the mind and heart in many directions. It is difficult to know which path will prove productive. It seems that Chesterton's concern is that the modern mind for all its sheer knowledge is divorced from something very simple. The Wise Men need the baby to save them from their own knowledge. They need to enter into the house where Mary and the child are or else they will journey forever over the earth and never be at home. When they worship the God who lives on the earth, the mind that studies the sky will be saved.
The Magi are searchers. They are looking for the Christ child, but they do not have exact directions and they cannot travel by day. A star leads them, a tiny point in a night sky. Their quest is mainly darkness and minimally light. They are manipulated by Herod and become unwitting accomplices in a horrible slaughter. They rejoice at their find and they present their gifts worshipfully, but they leave quickly and return home by another route. Darkness and danger are more a part of their lives than joy and worship.
Their situation is often contrasted with that of the shepherds. The shepherds do not have to deal with a mute star. They are blessed with a very talkative angel. This angel gives them exact direction to the birthplace of the child. They will not have to consult devious kings. They are also told the identity of the child and serenaded with a song about the meaning of his birth. Once they arrive everything is exactly as they were told. They skip off to tell everyone, and to a person everyone is astonished at what they hear. Angelic revelation, joy, and proclamation tell the shepherds' story.
We may yearn to enter into the Christmas mystery with the simplicity and directness of a shepherd, but often the struggling Magi are our real representatives. Their struggle is characterized in many ways. Evelyn Waugh sees in their journey the vacillations of the learned: "How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where shepherds had run barefoot!...Yet you came, and were not turned away.. ..For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their Kingdom."
"Taking sights and calculating" is a tame estimation of the Magi's journey. William Butler Yeats sees it as an endless, unsatisfied passion to ground our "thrashing about" in mystery. However it is rendered, the Magi are symbols of the restless human spirit, of the unseeing quests we undertake and, more often than not, the unlikely finds we discover.
Following Christ costs. This is a Gospel theme that is stressed and restressed. Jesus' parables of the buried treasure and the pearl suggest that finding and selling go together; "going, he sold all that he had...." To follow Jesus one must leave occupation and family. This is not so much a literal leaving as a symbolic detachment. Choosing a new absolute point of reference entails letting go of previous absolutes. To walk a new path we must leave the old path. This emphasis on detachment is not only insisted on in the gospel, it seems to be the commonsense consequence of freedom.
Yet the inevitability of this painful process always stuns us. We are always taken by surprise that this newborn child wants whatever gifts we have. On the positive side, this means redirecting our energies toward whatever is coming to birth in him. On the negative side, it means letting go of other gods. This birth of Christ brings the awareness that we are alien people clutching gods.
When people attempt to summarize the revelation of Christianity, they often talk in terms of reconciliation. The divisions within people, between people, between people and the earth, and between people and God have been overcome. There is a new sense of communion. What was divided is not seen to be in a new, life-giving relationship. Communion has replaced separation. This awareness of communion includes claiming aspects of ourselves and others we had previously pushed away.
This theme of communion and the overcoming of separation appears in some of the poetry about the Magi. In W.H. Auden's Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, the Wise Men and the shepherds both appear at the manger. Their voices are initially contrasted. The Wise Men talk of hunting high and low, traveling with doubt and the unknown, and finally finding an ending to their endless journey at the manger. The shepherds are the opposite. They talk of traveling nowhere, living in uninterrupted routine, and finding a beginning of their journey at the manger. They represent different types of people, but also they refer to different dimensions of each person.
For both these human types the birth of Christ is a refusal and a blessing. The Wise Men desire to have no past and the shepherds no future. These desires are refused, but it is noted that Love has used these escapist tendencies as a "guard and a guide." Instead they are both asked to bless their overriding drives, the Magi their impatience and the shepherds their laziness. Then they bless each other's sin and exchange places. The Wise Men give away their exceptional conceit and the shepherds their average fear.
G. K. Chesterton once took issue with Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Scientists. Mrs. Eddy told the press that at Christmas she did not give presents in any w gross, material sense. Rather she meditated on Truth and Purity till all her friends were better for it. Chesterton accused her of being anti-Christian. The whole point of the Incarnation was to embody good will. "The Three Kings came to Bethlehem bringing gold and frankincense and myrrh. If they had only brought Truth and Purity and Love there would have been no Christian art and no Christian civilization." Chesterton goes on to argue that Christ himself was a Christmas present, a real embodiment of divine love.
Therefore, gift giving is the way the invisible becomes visible, the way the hidden heart is made known, the way spirit risks itself in substantiation. The gift giving that is associated with the birth of Christ is not gross, but spiritual activity of the highest order.
In Christian tradition the gifts of the Wise Men have become symbols of the perfect gifts. What makes them perfect is their ability to bear and communicate spirit. On the one hand, the gifts show that the Magi know who the child is. The gold symbolizes his kingly humanity, the frankincense his divinity, and the myrrh (an ointment used in embalming) foreshadows his redemptive death. They are not fooled by the outer trappings. Their gifts show they discern his inner reality.
On the other hand, poets have interpreted the gifts as symbols of the Magi's inner dispositions. Gold means that they offer their virtues, frankincense shows them to be people of prayer, and myrrh represents their willingness to sacrifice. The outer gifts tell of their inner reality. What is hidden is revealed. Their gifts are perfect because they allow communication between two interiors; the hearts of the Magi reach the heart of the child. The perfect gift is one that carries one person into another person.
Each age reads Scripture out of its own concerns. This is doubly true of the imaginative explorations of the Magi story.
We live in a time in which our rational mind is so powerful it could trigger our extinction. No wonder the Magi become warnings to recover the child.
We live in a time in which we are sensitive to tasks of life that are built into the structure of aging. No wonder the Magi represent the stages of life.
We live in a time between times, a time of glacial shifts of consciousness. No wonder the Magi's search is hard and their find both less and more than what they expected.
We live in a time in which our preoccupation with the materiality of all lives threatens to shrivel our sense of spirit. No wonder the Magi know that matter is the secret communication of spirit.
