It is an honor to speak with you again. Eventually I will run out of things to say about Christmas, but as my wife says, it is a good thing I have the gift of gab. I can talk a great deal about little things, but only a little about great things. Thankfully, I think Christmas (and Christianity for that matter) is a conglomerate of little things.

The last two years I have tried to tell stories. Two years ago, I told the story of the Bethlehem Star, how it was actually Jupiter and Saturn intersecting, causing a brilliant light in the sky. We literally have software now that can track the movement of every start in the sky through history. We can thus rewind the tape and see exactly what things looked like at the Nativity scene. Remarkable. That was the Star of Bethlehem.

Last year I told you the story of the real Saint Nicholas. He was a bad ass. He not only burned to the ground the pagan temples in his land, he not only suffered imprisonment for his refusal to worship the Roman gods, but he punched a heretic in the face for denying the divinity of Christ. For me, that equals bad ass.

This year I’d like to tell you the story of the three kings who appeared on Christmas night to adore the infant Jesus. The problem is that there probably wasn’t three of them, and they probably weren’t kings, and they probably didn’t appear on Christmas night, and Jesus might not have even been an infant at the time. But other than that, it is a cool story.

The three kings, the three wise men, the Magi. Who were these guys?

 Matthews Gospel is the only gospel that addresses them. It doesn’t say three kings. It doesn’t say three wise men. It doesn’t say three magi. It just says, “Magi from the east”. Actually, in the original Greek, it doesn’t even say East. It says in the originally Greek, Magi “from where the sun rises.” East, I guess is close enough. But as a side note, doesn’t “from where the sun rises” sound better than East? And doesn’t it just fit better when the whole story is about a baby who grows up, dies, and rises from the grave? Being the poet that he is, I bet Uncle Fred would have used “from where the sun rises” instead of East. I don’t know. Come to think of it, I think Fred should do his own translation of the bible.

But East is good enough. And East has a lot of symbolism in Scripture. As you know, nothing is superfluous in Holy Scripture. Everything has a meaning, a double meaning, a triple meaning. So, the Magi came from the East! What else does the East mean in scripture?

Did you know that most Churches throughout history were built facing east. The Catholic Mass, you know, when people say, “the priest has his back to the people”, is actually a symbol of everyone facing East together. Why East? Because Christ said that he would return from the East – the second coming would come from the East. Jesus said in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 24:27, “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man.” I used to send my son outside every morning to look east, asking him if he could see Jesus returning yet. Seriously. I used to do it every morning, and I still do it on occasion. Imagine if he came running inside telling me he saw Jesus coming over the eastern hill. One day I bet he will.  

So again, everything in scripture has a meaning, a double meaning, a triple meaning. So, the Magi came from the East! And so will Christ once again.

Anyhow, back to our story.

The Magi came from the East. OK. What is a Magi?

To help with this, I will enlist the spelling skills of our esteemed Editor in Chief. Fred – what word do you get if you add a C onto the end of Magi?

MAGIC. Ah! Magic. Usually, folks, when you have two words with that many similar letters, you can bet they are related somehow. What on Earth do the Magi and magic have in common?  

You see, the Magi were from Persia – today its called Iran. And the Magi were from a priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism was an ancient religion of Iran – and a really weird one at that. The priests of this religion were often considered sorcerers. They were not just astronomers, but astrologers. Astrology is when you think the stars tell you your future. You read the stars like reading tarot cards. So, Magi were not highly regarded by the Jewish people. To put in a sophisticated way: they were superstitious wackos.

Magi – magic.

To double down on the point, just consider the sorcerer in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus, condemned as a heretic by the Apostles. He “bewitched” some of the early Christians with his magic. But when the big dogs showed up, the Apostles, and performed miracles, Simon of Magus offered to buy their magic tricks. Magus. He was from the same group in Persia as the Magi.

Now, the King James version of Scripture, a translation that I love, does not call them Magi, even though the Greek word is perfectly clear. King James says Wise Men. My guess is that by 1611, when the King James was translated, the tradition of the wise men, the three kings, was so prominent that they didn’t want to muddy the waters by using the word Magi. Afterall, Magi is a rather negative connotation, as I have just showed you. So, good King James didn’t want the nice Nativity scene messed up with a bunch of sorcerers. So, he called them Wise Men.

But I really don’t understand this. The whole story of Christ is about the calling of all nations to conversion, not just the Jews. Jesus came for Jews and Gentles alike. Right? Jesus is for everyone, right? In Christ there are no Jews or Gentles. There are no Jewish Shepherds or Persian Magi. There are no purified and unpurified. If you offer yourself to Christ, you are accepted. Am I right or am I right?  

Well, you have Magi – magicians – sorcerers – astrologers – from a faraway land come to Christ and fell down before him. In their humility, they fell down before a baby. Talk about humility! This reminds me of many other characters throughout scripture that Jesus rewards. He accepts and rewards anyone who is meek and humble of heart, just as He is.

To me, the Magi bowing down before Jesus represents conversion of sinners, the conversion of confused people, the saving of a lost people, a people who placed their faith in their reading of the stars, in the mysteries of the natural world. We have a lot of people today who do that. People place their faith in the natural world, in Mother Earth, in Almighty Science. The Magi were probably like this until they found themselves bowing before a baby. Imagine the captains of industry doing that today? Would Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, or the Google Guys, fall down before a child?

Here, in the Nativity scene, we have men of science making an act of faith. Here we have men of the natural order bowing before the supernatural. Here we have men of the world’s old and false religion prostrating before THE new religion, the new covenant.

So, I love to see the Magi for what they were.

Now, how did we start calling them kings? Well, there are a couple of Old Testament passages, particular one from Isaiah that talks about kings will bow down before the Messiah. So, people just started calling these guys kings! Perhaps they were kings. Perhaps tradition really did pick this up outside of Scripture, which happens all the time. But as far as my research shows, there is nothing in scripture to indicate they were actually kings unless you assume the Old Testament passages applied to them.

And why did we start saying there were three Magi? Well, that’s just an assumption because there were three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But we have no idea how many showed up. Magi is plural, so there were at least two. But there could have been 7 or 12 or 40! Some other good biblical number. But we say three. That’s fine.

So what do these gifts mean? As I read it, these three gifts are absolutely perfect, for they represent the incarnation – God becoming Man – Jesus.  

First, gold is of great value. It is fit for a king. Jesus is a king.  

Second, frankincense is just a fancy word of incense. It represents our prayers rising up to God. You offer incense to a god because it rises up. It carries our prayers up to God. And Jesus was God.

But, thirdly, we have myrrh. This represents death. You springle a dead body with myrrh for the embalming processes. In fact, it was considered more valuable than gold because it could only be made in the far East. Here, the Magi have recognized that this baby would one day die and should have a burial fit for a king. Jesus would indeed die.  

And so, we have three gifts that total up to Jesus. Jesus is the king of kings, for he is God made man. A king gets gold. God gets frankincense. A dead man gets myrrh. Christ is all three. He is a king. He is God. And he is a dead man.

Lastly, to continue our story, I’m sorry but the Magi did not show up on Christmas night. Tradition holds that they showed up 12 days after Christmas, which is where the 12 days of Christmas come from. We also call this the Epiphany, January 6. Epiphany means, the shining of the light. We can conclude this means both the light of the Bethlehem Star and Jesus being the light of the world.

You see, we are not, I repeat, not in the Christmas season. We are in Advent. I know I’m a stick in the mud for this. Even I decorated my house last weekend. But I sorta do feel like a sell out. Your ancestors did not decorate their house until Christmas eve. Why? Because Advent is a penitential season – a season for suffering. Both the Magi and the Holy Family were undergoing difficult and treacherous journeys during this time. For the past few thousand years, Advent was another Lent made for fasting and alms giving and mortification. We are waiting for the Lord, repenting for our sins. We are then supposed to party like crazy for the 12 days of Christmas. But I guess the horse is out of the barn on this one, and I might as well shut up about it.

One interesting historical note. The Magi might have shown up more than a year after the birth of Jesus. Scholars conclude this because Herod ordered the slaughter of the innocent, the murder of all boys under the age 2 based upon the visit of the Magi. So, who knows.

My point is this: it doesn’t matter when the Magi showed up. It just matters that they did.

And I think it does matter that these guys were not well-respected Jews. They were men from a distant land from a false religion. I think that matters a great deal. All that matters is that they humbled themselves before Jesus.

I don’t think it matters whether there were 3 or 7 or 12. But I think the gifts they brought matters greatly.

To me, the Magi represent men unworthy of being saved by Christ, just like you and me. They represent men who brought gifts unworthy of the God of the universe. But they offered what they had to offer. This is all that you and I can do, sorta like when my kid draws something that makes no sense at all and gives it to me. It is a beautiful gesture and loved by the recipient.

At Good Will, we travel far and wide, like the Magi. We are unworthy to approach our Lord, like the Magi. We offer even something less than gold, frankincense and myrrh. We offer paper. We offer little books in day cares and elementary schools and funeral homes. We offer paper and wooden boxes in corporate America. And we offer paper through Amazon and thousands of bookstores and churches and across the internet.

But on these scraps of paper are messages that can change the world. Just like my little kids scribble on paper, we scribble in our books. To God, they might not be much more than scribble. But he loves them just the same. It was Saint Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest theologian in the history of Christianity, who said on his death bed, “All I have written is but straw”. He meant that compared to heaven, his writings were nothing.

Good Will’s products are our gifts to the infant Jesus. We offer them with humble hearts. We offer them with repentant hearts. And God warmly and graciously receives them.

Please remember this Advent and Christmas season that Good Will makes these offerings to God each and every day and that you play a vital role in this process. If you treat it just like a job, then your individual task is just that: a job. If you make it an offering to Our Lord, like the Magi offered their gifts to Him, then He will receive them in the same spirit. Please don’t waste the opportunity to make an offering of your work at Good Will Publishers. Most people never have such a chance. You work for a Christian business doing Christian work in the world. I hope you are proud of this, particularly during the Christmas season. Happy Advent. And Merry Christmas.

Thank you.