It was a weird business. Herod already sat the throne like a cowboy on a rodeo bull: He'd fadged up a Jewish pedigree, won a war against the Gentiles and went Extreme Makeover on the temple - all signs that should have cemented his claim to be messiah. And he killed anybody who seemed to need it. Still, he worried.
What he didn't need - what nobody really needed - was a bunch of hippies drifting in from out of state to jab a cattle prod into the delicate underbelly of the whole fragile situation.
They came from the East - like maybe New York; probably talked funny, too. And they spouted a bunch of New Age mysticism about Saturn in retrograde and the winter solstice. Didn't know the Bible, though. Herod called in his tame preachers who'd all done AWANAS as kids and didn't hesitate to cite chapter and verse on the twenty of the coming king. "Bethlehem," they chirped in unison. The fastest among them stepped forward, his finger pointing to the passage as he announced, "Micah 5:2!" But even as the winner collected his prize - a laminated book mark imprinted with the Ten Commandments - he knew he'd stay away from the City of David. Nothing good could come of this.
Matthew wrote to reassure - and to challenge - a Jewish church that found itself suddenly flooded with Gentiles, half-trained foreigners who had figured out that nature only started a sentence which only Scripture could finish. They had enough sense to see that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God" but not enough education to know what to do about it. The Evangelist drops a couple of hints to his fellow-Israelites: First, these newcomers need your Bible knowledge if they're to complete the journey, and second, your Bible knowledge is no good to you if it doesn't reinterpret your own world and send you on the same trip.
Epiphany - literally "the shining" - reminds us that the star of Bethlehem was essentially a reading lamp meant to shed enough light on Scripture to help us find the Lord. We can go blind by staring at the light and we can go blind by reading in the dark. The only safe course is to let both books - life and sacred text - send us off on a journey to Jesus.
Wise Up!
Doug
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