Reflection for Epiphany on Matthew 2:1-12

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th January 2024

Matthew’s Wise Men from the East are on a quest, following a star. In a quest, heroes follow a long, hard and dangerous journey to find an object of great value before returning home. The Wise Men are learned astronomers, who have come to pay homage to the king of the Jews, because they ‘observed his star at its rising’, we’re told. The learned chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem direct them to Bethlehem. The star leads them there, to the Christ-child with Mary his mother.

At the culmination of their quest, they are overwhelmed with joy. They kneel in homage and present their gifts, signifying that the royal king they seek is in fact this baby. Now that’s amazing, isn’t it? They have travelled so far, suffered such hardships, to find what? A tiny, vulnerable, human child, just like so many they could have found without stirring from home!

After finding what they seek, the Wise Men return home – the proper end of any quest. Matthew does not tell us what they made of it. But in his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, T S Eliot imagines the response of one of them, years later in old age. I can do no better for a reflection than read it to you.

Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I am sure we are to take Matthew’s story as fable, not history. The great truth buried in it is this, I believe - the Wise Men’s quest is our quest too. The light of the star represents all that is good and true and beautiful, all that is worthy of God. If we have the tenacity they had, to follow the light of their star, like them we will find that baby, who is, as St John puts it, ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone’. And like the aged Wise Man, what we have found will change us, we will no longer be at ease with the ways of the world we knew before, the old dispensation.