By: Gustav Ineza, OP
Today the Church celebrates the Epiphany of Our Lord. The word epiphany, from the Greek Ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, means “manifestation”, “obvious appearance”, “revelation”, etc. So, today we celebrate God’s revelation to the world, beyond Israel. Revelation: we are used to this word in our church. We say that God reveals Godself to us in various ways. But can God also reveal Godself to other nations? Can those who are not with us encounter God even better than we do in their daily lives? For so many people, God starts its revelation through the lives of believers. The way we live our lives is a testimony of what we believe in and people ask to know more about it. Let us humbly ask for forgiveness for not always being the stars that lead people to God.
The magi are amazing. I think that, after the Holy Family, the magi are the most represented in Christmas scenes, before the angels and the shepherds. You will ask me: “How do you know that?” Well, Social Media memes! In the past, jokes on the Epiphany were mainly about schools’ Christmas plays in which little children struggle to pronounce the word “frankincense”. From time to time, you get things like: “Frank sent this”, “Frankenstein”, etc. This year those memes changed a little bit to put in light the pandemic, Covid-19, that we are still going through. Two images stood out for me as they explained well the pandemic times we are going through: on one image was the three magi walking in the desert and one of them turned and told the others: “When we get to Bethlehem, if anyone asks, tell them that we are from the same household.” The other image had Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and the animals in the manger, with a laptop. On the laptop was a screen with four faces and Joseph is saying: “Balthazar, I think your microphone is on ‘mute!’”
It is fitting to begin by trying to understand the meaning of the word “Magi”. The Greek word for Magi is “(magoi) μάγοι,” plural of “(magos) μαγος” The simpler explanation is to realise that it is very close to the words “magic” and “magician”.
Dear friends, the Magi were almost certainly not kings, but a class of Persian sages who served the kings with their skills in dream interpretation and observing the movements of the stars. Many people tend to limit their work to astrology, but I would say that, seen the seriousness of their work, one can hardly deny that they were the ancestors of astronomers. So, a combination of astronomy and astrology could be found in them, seen that in those days both disciplines were not clearly distinct.
Many Biblical commentators use Jeremiah 39:3 and Jeremiah 39:13 to give an example of a magos.
In those verses that introduce the war on Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the verses right after it, one finds the name of a royal official of the king of Babylon, Nergal-Sharezer, and some version call him the Rab-mag, which probably means chief of the magi. Some version thought that there were two people and one of them had the name “Rab-mag”. However, most translations saw it as a function. In Smith’s Bible Dictionary, it was “an office of great power and dignity at the Babylonian court, and probably [it] gave its possessor special facilities for gaining the throne.” The Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers Online agrees with Smith’s Bible Dictionary in its definition of the role of the official of king Nebuchadnezzar.
Depending on the sources, the title of magi appears among the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians. The idea of them being kings came about the sixth and seventh centuries.
In the sixth century, Italian tradition says that there were three Magi, Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar (Or Gaspar, or Jaspar). Some other traditions call them Bithisarea, Melichior and Gathaspa. It seems that some eastern traditions say that they were twelve. The Western Church thought that they were three since the Gospel of Matthew mentioned three gifts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Some people have said that had it been three wise women, they would have brought more essential things to parents of a newborn child. However, we know that these presences were more symbolic than chosen because of their direct usefulness to Joseph and Mary.
One strange aspect of today’s gospel is the role played by the star that appears to those wisemen. Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers writes that “stories, not necessarily legends, of the appearances of such stars gathered round the births of Alexander the Great and Mithridates as well as Caesar.” And then there is that foreign prophet found in the Book of Numbers, Balaam, who talks of “a star that was to rise out of Jacob” (Numbers 24:17). I am coming back to this Balaam in a moment.
The star that guides the magi seems to replace the angels that helped the shepherds have access to the baby in the manger. As they used to get their messages through the stars, it was a star that God used to communicate to them. Had they been reading the signs of times by looking at the shapes or movements of other creatures, God would still have made the revelation through those means. It is amazing that the same people who will interpret the readings from the Book of Micah 5:2 to Herod and to the magi, were not able to see that star. Indeed, God uses different means to reveal Godself to different religious traditions.
But let us forget about the star for a moment and focus on the revelation its holds. Indeed, Chinua Achebe writes that “when we gather in the moonlight at village ground, it is not because of the moon.” The star too was not the center of the revelation, but the newborn child.
So, coming back to Balaam, the foreign prophet found both in the Old and the New Testament – also in the seventh sura of the Qur’an (Al-A’raf: 175–176), where he is not named but his actions are, and later named by al-Tabari’s Tafsir or Qur’anic interpretation as a channel of Allah’s curses towards the disobeying people of Israel – that Balaam is also an example of God’s freedom in choosing how to reveal God’s ways.
This makes one wonder about what other ways and channels God may use to reveal Godself to the World, especially those ways that we may get tempted to not value because they do not fit in our books or because they are not announced by the prophets in our religious traditions. The fact that we may not be opened to trying to find God’s work in other traditions, especially when we realise that they are ethically shaped, may lead to disastrous results. In the evangelisation process, many traditions were ignored, and many others given a bad name which remains. In my own tradition, the Rwandan tradition, Christian missionaries did not accept that our monotheism was valid and refused that we may use the word “Imana” to mean God, and they gave us the word “Mungu”, which is in Swahili. After Vatican II, we were finally allowed to use Imana for God in Kinyarwanda. It is not an easy task today to try to undo the errors made by oftentimes well-intentioned missionaries in colonial lands. In fact, if anyone took the magi a little bit seriously, well for very selfish reasons of course, it was Herod. Well, it is amazing to what extent politicians today may ant to hijack interfaith settings for political purposes.
How much credit do we give to reasonably believable statements in religiously and ethically motivated traditions? So many people rediscover the treasures in their traditions when they encounter foreign ones. A prominent theologian in Christian-Muslim dialogue studies, Louis Massignon was the inspiration to many among the influential bishops and theologians at the Vatican II council. He had come back to his Catholic faith through the encounter of Muslims. His work is among many that inspired the making of documents such as Nostra Aetate (Latin of In our time), the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions.
So, dear friends, inasmuch as today’s feast is about Christ revealing himself to the world, it is also the day of the revelation that God works in different traditions. May we be among those interested by what other traditions want to share with us. Amen.