“Two Thousand Years at Rafah”
Matthew 2:1-18
If you were here on Christmas Eve, you might have noticed that there was no “no room at the inn,” but instead, “no room in the guestroom.” Though we have all seen countless Christmas pageants, in person and on screens large and small, this is a better translation of Luke’s text. If the census had actually happened, Joseph and Mary would likely have stayed with relatives, not at a Motel 6.
In the same way, today’s reading does not give us three kings, or even three wise men. First, there is no mention of how many traveled from the east, just the three types of “gifts.” In fact, in some Eastern forms of Christianity, they celebrate twelve travelers, possibly reflecting the twelve tribes of Israel.
Second, they are definitively not kings. The unknown authors of Matthew use the word “Magi,” sometimes translated as “Wise Men.” We do not know whether the authors intended it in this generic way, or if they were using it with specificity. Magi were priests in the Zoroastrian religion of what is today Iran, east of Judea. Conflating the Magi with kings was certainly convenient for the church when it wanted to claim supreme authority, but it simply isn’t there in the text.
The authors of Matthew have a different agenda. They are, of course, recording the story of Jesus, who they view as the Messiah. But instead of focusing on his connection to David, as scripture, theology, and tradition often does, the authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as a new Moses, the intermediary between God and humankind, negotiating a new covenant, for covenant and testament are translations of the same concept. You might also use the words contract or agreement or treaty.
To that end, the authors of Matthew consolidate the teachings scattered throughout the other two synoptic gospels into five great sermons, to match the five books of the Torah. The sermon Luke describes as delivered on a plain is delivered on a mount in Matthew, to match the work of Moses on the mountain. And, relevant to today, there is a royal order to slaughter infants, just as there was so long ago under the evil Pharaoh. The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt strengthens that connection.
Though the events described in today’s reading are likely the product of holy imagination, the birth of Jesus roughly coincided with a widespread revolt against the rule of Herod the Great, a revolt that was eventually crushed with brutal violence. There is, in this text, a kernel of historic memory, a real slaughter.
What Western Christians have made of this story is a bit more complicated. Though it has assumed a different definition in modern times, in the original Koine Greek, Epiphany meant an appearance or manifestation. The visit of the Magi, who are definitively not religiously or culturally Jews, is read as salvation being made accessible to the Gentiles, often read through both the Koine Greek and Hebrew theology as “the nations.” This is a fulfillment of Hebrew testament promises, that through the children of Abraham, through the people covenanted to Yahweh, all nations would be blessed. The star appears to Gentiles, salvation is made manifest to the nations.
Unfortunately, Christians have often understood the new covenant as superseding prior covenants, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic. This was exacerbated by the dramatic events approximately four decades after Jesus was executed. Jerusalem and the surrounding region had spent most of the previous five centuries under foreign rule, often paying backbreaking taxes. The one successful revolt in the period, a century and a half before Jesus, was led by the ancient equivalent of rednecks, soon found to be completely incompetent and corrupt. The widespread rebellion around the time Jesus was born was followed about seventy years later by the First Jewish War, an utter disaster that saw Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed again.
It is after this, four decades after Jesus was executed, that what we know as Judaism today, Rabbinic Judaism, begins to form, at the same time early Christians were adapting their faith for the context of non-Jewish culture in Hellenistic and Roman-ruled regions.
Supersessionism is the bad theology that sees Christians as replacing Jews, and plays into two thousand years of hatred, Martin Luther’s raging antisemitism, the “Blood Libel” fabricated in Russia and so like today’s Q-Anon, even the Holocaust, for while few senior Nazis publicly identified as Christians, Christian Germany was the soil in which the Final Solution grew.
And here we are, two thousand years later, and Persia, which is today Iran, funds the terrorist group Hamas, which opposes the right of Israel to exist, an existence necessitated by centuries of oppression and slaughter due to Christian and Muslim antisemitism, while extremist Jewish settlers engage in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, wiping out Muslim and Christian communities that have been there for centuries with a wink-and-a-nod from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition.
The silence in Bethlehem this season was not just about the crimes against humanity and the slaughter of civilians in the war between Hamas and Israel. It is also about the crimes against humanity, one seizure and one border wall at a time, in the place where Jesus was born. And honestly, though pastors are often called to be public theologians, I am not an agent of international jurisprudence, and have no desire to calculate the relative value of different lives or the weight of different sins. I am not interested in lesser and greater evils when the toll is always a slaughter of the innocents.
It is all grotesque to me, the intolerance, the hatred. Every person deserves the right to self-determination, to bodily autonomy, to worship the holy as they understand it, or to not worship, if that is what they choose. Every person, including a woman in Texas facing the devastating end of a pregnancy and the young woman in Pakistan who wants to marry who she wants to marry, the boy who has lost his entire family as Israeli bombs fall on so-called safe-zones and the boy who has lost his entire family as terrorists raped and murdered their way through a kibbutz.
The epiphany for me is not that God’s covenant was or was not symbolically extended to Gentiles through a visit from some unknown number of Zoroastrian priests. Even if we take the account in Matthew as factual, it never says anything about the Magi abandoning their own faith to follow a Jewish baby who will not even begin teaching and healing for another three decades.
The Magi celebrate a child from a different culture. Then they go home. The end. At least as far as the Magi go.
Of course, we read the rest of the story this morning, the family warned that Palestine was not safe, fleeing across the border into Egypt like so many wounded at the Rafah Border Crossing today.
Maybe there is still hope for humankind. If Jesus is the new Moses, then maybe it is worth noticing that the victory over the Pharaoh came through divine violence, a series of plagues ending with the Passover, the death of so many first-born sons.
But the Easter victory does not come through divine violence. It comes through the divine suffering violence, and gives witness that love and holy mystery are so much stronger.
May we, like so many Magi, bring the simple gift of loving presence to the young woman who lost her child or chose not to give birth, to the young woman who gave birth to a child, the young Jewish mother, Muslim mother, Christian mother, or none of the above, to Hipster moms and ex-con moms. May we, like Magi, refuse to participate in slaughter, and instead, be agents of new life. Amen.