4th January 2026 

04/01/26 – Martin Mowat

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6 and Matthew 2:1-12

Do you remember that in the 50s and 60s it was fashionable to have two-tone cars? Well, just to warn you, this is a bit of a two-tone message, you’ll see why in due course.

This coming Tuesday is the Feast of the Epiphany, the day, 12 days after Christmas, when we remember the Magi’s visit to Jesus in his Bethlehem stable. 

Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn, we’ve just heard in Isaiah’s famous prophecy. 

So, these Magi, were they really kings or just “wise men”, and if kings of what countries? Well actually no, they weren’t kings, at least there’s nothing in the Gospel of Matthew, the only place in the Bible that they are mentioned, that implies they were rulers of any kind. Rather, it’s thought that they were just astrologers who served in the Zoroastrian temples of Persia, searching the stars for prophecies and omens.  That would satisfy Matthew’s statement that they came “from the east” 

That idea probably originates in the fact that they told King Herod, in Matthew chapter 2, that they’d seen a star that they believed heralded the birth of a messiah.  They weren’t Israelites, though, so they must have been very well read, hence, no doubt, the adjective “wise”.

Their names are traditionally Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior. The fact that the popular carol says “We Three Kings of orient are” is because in western church tradition, Balthasar is often represented as a king of Arabia or sometimes Ethiopia, Melchior as a king of Persia, and Gaspar as a king of India, but that’s not factual and it’s not biblical, as I said.

How long would it have taken them, then, to travel by camel to the manger in Bethlehem? If we take the view that they were astrologers, not kings, and that they came from Persia, so some 500 miles, most likely at least a month or even longer, and possibly enduring all sorts of hazards and hardships along the way? 

Why, then did this group of foreign Gentiles get together and decide to set out on such a considerable journey? It was to meet and honour one who has been born king of the Jews. Hence the costly, precious gifts that they brought, gold, frankincense and myrrh which were probably meant to be as symbolic as they were practical. Gold represented royalty, frankincense represented the presence of God, although researchers believe that the medicinal uses of frankincense would have been known to Matthew when he wrote his gospel, and myrrh to represent the suffering that was to come.

I have no way of telling, but as I intimated last week, I do wonder whether they might have been surprised to find that they had travelled all that way only to find a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in an animal’s eating trough, in a dirty, smelly, farm building. 

Be that as it may, at some point they were apparently warned “in a dream not to go back to Herod, as he had asked them to, so they returned to their country by another route.”

The next verse in Matthew’s gospel tells us that “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

This was because “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he had been furious and had given orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under. That is an horrendous episode by anybody’s standards.  Why did Herod do something so callous? For the same reason that powerful men do equally callous and cruel things today, because they can, and because it builds their ego. In this case Herod felt threatened, and when powerful men feel threatened, anything can happen.

So, the little family did as the angel told them to do. They went to Egypt and travelled around for something like three and a half years before God told them that they could make their way home to Nazareth.  Their relatives, friends and neighbours must have been worried about them and incredibly relieved to see them home again, infant in train. 

Egypt. It’s funny. I’ve never been there but when I think of it, I see it as hot and inhospitable, probably because of the 430-year Israelite slavery there. But actually that’s totally wrong because the Nile delta is extremely fertile and the lifestyle there would have been wonderful then, except for the slaves of course.  

That’s why it was a place of refuge, I suppose. First for Abraham, later for Jacob and his twelve sons, and now, even later still, for Joseph, Mary and their little one.

And that’s my queue to return to my series about Abraham, albeit rather an obscure one.

It was some weeks ago when we talked about Abraham and Sarah telling porky-pies to Pharaoh about their relationship, telling him that they were brother and sister, rather than husband and wife. It was in fact partly true, but when Pharoah took Sarah into his harem, God cast a plague on the royal family, which not surprisingly annoyed Pharaoh intensely, so he sent them away, showering them with gifts in the process, and these gifts included a servant girl called Hagar.  So she’s my rather tenuous link, because she was an Egyptian.

Abraham and Sarah were desperate to have children, despite their advanced age, but not just children, they needed a son to inherit. For some reason, in that culture at that time, it seems that daughters couldn’t do that.  They desperately wanted a son and for whatever reason it wasn’t happening.  Was Sarah baren, or was Abraham impotent? Of course they had no way of telling, so Sarah had an idea, and she shared it with Abraham. 

It’s an idea that sounds outlandish to us but apparently it was not at all unusual.  The idea was that Abraham sleep with Hagar, Sarah’s servant, and have a son that way, which is what they did.

But there was a problem, well several actually. Hagar began to despise Sarah because now it was clear whose fault the lack of children had been, and because she had been able to, she felt superior. Sarah didn’t like her attitude one bit and started to mistreat her, so much so that Hagar ran away, taking the precious child with her.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.  The worst of it was that Abraham and Sarah had tried to give God a helping hand, and do things in their own strength, according to their own logic, and in their own way. But it hadn’t solved anything because the baby Ishmael wasn’t the son that God had promised.

God was yet to fulfil his promise in his own time, in his own way.  What they didn’t know was that God NEVER reneges on a promise.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, talking about changing his plans to visit them, Paul said “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so, through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.”   Amen means “so be it”, it means “OK, Lord, do what you’ve said you’ll do”.

When Abraham received the promise of a son, which he did on no less than six occasions, he should have said “Amen, OK, Lord, do what you’ve said you’ll do,  and do it your way.” And then waited. 

Next time we’ll see how God DID fulfil his promise, but meanwhile let me ask YOU, has God promised you something and it still hasn’t happened? 

It will.