The Bible has a way of telling stories that is very spare, almost minimalistic, which leaves lots of room for the imagination to run free.  In today’s Gospel lesson we read, “wise men came from the East came to Jerusalem.”  That small portion of one sentence says a lot and leaves a lot unsaid.  Who were these wise men?  Where did they come from?  What was their journey like?

We may wonder who the wise men were, and we know a little bit from history.  The Greek word that here is translated as wise men appears in several places in the Bible.  Usually it has a negative connotation and is translated as magicians.  We find it in the Greek version of the Old Testament Book of Daniel where it refers to Babylonian seers who were unable to interpret the king’s dream.  We find it in the New Testament in the Book of Acts the where it appears twice.  First is refers to Simon a magician in Samaria who tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles Peter and John – they refused to sell – giving us the word simonony.  Later in the Book of Acts, a man named Bar-Jesus, a false prophet on the inland of Cyprus, is also called a magician.   But here, in the Gospel of Matthew, the word has a positive connotation.  The wise men were probably some kind of priests and astrologers who studied the heavens, looking for signs pointing to a messianic king.   In fact, messianic expectations were running so high in that era, that wise men showed up at the birth of Roman emperor Nero   - he was not the messiah, it turns out.

We may wonder where the wise men came from.  We know that they came from the East, but it’s not clear exactly where in the east.  Some scholars think that they came from Babylon and others think that they came from Persia.  If they came from Persia they may have been priests of the Zoroastrian religion.

The lack of concrete information about who the wise men were and where they came has allowed imaginations to run free for centuries.  The Eastern Church they imagines that there were twelve wise men, while we in the West imagine three.  They have been given names Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar, and have each been identified with one of the world’s ethnic groups.  Because they have valuable gifts and meet with Herod on equal terms, they are sometimes thought of as kings.   All of these details are embellishments, which you can see in our glorious Epiphany window, add rich detail to the story.

We may wonder what the wise men’s journey was like.  My imagination is drawn to the details of the trip and how difficult it must have been.  I can imagine them crossing the dessert boiling hot during the day and freezing cold at night.  No one I know, however, imagines the wise men’s journey better than the American-English poet T.S. Eliot in his poem The Journey of the Magi.  Let your imagination run free as you listen to what Eliot writes

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, refactory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when 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 dirty 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 years, saying
That this was all folly.

Those verses help me picture the wise men’s journey perfectly.

I like to imagine the wise men’s journey because it is the story of the journey to faith.  It seems to me that the Biblical witness is that the way to God is often like the wise men’s, a cold, hard journey.  Consider our Old Testament lesson this morning from Isaiah.  Although the passage itself is full of exuberance, the background isn’t so cheery.  Isaiah speaks of Israel’s sons and daughters returning with great joy to Jerusalem.  Here he is referring to is Israel’s return home after 70 hard years of exile in Babylon.  The return that Isaiah envisions is so glorious that the rest of the world joins in too.  As marvelous as the return is, we should remember that the road home went through 70 years of exile.

St. Paul knew all about the hard road to faith, too.  Paul writes from prison because he had aroused great hostility by advocating the equality of the Gentiles in the Church.   As we read today in The Letter to the Ephesians, “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.  Of this gospel I have become a servant.”  He had come to this faith the hard way, being a persecutor of the Church before he was the apostle to the Gentiles, standing up for their full inclusion in the Church, and now he was paying the price.

We care about the wise men because whether we are wise or foolish, we are all looking for the Christ Child.  We care about their journey because it is our journey too.  There are no short-cuts on the spiritual journey and the way can be hard.  As Jesus says, “’the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction … the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life.’”  Along the way we find King Herod and all kinds of trouble that try to kill the dream that is in us.  But along the way we also have the star of faith which steadily leads us to the Christ Child. Amen.