What do You Want for Christmas?
On the night before Christmas, growing up, we put out empty pillowcases next to our beds. In the morning they would be filled to bursting with presents.
Once I miss-timed my Christmas morning wake-up. I could feel at the end of the bed that the bag was full but not even the birds were awake. Reclaiming sleep was hopeless and the next hour or two of waiting in the quiet darkness was a bit torturous.
Perth Christmas mornings were invariably cool and clear-skied, with the promise of much swimming in the pool later on. We would take our bulging pillowcases into the living room, and then began the heaven of extracting and unwrapping one perfectly wrapped gift after another.
Our parents’ amazing generosity did not however prevent us from inwardly assessing present quality. What separated the sheep from the goats was the hardness of the wrapped gift. To put it bluntly, a solid gift rated high, a soft gift rated low. Hard gifts were likely to be a toy, a Star Wars blaster for example, or a board game, or something electronic like a Walkman (if you’re under 38, ask someone older...) Soft gifts were likely to be clothes. Nothing is less interesting than clothes.
I would like to say, coming up to my 49th Christmas, that I have grown out of this ungrateful habit of assessing presents according to their pliability. But I haven’t. Because hard presents these days mean books, and clothes are still dismal.
Having introduced the Christmas present theme in such a longwinded way I turn now with a crash of gears to the gifts that were given at the first Christmas: the three presents of the Magi presented to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.
Matthew alone tells us the story:
After the Magi from the east had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.
We don’t know how long after Jesus’ birth this happened. Given that King Herod, just after the Magi’s visit, tried to kill Jesus by ordering the death of all boys in Bethlehem aged two years and younger, it may have been anytime within two years of his birth.
A magos was a pagan wise man, priest, and/or astrologer. “Magic” and “magician” come from magos. Magi is the plural, and coming from the east, and following a star, these were probably Persian astrologers.
Our Christmas cards’ assumption that there were three Magi rests on the giving of three gifts. From Matthew though we learn only that there were more than one. The traditional names, Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior, were fabricated about five centuries after Jesus’ birth.
We know for an historical certainty, however, what the Magi did when they finally found the baby Jesus. They “fell down and worshipped him.” The word “worship” typically described prostration before a king, to kiss the hem of his robe. The Magi fell on their faces before the baby Jesus in awful respect.
Many have dismissed the story of the Magi’s visit, “What Persian wise man would come to honour the birth of a Jewish peasant?!” The strangeness of their worship points to the greatness of the baby.
These travellers, who would have been very rich to have made such a long journey, and who were no doubt highly honoured in their own land, saw in the baby Jesus someone of cosmically greater honour and glory.
And the fact that non-Jewish pagan religious leaders came to worship Christ shouts out that the Saviour came to rescue not just Jews, but people from every tribe, nation, and tongue. So some thirty years later the same Jesus would command his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations.”
We must also contrast the pagan Magi with Herod the Great, the putative “King of the Jews.” As a Jewish leader, Herod should have led his people in honouring the birth of the Lord’s Anointed. Instead he tried to murder him, and it was left to gentiles to honour him. This prefigures what the Gospels lay out from start to end, the rejection of Jesus by Israel, and his intention, born in Genesis 12:1-3, to take his salvation blessings beyond the borders of Israel to all nations.
Let’s now look at the significance of those first “Christmas gifts.”
Gold is a rare and precious metal. As I write, it costs almost $70,000 per kilo. Gold has always be immensely valuable, and until we get to heaven and tramp on it like bitumen it always will be counted as immensely valuable.
Frankincense, from an old French word meaning “pure incense,” is the dried sap of the Boswellia sacra tree, native to the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula. Small holes are chiselled into the bark and the sap seeps out in little tears, which are collected when they dry. Frankincense “is bitter in flavour and has a strong balsamic odour when heated.” The Egyptians used it for embalming. In the ancient near east Kings were commonly anointed with frankincense ointment. It was “particularly expensive.”
In the desert God commanded Moses to make a sacred ointment with this rare aromatic: “Take fragrant spices—gum resin, onycha and galbanum—and pure frankincense, all in equal amounts, and make a fragrant blend of incense, the work of a perfumer. It is to be salted and pure and sacred” (Exodus 30:34-35).
Myrrh likewise is dried sap, in this case from the Commiphora myrrha, “a low thorny tree” which grows in the same places as frankincense. Myrrh is used in perfumes and cosmetics, and was one the ingredients in the sacred anointing oil used to consecrate Old Testament priests (Exodus 30:23-25).
Just before Jesus was nailed to the cross, “they” (was it the soldiers, or the women who followed Jesus to Golgotha?) offered him “wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.” (Mark 15:23, the concoction may have been a kind of primitive anaesthetic.) After his death John reports that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus “brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about thirty kilograms. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs” (19:39-40). The myrrh was intended to slow and mask the odour of decomposition, and its application indicates that Jesus’ followers did not expect an imminent resurrection. Myrrh, then, is closely identified with Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.
In Revelation 18, gold, frankincense, and myrrh appear in the list of luxury goods that the “merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over,” because after God’s judgment upon Babylon no one will care about them anymore. This testifies to the great value of these items in the present world.
Moreover, the Queen of Sheba gave King Solomon “120 talents of gold, and a very great quantity of spices and precious stones. Never again came such an abundance of spices as these that the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon” (1Kings 10:10). Psalm 72 uses this as a picture of the ultimate tribute that will be given to the Lord’s Anointed:
The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him; the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts. All kings will bow down to him and all nations will serve him (verses 10-11).
With those gifts the Queen honoured Solomon as a great King, and with their worship and costly royal gifts the Magi honoured Jesus as their great Sovereign and King. They showed him to be the fulfilment of Psalm 72.
The early church Fathers tended to attach allegorical meaning to each gift: gold for Jesus’ royalty, frankincense for his divinity, myrrh for his humanity. Certainly Jesus is all of these things.
Modern scholars, however, tend to discourage looking for individual significance, saying that it is the general “character of the gifts which is the impressive thing, not the potential use.” Alfred Edersheim, for example says that the Magi’s homage was “the first and typical acknowledgement of Christ by those who hitherto had been ‘far off;’ and their offerings as symbolic of the world’s tribute.”
I agree in the main. But... the close Old Testament association of frankincense with the priests, and the close Gospel association of myrrh with Jesus’ death and burial, tells me that the Magi’s presents were not any old precious and expensive gifts, but pointed forward to Jesus’ great High-priestly work, the offering up of himself as a sacrifice for the sins of all of his people from every corner of the globe.
May the Magi’s gifts remind us this year of God’s gift of His Son, the Great King who was given as a sacrifice for the world, “that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash