The Bible is
often hard to understand. It is meant to be so – not to hide things from
us or intimidate us into servile reverence, but rather to make us think for
ourselves. Sometimes the passages that seem simple are actually some of the
hardest to understand when we start thinking about them.
Take for instance
the story of the ‘Wise Men’ in Matthew 2. It is one of the most familiar
stories in the Bible. Every child knows it, though perhaps in its highly embellished
form, with crowned kings kneeling alongside the shepherds in a sanitised
stable. But reading it just as it is in the Bible, what does it really mean?
What is the point we are meant to take from it? It is full of unanswered
questions.
First, who
were they? At the time when the King James Bible was written, ‘wise men’ really
meant ‘wizards’. The Latin Bible, based on the Greek, calls them ‘magi’. This
word is connected with ‘magic’. They were really ‘magicians’. The word is used
in two other places in the New Testament, both in the book of Acts. First it
describes a man called Simon, a sorcerer who offered money to buy a spiritual
gift from the apostles: he goes down in history at Simon Magus, the
arch-heretic, and ‘simony’ is a word for corruption in religious circles. The
second example is Elymas the sorcerer, who tried to prevent Paul from preaching
to the governor of Cyprus. So, are we supposed to approve of these ‘magi’?
They came
because they had seen a star. In other words, they were astrologers. The Bible
never has a good word to say about astrology, and Christians are generally discouraged
from believing in it. So is this story telling us that astrology is a way to
God?
More unanswered
questions:
When they
eventually came to the right place and saw the baby Jesus, did they realise how
wrong they had been in their assumptions?
Were they
converted to the Jewish faith, and did they recognise Jesus as the Messiah? And
did they then give up their astrology and their other pagan beliefs?
In later
years, did they hear about Jesus?
If so, did
they become Christians? And if not (from the point of view of evangelical
Christianity) are they in heaven now or in hell?
The point of
the story in Matthew’s Gospel, of course, is that Jesus came for everybody. And
perhaps what it is telling us in today’s multi-faith world is that if we believe
this we will be faced with many unanswered questions. Matthew doesn’t answer
them, neither does the Bible as a whole: it just raises more questions. We may think
we have our doctrines all worked out, but real life isn’t as simple as that.
What this story, and the whole trend of the Bible tells us, is that whatever the
questions we have to hold on to the faith that Jesus is for everybody.
