Straight to the Heart

No one could accuse Matthew of understating his point. He is concerned that Mary and Rahab in chapter 1 were not enough to convince you. He knows the stubborn nature of the belief that God saves good people and not ordinary sinners. He is concerned that you may even assume that people of other faiths are not on his Gospel radar. So Matthew finds another example to convince you that God wants to save ordinary, sin-steeped people like you, me, and all the other people who live in our towns and cities. He hopes this will convince you that anyone can become an Ordinary Radical.

Most people know the Christmas story about the three Kings who saw a star in the east and travelled to Bethlehem to worship the baby Jesus. Actually, neither Matthew nor anyone else in the Bible tells us that there were three of them. Nor do they tell us that they were kings. They were Magi, which means that they were just about the least likely group of people to respond to Jesus and the Gospel of his Kingdom.

For a start, they were Persians, not Jews. They lived hundreds of miles away from Israel and were part of a completely different race. They had no natural share in God’s promises to Abraham or in the Jewish anticipation that God’s Messiah would one day come.

What was more, they appear to have been Zoroastrians, mystic followers of a different religion. In fact, judging by what Matthew tells us in chapter 2, they were leaders in their faith. They were to Zoroastrianism what an imam is to Islam today.

Furthermore, they were Magi, part of that ancient order of soothsayers who used the occult to predict the future from stars and dreams. Their order is the origin of the English word “magic”, and it was against people such as them that God pronounced judgment in the Torah. Soothsayers, astrologers and occultists like the Magi were to be condemned to death under the Mosaic Law.

As if all this were not enough, they were also the heirs to the destroyers of Jerusalem. Although some English translations fail to capture it, Jeremiah 39:3&13 literally tells us that the Magi assisted King Nebuchadnezzar in destroying Jerusalem in 586BC. They helped besiege the city until its residents murdered and ate their own children. They helped rape and pillage, and helped throw babies from the city walls to their deaths on the rocks below. They helped plunder the gold from God’s Temple and torch his holy city. The Magi who saw the star in the east were not merely foreigners who had no share in the message of the King of the Jews. They were the heirs to those who had killed King Zedekiah’s sons and reduced the Jewish royal family to such poverty that Joseph was forced to work as a manual labourer in Nazareth. The Magi we see pictured each Christmas in the stable were the heirs to the murderers whose violence had put him there.

Matthew has got our attention. There was hardly anyone on the face of Planet Earth who was less likely to respond to the Gospel than these Magi. Yet they went, travelling miles across the desert, when the Jewish leaders in Matthew 2 could not even be bothered to travel six miles up the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

Matthew tells us about the Magi for the same reason as Rahab, to convince us that God saves ordinary sinners like ourselves: ordinary people who respond to his Gospel with radical faith.

But he also tells us about the Magi to fix our eyes on those around us. Don’t write off any of your friends and neighbours in terms of the Gospel, just because they are Hindus or Muslims or occultists or God-haters. Matthew tells you that they may be just the kind of people God wants to save through you. If you will be God’s Star then you may well lead them to become his Ordinary Radicals too.