January 6th is the traditional celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord, when the "wise men" came from the east to present Jesus with the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In the United States, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast on the first Sunday following the New Year for reasons of convenience, while our Orthodox and more traditional brethren stick to the 6th. Here in Tampa Bay (Tarpon Springs, to be exact, where there’s a large Greek immigrant population), it’s celebrated by the Orthodox Church with young men diving into the bayou to retrieve a special cross thrown in by the local archbishop—the boy who finds and comes back up from the water with the cross is provided with special blessings for the coming year. (UPDATE: Here’s this year’s result.)
There are some curious pictures that we have in our minds of the "three wise men" at the manger scene, bearing their gifts. It’s been the image we’ve used in our crèche scenes for ages. But the scenes are all wrong:
- Tradition suggests that there were three wise men, or three "kings" who came from the Africa and the Far East. Catholic tradition gives them names—Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar—which are used as part of an Epiphany tradition of blessing one’s house (over the top of the door in chalk is written the year with a cross and the initials of the three kings; for example, "20+GMB11"). However, the scriptures never say just how many "wise men" or "kings" came to see Jesus. There could have been three; there could have been many more (they are called "kings"—they must have had entourages with them in their travels). We assume three because of the significance of the number throughout scripture (i.e., the Trinity) and the fact that the scriptures show them presenting the three gifts.
- We almost always place the three wise men in the manger scenes we put out every Christmas season. Yet, if one reads the scriptures, while Jesus was indeed born in a manger (thus assuming that they were in a stable cave), the Gospels state that they three wise men came to see Jesus "at the house where Mary and Joseph were staying." Note that they’re now in a house, not a manger or stable. Once the census had taken place, it very well could be that as people left to return to their homes, Joseph was able to find a place for his new family and to give Mary time to recover from the trauma of childbirth. Given the amount of time that it would have likely taken these kings to travel from their homes in the east, and the subsequent plan of Herod to kill all the boys aged two and under (ascertaining that timeframe from the information he received from the wise men as to when the star that they followed appeared in the sky), it was likely that a year or two had actually passed by the time they got to Bethlehem and that Jesus was no longer an infant but a little toddler running around the house.
- Myrrh is an awkward gift to give a supposed king. It’s used in preparing a body for burial. A rather macabre present for a child. Did they somehow already know what God’s plan was?
All that aside, we celebrate the feast of the Epiphany as the time that the Lord is first introduced to the world, paid his first respects—interestingly enough, not by Jews, but by Gentiles. It’s, in a sense, a foreshadowing of what was to come throughout Christ’s earthly life. He would be rejected by the "in crowd" (the Jewish leaders), but received with enthusiasm by those on the outside.
