Magi is a word that is used frequently in the telling of the nativity story, but rarely do we understand what it really means. Most folks refer to them as wise men and a famous song refers to them as kings, but what were the magi? From Michael Pettem’s “The Star of Bethlehem: Science, History, and Meaning:
“The English “Magi” is simply the plural of the Latin word “Magus.” The Latin word in turn comes from the Greek “Magos.” The Greeks in turn took the term from the Old Persian “magush.” We will simply use the term “Magi.” The Magi were originally a hereditary caste of priests that officiated at religious ceremonies in ancient Iran. The ancient Iranian religion resembled Hinduism, and the caste of the Magi has been likened to the Brahmans in India. In the sixth or seventh century BC the great prophet Zarathushtra, often called Zoroaster in English, reformed the Iranian religion and inaugurated what became Zoroastrianism…The delegation to Jerusalem was rather a state visit by foreign dignitaries with expensive gifts to honor the birth of an important king. Such an embassy would have been planned due to reports from Babylonian astrologers, but the embassy itself would not have been by astrologers, but by court officials, by Magi, prominent members of the court of the Parthian Empire.”
The Jews spent 70 years in Babylon during their exile from Jerusalem, and during that time it is certain that their religion and scriptures found their way into the minds of their “wise men”. As the Babylonian Empire gave way to the Medo-Persian Empire, then the Greeks and the Parthians, it is likely that the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets filtered down through the ages within the circles of the well educated priestly class. The book of Daniel (2:48; 5:11) depicts the Hebrew royal prophet as being promoted to the head of the “wise men” (royal advisers, interpreters of dreams, prophets, magicians) in Babylon. Daniel’s prophecies became so legendary in ancient Babylon that their influence echoed for over 600 years. Somewhere around the year 100 AD, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “In the ancient records of their priests was contained a prediction of how at this very time the East was to grow powerful, and rulers, coming from Judæa, were to acquire universal empire.” He attributed these prophecies to the Roman Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus, but the visitors who came to Bethlehem from the East had a very different interpretation.
Nearly two thousand years later another brilliant, wise man would have his own encounter with Jesus. T.S. Elliot was a paramount 20th-century poet, critic, and playwright who revolutionized literature and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the Summer of 1927 he became a Christian, and two months later wrote the poem “Journey of the Magi”. It is written from the perspective of one of the Magi, speaking many years later on what the journey meant. Ultimately it’s a reflection on the pain, fear, confusion, doubt, second guessing, isolation, and ultimately, the realization and acceptance that all this was necessary to be reborn and transformed. It’s not about the destination alone, but the necessity of the journey to reach the destination, the cost that must be paid. The paradox: the Nativity also felt like a death — the death of his old world, his old gods, his old self, life as he had known it. Christ’s coming signals both the birth of new life and the death of the old order. Faith is not merely comfort; it undoes you before it remakes you.
The Journey of the Magi
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, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times 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 hostile 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 ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down,
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
With each passing year I relate more and more to the sentiment of the magi from this poem. I’ve come to realize there is no resurrection without there first being a death.
"For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Before anything can change in your life there must be a funeral." Chris McCurley
"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Death is something empires, not resurrection people, worry about." Rachel Held Evans
“Christ conquered the devil with the same weapons the devil used against us: a virgin, a tree, and death. The tokens of our demise have now become the tokens of our victory.” John Chrysostom
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