The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
January 11, 2009
Vol. 12 no. 02

Everything But...
           It happens every season that we are forced to live on the boundary for a Sunday, neither fish nor fowl, depending upon your druthers. This is clearly the First Sunday after Epiphany, which is usually the first Sunday after two dated events of importance in Christian tradition. January 6 is Epiphany, the day when the Magi arrived in Bethlehem, while January 9 has been remembered as the Baptism of Jesus. I imagine the water was very cold. We are on the boundary of two days - which one do we celebrate?
          Let’s do both, realizing that about 30 years intervene between the two Gospel stories. “Nothing happens” in the interim anyway!
          The Magi play the role of exotic foreigners to the hilt in the Gospel of Matthew, and no shepherds are in their way. Their origin is vague, though tilted somewhere to the East, but one thing for sure is that they were not Jewish. Studying the stars was a source of wisdom and direction for them, so the Magi felt drawn to the land of the Jews in search of a great king. We don’t know which route they took, but since they eventually sought out Herod in Jerusalem they would have found it difficult not to cross the Jordan River. No bridges then, so they must have become wet. Were they baptized before there was baptism?
          Crossing the Jordan was the entrance into the Promised Land, the way to get into a universe saturated with God. The Magi, eventually to be identified as practitioners of magi-c, tended to shop for wisdom wherever they could find it. Crossing the Jordan they found something so specifically divine that it demanded their worship. But, did they change? Like a lot of us, they just went home.