This essay first appeared in our weekly Scripture reflection newsletter on January 4, 2025.
It wasn’t until after I entered the Jesuit novitiate that I learned about the Christmas custom of placing the figures of the three Wise Men far from the crèche, or manger scene, until the Solemnity of the Epiphany. This was not something my family did, perhaps because our Nativity set was fairly small, and the little Wise Men might have gotten lost in our living room. Likewise, I didn’t know about the more common tradition (which, like the Wise Men custom, is seen in many churches today) of leaving the manger empty (sans the Christ Child) until Christmas Eve. I find that latter tradition a little surprising, since it means that during the whole of Advent, Mary and Joseph are staring into an empty crib!
But the reminder of the long journey of the Magi offers an important insight into how we come to faith. It’s often a long and hard journey. Staying there can be hard too.
By the way, as for nomenclature, the New Testament scholar Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. notes that it’s probably better to call the visitors “Magi,” which originally referred to a group of Persian priests, than to say “Wise Men” (too generic), “kings” (inaccurate) or “astrologers” (confusing for people today).
The reminder of the long journey of the Magi offers an important insight into how we come to faith. It’s often a long and hard journey. Staying there can be hard too.
But what many Christians want to know first about this treasured part of the “Infancy Narratives” (the stories of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew) is: Did it really happen?
As you might imagine, that has a complicated answer. In the Sacra Pagina commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, Father Harrington lists some factors in favor of the story’s historicity, such as the Jewish interest in astrology. Arguing against its historicity is the fact that the bright star guiding the Magi is not corroborated by any literature outside the Bible. The head of the Vatican Observatory, the astronomer and physicist Guy Consolmagno, S.J., has written that there is too little detail in the narrative to determine what kind of celestial event this might have been.
Father Harrington concludes, “The historicity of these episodes is an open question that probably can never be definitively decided.”
The Magis’ path to belief and, more specifically, to belief in the newborn King, to whom they would pay homage and offer gifts, was “a long journey.” So is ours.
But Matthew has offered us this beautiful story—perhaps embellished from an oral tradition based on some historical event—for a reason. For one thing, it reminds his readers that Jesus’s message is meant not simply for the people of Israel, but for everyone, including the Gentiles, that is, the non-Jews. Remember that Matthew’s Gospel ends with the command of the Risen Christ to make disciples of all the Gentiles” (28:19).
For Christians today, there may be another lesson: the journey to faith, as I mentioned, can be hard.
T.S. Eliot’s haunting poem “The Journey of the Magi” is perhaps best at capturing this: “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, sore-footed, refractory,/ Lying down in the melting snow.”
But in the end, as the Magi discovered, the journey is worth it—worth everything we can give to it.
The Magis’ path to belief and, more specifically, to belief in the newborn King, to whom they would pay homage and offer gifts, was “a long journey.” So is ours. It can take us a long time to come to a place of peace about our faith. For some people, it’s easy, but for most of us it’s a lifelong quest. And I sometimes think of those camels—“galled, sore-footed, refractory”—as an image of our church. The church carries us to faith, but it’s sometimes a bumpy ride.
But in the end, as the Magi discovered, the journey is worth it—worth everything we can give to it. It is something that, as the Book of Isaiah tells us, will make us “radiant” once we discover it. Because the end of the journey is not a destination but a person: Jesus Christ.
