We are familiar with the almost comically unfamiliar Kings that we meet today, journeying in Eastern finery, sticking out like a sore thumb so much that they are strangely familiar, as though there has been a fire alarm in Funny Girls and all the cast were out on the street, exoticism suddenly brought face to face with minicabs and rain and litter. The Magi are not the dusty east of poor Palestinian peasants under Roman occupation, but the spice-laden Persian east, the Aladdin east of our Western imagination- turbans, colourful robes, vast palaces, sultans, minarets and genies, astrology and magic and smoke and mirrors. The Bible calls them wise men- magi (we get the English word magic from that word). Much of what we think we know about them comes is, simply, the accumulated imagination of two millennia.

They arrive late in the Bethlehem story. For they have come a long way, and took a detour to consult with a tyrant- visiting Herod’s palace and asking,

Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.

Herod had not been expecting a new king, not least one announced by a star. He is worried, and calls in his own advisors. Instead of consulting the stars, they consult their old books, and by accident stumble on the old prophecy that a special ruler will one day come from Bethlehem. Presumably the Magi were by that point drinking sherbets and luxuriating in a palace, probably for the first time since they left their own.

Herod tries to use the magi. He knows it’s in Bethlehem the danger lies- but where exactly, he’s not sure. So he pretends to be a potential worshipper (when in fact he has far more nefarious intentions) and sends them off to do the finding for him. And so the naive wise men toddle off to Bethlehem:

When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

There is, of course, something incongruous about these richly dressed (as we like to imagine them) wise men stooping to get into a tiny cave to worship a baby. The son of a carpenter and a peasant-girl, worshipped by magi, worthy still of worship: here is, indeed, the mystery and magic of the story of Jesus’ birth.

It would not have come naturally to the magi to disobey King Herod. For the Wise Men were members of the establishment. They were accustomed to royalty, used to honouring power, comfortable with kings telling them what to do. That’s why they first sought the new king in the royal palace. But this time, they go back by another road, because they had had a dream (people put a lot of store in dreams back then as well).

The Wise Men, inadvertently, caused a massacre of children, though it is Herod who is guilty: a man ordering slaughter because he needs to preserve his own power. And that is why this story is so powerful- for we know who today’s Herod’s are, and who their victims.

Around the world, children are still being killed because powerful people have ordered it. And they give political or strategic reasons why the children have to be killed- but it is revolting that it still happens today.

God’s gift to the world is Jesus Christ, the vulnerable child. God stoops into a cave in Bethlehem to be born, but very nearly doesn’t make it out of the manger, escaping just in time from the murderous Herod. For the Christmas story is no fairy tale. There’s power politics, misunderstandings, evil, tragedy: Rachel weeping for her children. Not everyone welcomes the disruption which Christ will bring into the world. In Christ, God comes, not to a Christmas card world, but our real world of wicked and incompetent leaders, where children die unnecessarily, where ordinary people have their lives disrupted by powers beyond their control.

And yet: there’s also the star. In Christ, the light has come which shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never put it out. Thanks be to our God, who brings light even in the darkest places. Amen.