Cliff’s Notes to the Gospel
They say, “Confession is good for the soul.” And being that this is a new year, I don’t really mind confessing that when I was in high school, I used to use Cliff’s Notes. Those were the days before the internet. We now have access to so much information at your fingertips. But back when I was in high school, you could rely on these nifty, concise black and yellow cover booklets that gave summaries of long novels that we were supposed to read from cover to cover in high school English class. And if I were brutally honest, I would admit that I sometimes found even the Cliff’s Notes much too long in its literary analysis. I just wanted the short, straightforward summary of the book. So most of the time, I would look for the synopsis at the beginning of the Cliff’s Notes and rely on that to give me a preview of what the rest of the book had in store for the reader.
Now I’m not really advocating using Cliff’s Notes, at least not for its unintended purpose. It’s supposed to be used as a study aid in conjunction to, not in lieu of, the source material. And I mention this because the Gospel reading today, the story of the Magi, can itself be considered a Cliff’s Notes version of the entire Gospel story. If we take the time to examine it, we will find that the story of the Three Kings is the Gospel story encapsulated into one story…because on a most fundamental level, the story, as well as the entire Gospel, teaches us that anyone who goes searching for Christ, when they encounter Him, they will be changed in such a way that, although they may go home, they always find a better route, a different way to go home.
That is the recurring theme that runs throughout the entire Gospel—this change of heart, a conversion that leads one to take a different route. And we see this theme even on the level of the three gifts that the Three Kings presented to the Christ child: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It is particularly apropos to us, after having just survived what was for some a hectic season of shopping for and returning gifts…it is worthwhile to see what we can learn from what the Three Kings gave to God. After all, if you think about it, the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were the first Christmas presents—the first gifts that Jesus ever received for Christmas.
The first is the gift of gold. Why gold? Because it is the gift most fitting for a king. Gold represents the best that we can possess in this life and to a king deserves the best. Did you count how many kings were in the one Gospel story? There were five of them. Let’s see, there were the Three Kings, King Herod is the fourth, and then there is Jesus, the King of kings. King Herod spent his entire screen time worrying that the Child King would take all of his possessions away—that’s why he later orders that all of the first born male babies slaughtered—the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. At the birth of the King of heaven, a king of earth is troubled because he fears losing his possessions.
In the Christmas season, there is this subpar genre of gift-giving known as re-gifting. Now I won’t divulge if I myself have been guilty of what some believe to be a déclassé social faux paux (there is a limit to my public confessions per homily). But if you think about it, everything that we possess was first given to us by God; everything from our time here on this earth, our treasure we possess, and even our talents, they are all gifts first given to us from God. And so, what we decide to give back to God in terms of what we possess is in essence a re-gifting of what God so generously gave to us. And I mention this because whereas we tend to re-gift to others those things that we might not use or have excess of, we should re-gift to God as King only the best that we have. That what it means for us to offer Christ the gift of gold. The Three Kings were kings in their own right. But unlike King Herod, they weren’t afraid to lose their earthly treasures in order to follow the Christ…and that’s what they did when they gave the Baby Jesus the gift of gold…they left Bethlehem, their pocketbooks a litter lighter, which allowed them to successfully traverse a different route to get home.
Now the second of the magian gifts is that of frankincense, which as some of you may know is incense. In the time of Jesus, one would only burn incense to signify a sacrifice to God. That is the irony of the Three Kings—they were not Jews who believed in the one, true God. No, the Three Kings were from the East and believed in pagan gods—they were idolaters. Yet we called them Wise Men because when seeing the man, they acknowledged the God. By giving Jesus frankincense, they paid homage to his Godhead.
They say that our prayers rise up to God like incense—that is why we use incense during Mass from time to time—to remind us that our prayers should always accompany the sacrifices we offer to God. Now when it comes to the second gift of incense or prayer, the theme of changing our course applies in a very subtle way. We can make sacrifices—real ones that, in the eyes of the world, appear meritorious. But without prayer, our sacrifices are mere burnt offerings that never rises pass the amount of their worldly value. Even the most simple sacrifice we make is augmented in value with the offering of prayer because in our prayer are the implicit virtues of trust in God, docility to God’s will, patience and constancy, and humility. All of those virtues require a willingness to be ourselves transformed and so we ourselves become part of the sacrifices that we are offering to God. Incense and prayer…the second gift.
Now we come to the third and final gift of myrrh. Myrrh is an embalming agent used for the body of the dead, which, if you think about it, is an unusual gift. You wouldn’t give myrrh to God who cannot die, only to man who can die. And why give myrrh to a newborn baby? What the Three Wise Men understood that so many people after them failed to grasp is that unlike every person, who is born to live, Jesus is the only person who was born to die. You see, Jesus, as God, he was the author of life and therefore himself cannot die…unless he took our human nature, unless he was born of the Virgin so that he can offer his human life as a sacrifice. So that is why the Three Kings gave Jesus myrrh, the gift of one who is to die.
And this gift of myrrh, believe it or not, can in many ways be our gift to Jesus. Yes, we were all born to live. But we were also born to die to ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I always found the notion, “if you give up your life, you will receive eternal life” to be kind of counterintuitive. But it is actually one of the first lessons that we learned as a child. When we were young, we were given certain toys, like a ball for instance, and we had fun playing with the ball, throwing it up and catching it on the way down. But we eventually learn that to build any type of relationship, we have to give something away. A child may at first resist your taking the ball away from him, but he soon learns that to play catch with someone, you have to first give the ball away to have the ball thrown back or returned to you. Yes, playing by oneself is fun, but by no means near as fun as playing catch with someone else.
This idea of giving something away just to receive it back is not so counterintuitive or uncommon as you may think. You have to give someone a greeting, “Hello,” to receive one back, “Hi, how are you?” In basketball, you have to pass the ball to another player at some point, in order to be passed back the ball…otherwise, it wouldn’t be much of a game if everyone kept the ball to themselves. You have to send out a note, via e-mail for instance, to receive a reply back. Life is a series of giving what you have away, in order to receive it back…because by giving, we are received into a community, a body larger than a body of one. Because ultimately, that is what heaven is—a community of saints who all have give up their earthly life to Christ so that they can inherit life everlasting in heaven.
We know that the Wise Men went home by a different route—but it doesn’t mean that their journey home was just as easy as the old route. If it were the easier route, they would’ve taken it to begin with. No, they were willing to go out of their way, to take the more difficult way home because they knew that Herod was waiting for them if they returned by the old route. They went out of their way, the road less traveled, and in the course of it, found the path of righteousness.
Gold to the King, frankincense to the God, and myrrh to the Man. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that each king did not offer one of each gift. No, each of three kings gave each of the three gifts. All three of them gave the best they had in the form of gold. They offered their prayers with their frankincense. And they gave their life, symbolized by myrrh.
In the remaining days of the Christmas season, this season of giving, the Gospel reminds us of the true spirit of giving by giving us the story of the Three Kings. No wonder I so much go back to revisit this story. It reminds us that we cannot encounter Christ, each and every day, without somehow being moved to change our heart, to redirect our mind, to conform our will, so that we go home to the heavenly kingdom by the path of righteousness. The story of the Three Kings is the Gospel story in one story. It is the Gospel story because it is the story of our life.
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