More Thoughts on the Magi

For some reason, the Episcopalian blogsphere has had a lot of interesting material about the Magi recently. One of the blogs I regularly read, On Not Being a Sausage, is maintained by Deirdre Good, Professor of New Testament at General Theological Seminary, NYC. She points out this interesting article on another Christian blog that has an insight about the story of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents in Matthew's Gospel (emphasis mine)....

The unfortunate massacre took place because the Magi initially searched for God in the wrong place. When they initially targeted their search to Palestine they decided that the final identification could be made with the assistance of the rich and the powerful.

The Christian community has traditionally considered these children as martyrs and as Saints and commemorate this sad event as Childermas, Children's Mass or Holy Innocents' Day. In the gospel the massacre of the holy innocents comes after the story of the Magi. Yet the western church's marking of that date coming after Christmas on the 28th of December and before celebrating the Epiphany in January 6th seems almost to hide this story away – almost as if it would be rather bad taste to have such a sad unpleasant story spoiling the celebration of Christmas and Epiphany.
So by conveniently separating this sad event and the celebrations of Epiphany, we risk losing the holistic understanding of the consequences of Epiphany. By sanctifying and elevating to sainthood the massacred children we cannot sanitise the fact that the martyred children were victims of raw human greed for power and control and their massacre was the horrific consequence of wise people searching for God and salvation in the wrong place. (source)

I know not everyone gets the whole blog thing, but I do love scanning the web for gems like this. Blogging is a great way to cast crumbs on the water.

-t