SERMON XXII. THE GUIDANCE OF THE STAR. (FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY.) ST. MATT. 11. I, 2. Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, saying, Where is He that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him. T. MATTHEW'S account of the Wise Men who came from the East and worshipped at the cradle of the Infant Jesus, is remarkable first of all as being St. Matthew's. We might have expected to find such a narrative in St. Luke. As a rule, St. Luke represents those world-embracing aspects of the life and work of Jesus Christ, which he had learnt to dwell upon during his companionship with St. Paul, the great teacher and converter of the Gentile peoples. St. Paul is pre-eminently the Apostle of the Epiphany; St. Luke would be its natural Evangelist. St. Paul, with his passionate desire to "make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God," a might seem to us to be the natural fellow-worker with the Evangelist who should tell us that, when the Infant Eph. iii. 9. n Saviour was born, representatives of the wisdom of Eastern heathendom toiled across the desert to discover and to adore Him. Had this been so; had St. Matthew recorded the appearance to the shepherds, while St. Luke described the visit of the Wise Men, we should have been told, no doubt, that the events of St. Luke's narrative were not merely so selected as to illustrate, but that they were invented with a view to proving the truth of St. Paul's teaching. Therefore probably it is that, as a matter of fact, the one early event which justifies the action and teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles is recorded in the pages of the Evangelist who was most intimately connected with, and representative of, St. James and the Jewish Church of Jerusalem. So little ground is there for the modern assertion that there were two or three different Gospels in the Apostolical Church, or that the Evangelists wrote that which, in obedience to such theories, they ought to have written, or, indeed, anything like it. The Festival of the Epiphany must be deemed of very high importance by a believing and thoughtful Christian. It does not merely commemorate one of the most beautiful incidents of our Lord's Infant Life. It asserts one of the most fundamental and vital features of Christianity; the great distinction, in fact, between Christianity and Judaism. The Jewish religion was the religion of a race. If a man was born of the seed of Abraham and was circumcised on the eighth day, he was in covenant with God. If the blood that flowed in his veins was Greek or Roman, he was a stranger to the covenant of promise; he could at best, in some favourable circumstances, attain an outward connection with the religious system of Judaism, as did a proselyte of the gate. It was the consideration of this which led St. Paul to ask whether God was the God of the Jews only; whether he was not God of the Gentiles also. Was a merely national religion like this a full unveiling of the Mind of the common Father of the human family? Was His Eye ever to rest in love and favour only on the hills and valleys of Palestine? Was there to be no place in His Heart for those races who lay east and west and north and south of the favoured region? Or was the God of Israel, like the patron-deities of the heathen world, the God of Israel in such sense that Israel could lastingly monopolize His interest, His protection, His love; that heathendom, lying in darkness and in the shadow of death, would lie on in it for ever, without a hope of being really lightened by His Countenance, or being admitted to share His embrace? It could not be. The Jewish revelation of God contained within itself the secret and the reason of its vanishing by absorption into the brighter light which should succeed it. Just as the Apostle points out, when writing to the Hebrews, that the Jewish ritual, when closely scrutinized, was seen to be pregnant with the sentence of its own abolition since it foreshadowed that perfect work of the One Atoning Victim, which it could not itself achieve; b so much more did that glorious and blessed revelation of God's Being and character, which the Law and the Prophets taught so fully and so variously to the chosen people, make it impossible that God should not manifest Himself to others. How would His mercies have been over all His works; how would it have been true that He was Lord of all, if all, save one favoured race, were to be for ever outside His kingdom of righteousness? No; Judaism, as a religious system, read the sentence of its coming disappearance in the handwriting of its greatest seers and rulers. "All nations whom Thou c Ps. cxlv. 9. d Acts x. 36. a Rom. iii. 29. b Heb. ix. 8-12. с b hast made shall come and worship Thee, O Lord, and shall glorify Thy Name." a "All the ends of the world shall remember themselves and be turned unto the Lord; and all the kingdoms of the nations shall worship before Him: for the kingdom is the Lord's." "It is a light thing," so runs the prophetic message to Messiah, "that Thou shouldest be My Servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give Thee for a Light unto the Gentiles, that Thou mayest be My Salvation unto the ends of the earth." c Or to omit much else to the same effect- "There shall be a Root of Jesse, and He that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in Him shall the Gentiles trust." d These anticipations were not really realized when, during the two or three centuries before our Lord, educated pagans at Alexandria and elsewhere began to take a deeper interest in the Jewish religion, and to detect in it a higher truth than they had known before. The first step to the fulfilment of the predictions of David and of Isaiah was made when the Wise Men crossed the desert on their visit to the Cradle at Bethlehem. That visit opens a new era in the religious history of the world. We Gentiles of to-day, who have gathered here to worship our Divine Redeemer, owe all that we have hitherto received from Him, all that we hope from Him in time and in eternity, to that grace which led those Gentiles of old to come to Christ's light, those "kings to the brightness of His rising." Let us, then, inquire more particularly what lessons this remarkable event has to teach us. ,, е a Ps. lxxxvi. 9. e Isa. xlix. 6. e Isa. 1x. 3. I. This visit of the Wise Men shows us, first of all, how variously God speaks to us; how many are the voices whereby He calls us, if we will, out of darkness, whether of the mind or of the heart, into His marvellous light.a He uses a language to each which each can understand. It may be childish, even unintelligible, in the ears of other men; but it has a substantive value for us, if we will only hear it. The home of the Wise Men was probably in Persia." They belonged to the order or caste of Magi, who for many centuries represented the current wisdom of the East. They were looking out for some Deliverer from evils of which they felt the pressure, without being able to define and describe them. The historians Tacitus and Suetonius tell us that a rumour was current throughout the East which pointed to Judæa as the birthplace of men who would rule the world; and this rumour would have gathered strength from the vague longings for a Saviour which were widely felt by heathens as well as by Jews. As St. Paul says that the Jewish Law, like the heathen slave whose duty it was to lead his master's sons to school, led Israel to Jesus Christ, the true Teacher of humanity; d so the natural law, written in the hearts of the heathen, did a kindred work. It made the heathen conscious of с e b The ancients were divided between Persia and Arabia; the Eastern Fathers generally naming the former, the Western (through a natural interpretation of Ps. lxxii. 10, etc.) the latter; cf. Mill, Chr. Adv. Publ., P. 375, note 66. с Suet., Vesp., §4: "Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis ut eo tempore Judæâ profecti rerum potirentur." Tacitus, Hist., v. 13, thinks that the anticipation was realized in Vespasian. e Rom. ii. 14, 15. a Gal. iii. 24. |