Gifts of the Magi

As I was preparing for this week’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and the treasure God offered to us in our own Baptism, I found myself thinking more about those gifts the Magi brought to Jesus last week, which signified their recognition of Christ, but also, perhaps, something even more to you and me. I think those gifts spoke a word about how we should approach Jesus in prayer.

For example, we’ve all got gold, haven’t we? I mean, all of us are materially rich, relatively speaking. But we so fill our lives with material things that we leave little room in our souls for the riches of grace being offered to us in Christ. So, we “give Jesus our gold” whenever we put down our phone, or bring the Bible into bed at night. We’ve got lots of worldly gold, yes, but God is offering us something of infinite value.

And what about the frankincense in our lives; what might that be? Since that gift recognized Christ as true God, perhaps the grains of incense we’re called to empty before him are our preconceptions about God. We’ve all got our own ideas about “what God is like,” but most of these are incomplete at best. If, however, we willingly give these notions to Christ we make room in our hearts for the prayer that He makes possible, which enables us to worship God in spirit and in truth.

As for the myrrh, since it was a sign of how Christ would rest in the tomb after dying on the cross for us, perhaps God is inviting us to lay down our own ideas of what makes for rest. Not seldom, we insist on defining rest as inactivity, having no responsibility, or being left alone to do what we want. In other words, we think rest comes from escaping the cross. But the true rest that Christ is offering us comes only after dying to ourselves on the cross.

So maybe the Magi say to us, “We were happy to give up our treasures for the worth we found in Him. Nor was it difficult for us to part with our ideas about God for the fullness of the teaching we found in Him. And setting aside our own equivocations between comfort and rest has brought to us the most surprising newness of all through the rest we found in Him.” Now imagine we were to live our Baptism in this way? +