“…they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.” (Catholic edition RSV, Matthew 2:11)
The Wise Men’s journey to Bethlehem was a pilgrimage, not an excursion. They traversed the desert not to satisfy their curiosity, nor to give themselves a foreign holiday, but to offer their homage and worship to One whom they knew to be more worthy of it than anyone else in the world.
They showed that most clearly by the gifts which they offered to Our Blessed Lord. Gold, the royal metal, declares him to be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Incense, the central gift, expresses the central fact of his Person, that he is the Eternal God who became Man. Myrrh, foreshadowing his burial when the spice was used, proclaims him as the Saviour, who suffered to save us from the power and consequences of our sins.
And so from our point of view, those three gifts point to our corresponding response to Our Blessed Lord as our King, our God and our Saviour; and that response is nothing other than our threefold response to the first and great Commandment, “…thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength…” (Mark 12:30).
“If you love me”, said Our Blessed Lord to his Apostles in the Upper Room, “you will keep my commandments”. And he added, “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me…” (NRSV, John 14: 15,21). And there lay the answer to a question which two years before he had put to a great crowd drawn from all parts of Palestine and beyond, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not do what I tell you?” (NRSV, Luke 6:17,46).
So our response to Our Blessed Lord as our King is something more than mere loyalty – it is loving obedience and it will be expressed and revealed in our daily life. What does that mean in practice? It means honesty, truthfulness, integrity, in little things and in great. It means purity of mind, patience and self-control, active good will towards all and a forgiving spirit towards those who have wronged or injured us.
And it also means that our motive for thinking and speaking and acting like that is just that we may please Our Blessed Lord and be pleasing to him; not loyalty to principles, but loving obedience to him.
So too with our response to Our Blessed Lord as God made Man. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God…” (Matthew 4:10) and worship is adoration, the total adoring response of human beings to the One Eternal God as he has revealed himself.
Worship is not a matter of our feelings or emotions, rather, it is essentially a conscious action of the will, whereby in adoring love we deliberately offer to God our whole selves, all that we are and all that we do, for him to possess and to use as his very own. Thus true worship issues in true obedience. As Archbishop William Temple said, it is not so much that worship helps conduct, as that conduct tests worship. (1)
But love for Our Blessed Lord cannot fail to be accompanied by penitence for our rebelliousness and our acts of rebellion against him, and for our many failures to respond by our loving obedience to him who loved us and gave himself for us. And so, as the myrrh reminds us of the crucifixion and death of Christ – the price that he paid for coming to save us from the power of sin in ourselves – it symbolises also our penitence for our own particular sins which he came to save us from.
True penitence for our disobedience to our King and our God, followed by a determined and practical effort to amend, must always be an essential proof of our love. To adopt the attitude, consciously or unconsciously, of “I couldn’t care less about my sins” when confronted with the crucifixion, is to reject Our Saviour himself. Indeed without both penitence and obedience, worship is not worship at all. It is simply an empty formal act unconnected either with the kind of person one is or with the kind of life one leads – it is something loveless and therefore valueless.
Here on earth we find that all three gifts are represented in the Christian’s life, but in Heaven there remain only the gold and the frankincense – obedience and worship. The myrrh of suffering and of penitence has gone, despite the fact that the scars, which still mark Our Lord’s glorified Body are a perpetual reminder of the cost he paid for us men and for our salvation.
But there in Heaven the Blessed Saints obey our King and worship our God in full and perfect love, and their salvation is at last complete, so that Our Saviour’s sufferings are remembered only with joy and gratitude for what they have achieved.
“The dear tokens of His passion
still His dazzling body bears;
cause of endless exultation
to His ransomed worshippers… (2)
References
1. Temple, W. (1944) The Church looks forward, New York: Macmillan. The original quotation is, “People are always thinking that conduct is supremely important, and that because prayer helps it, therefore prayer is good. That is true as far as it goes; still truer is it to say that worship is of supreme importance and conduct tests it. Conduct tests how much of yourself was in the worship you gave to God”. Cited in Ramsay, M. (2004) The Anglican Spirit, New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, in Editor’s Notes p.142.
2. Cennick, J. (1752) republished and altered by Charles Wesley (1758) and Martin Madan (1760) Lo! He comes with clouds descending. Available from:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/l/h/lhecomes.htm (Accessed 28 December 2011) (Internet).