Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way onto the Internet for Winter, Christmas, the birth of Christ, Santa Claus, and so much more..Magi Kings
On the same night, a bright star appeared in the eastern sky. It came up majestically over the rim of the world and could be plainly seen through the trees of a forest, in the mirror of a quiet lake, a blue pearl over a tawny desert, a gem of hope far at sea. It was seen by many, and marked by few. The star came up blue-white, in the orderly orbit of the heavens, and it seemed so large that it shed blue shafts of radiance.
Three of the men who studied it were Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. They were rich Persians. In the southeast, they regarded the new star in the east and stroked their beards. These were wise men, scholars who were referred to as the Magi and who were known in Persia as philosophers, scientists, astrologists and followers of Zoroastrianism, a creed which fought the worship of graven idols and believed that there was but one God for all men.
The Magi were excited about the star. It had two phases of interest for them. One was the physical-where did this star come from and why had it not appeared in the night sky before? The other was the symbolic: what message was the star trying to convey? The three wise men pondered these things and could come to no agreement on the first premise.
One argued that it was not really a star, but a rare conjunction of two or more stars. This could not be so, a second said, because if it were, their paths, having converged, would soon part and they would be seen as separate stars. A third said that the star was really an unknown comet, appearing brilliantly in the eastern sky, and doomed quickly to pass from view.
Whether it was several stars, or planets, in conjunction, or whether it was a fiery body without a visible tail, the star had special meaning. They were sure of this. They consulted some of the old astrological predictions, and found nothing that would fit the situation. They tried some of the old Greek and Persian tracts, but found nothing which might apply.
It wasn’t until they went over the ancient Jewish scriptures that the wise men saw the true meaning of the big star. There was an old prophecy by Balaam which said:
“I shall see him, but not now. I shall behold him, but not near. A star shall rise out of Jacob and a scepter shall spring up from Israel.”
The star then would mean that a savior of the Jews had been born. Melchior agreed that, if the star could not be explained in any natural manner, this interpretation was important-to the Jews. Oh no, said Balthasar, more than the Jews because Balaam, the prophet who uttered the words near the end of the forty years’ wandering, was not a Jew. He was a gentile. In fact, the words, according to scripture, had been said in the Mountains of Moab, on the edge of Persia-outside of Israel,
If so, said Gaspar, then the fact that the star had been seen by Persians, and properly interpreted by them, would have exciting meaning for the entire world. It was possible that the messiah had come to save not only the Jews, but the Medes, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Babylonians, the savages farther to the east.
At once, the three wise men left their tents, determined to follow the star. They packed food and water, and the special trappings of rich philosophers, and started out on camels to find the place of the King of Kings. None of them expected to reach a destination in one night and there was some disagreement among them about whether the star would appear again on the following night, so that its path could be traced.
