My three decades of service in social work and urban ministry have been sustained and inspired by the ethics and values of scripture. The greatest commandment (Mt 22:36-37) in the time before Christ is to love the Lord with all your heart, mind and soul (Dt 6:4-5), so I thought it would be symbolically interesting to use the 3 magi as archetypes of these three domains of reverence.
I feel that perhaps the gold is a symbol of the physical/body, the heart, seat of the emotions, so Caspar sings of compassion for the poor, and is moved by the surprising and marvelous poverty of the savior. In a land where the king is wicked, and the Christ came among humble shepherds, what use is gold? Surely a great sage of India would not have missed the vanity of wealth to the son of God, except as a royal symbol.
Frankincense is a scent used in worship, so I think of Balthazar as concerned about things of the spirit. What is true worship? He concludes that the physical senses, including olfactory, are the means through which we surrender to the divine. God has become flesh, and so participates in our sensory world, connecting us to heaven, the realm of the spirit.
Myrrh is a royal spice, but also used in burial, foreshadowing the deeper implications of the incarnation. Melchior represents reason in my version of the story, and so his prayer is for guidance. He asks the hard questions. Why is there so much suffering? In order to eliminate a possible rival, the provincial king Herod ordered the slaughter of all the innocent children. Melchior could see that the very actions of the magi themselves resulted not in celebration but unintended consequences for the people. Perhaps this is the reason why the magi disappeared into legend and were never heard from again in the Bible.
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