WISE MEN STILL SEEK HIM, PART 3
MYRRH FOR A WONDERFUL SAVIOR
MATTHEW 2:1-12
DECEMBER 11, 2016
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT, YEAR C
FARM HILL UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, HARRISBURG, AR
INTRO. Myrrh was the gift of Balthazar of Arabia. But I just don’t get this gift. It had some medical uses. In the New Testament, it is called gall, and a mixture of myrrh and wine was given to Jesus at the Crucifixion as a way of dulling his senses. “Myrrh symbolizes bitterness, suffering and affliction” (gotquestions. org). Generally, the smell of myrrh was the smell of death. It was used for burial preparations. So why did it show up at such a glorious time as the birth of Jesus? What if you had a child or grandchild born, showed up at the hospital room, and wheeled in a full-size casket, and said, “Here you go, just the thing you need.” SECURITY! Are you nuts? What kind of gift is that?
I have a couple of theories. One is this - could Mary have passed the myrrh on to some of the mothers of young boys around Bethlehem? Could it be that she sensed the destruction of life that was to be visited upon those baby boys and wanted to do what she could for them before she and Joseph and Jesus fled in the night? I have another theory. The Gospels talk about various women, followers of Jesus, going to his tomb early in the morning on Resurrection Day to properly anoint his body for burial. Could it be that Mary kept this myrrh, that it was something she treasured like many things she treasured about Jesus in her heart, and it was intended all those years later for the dead body of the one who was no longer in the grave, the one who defeated death, who lives today and forever, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior?
Those are two ideas I had about why this myrrh showed up at the manger that first Christmas. But before you toss the myrrh aside and forget about it, maybe we should remember that all of us have seen an awkward gift or two show up under our tree at one time or another. When I was in high school, I was on the newspaper my senior year. We did a gift exchange, and I bought the guy whose name I had drawn a toy cap gun and holster, because he loved to talk and act like a cowboy. I wish I could say I loved my gift! I won’t say what it was, but it was embarrassing in several ways. It made for some awkward conversations. And so what do we do with gift of myrrh? How do we explain it?
I. MYRRH IS FOR THE DEAD. This is where myrrh starts out. Whatever happened to the actual present of myrrh that Balthazar gave him there in Bethlehem, myrrh is associated with the birth of Jesus as well as his death. Why do we see death around Christmas? Isn’t it supposed to be all love and life and joy and peace? Well, we have all heard that more deaths occur around Christmas. According to research, Christmas is the deadliest holiday of the year.
“A group of sociologists analyzed all the official death certificates during a 25-year period in the U.S. between 1979 and 2004, and concluded that there has been an excess of 42,325 natural deaths in the two weeks around the Christmas holiday period. This excess is above and beyond what would be considered the normal seasonal increase in the death rate in the U.S.... the chance of dying during the holiday period increases somewhere between 3% and 9% depending on the demographic group you look at, and between 1% and 10%, depending on the cause of death analyzed” (us-funerals.com). This connection with death goes all the way back to the first Christmas.
A. For one thing, Christmas brought death to the baby boys around Bethlehem. This is what the church calls the Massacre of the Innocents. Some New Testament scholars estimate, given a likely population in Bethlehem of around 1,000 or so, as many as 20 young infants could have been executed (Raymond Brown, according to Wikipedia). This massacre is the theme of the Christmas song, “The Coventry Carol”:
1. Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, Bye bye, lully, lullay.
3. Herod the king, in his raging, Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight All young children to slay.
It is one of the ironies of Christmas that this beautiful child Jesus, the Son of God who came to bring eternal life to all, would bring death with him at the very start of his life.
B. And then, myrrh is for the dead because Jesus laid in the manger so he could soon lay down his life in death for you and me. One of the most famous sculptures of Michelangelo is called the Pietà. It shows Mary cradling Jesus on her lap after his death on the cross. It is a sobering representation of the pain and agony Mary must have felt as she looked down at her Son, in whom all the hopes and dreams of the world rested. What did she think then? Did she ponder that he would rise from the dead? What did Mary think on that Christmas night as she tenderly laid Jesus in the manger, this being of a few inches and a few pounds, in whom all the hopes and dreams of the world rested? Did her heart soar at the life he would live, the people he would touch, the broken bodies he would heal? And did her heart tear in two, even as the angels sang and the shepherds stared in wonder, at the thought of the death he would die for the sins of the world? Myrrh brought the smell of the death even at the crowning moment of life! Myrrh is for the dead.
1. Myrrh is for the dead
II. MYRRH IS FOR THE LIVING. Myrrh, besides being used for the dead, also had a medicinal value. It was often used to dress wounds because it causes tissue to constrict. Today, it’s still used to prevent and treat gum disease and sometimes shows up in toothpastes and mouthwashes (mentalfloss.com). And so we see that even that what is used as a part of the death process is used for the saving and encouraging of life as well. It is just another reminder that, as Paul says in Romans 8, that God works for the good in all things. Here, when the wise men showed up, a quiet night in a simple village, death was at the door. This infant was growing up to die. Yet the whole event was intended for the living!
“(There was) a small boy who was consistently late coming home from school. His parents warned him one day that he must be home on time that afternoon, but nevertheless he arrived later than ever. His mother met him at the door and said nothing. At dinner that night, the boy looked at his plate. There was a slice of bread and a glass of water. He looked at his father’s full plate and then at his father, but his father remained silent. The boy was crushed.
“The father waited for the full impact to sink in, then quietly took the boy’s plate and placed it in front of himself. He took his own plate of meat and potatoes, put it in front of the boy, and smiled at his son. When that boy grew to be a man, he said, ‘All my life I’ve known what God is like by what my father did that night’” (sermonillustrations.com). What a picture we have of what Jesus came to earth to accomplish! He was born to die! He died so we could live! He suffered so that we could be victorious! He gave so we could receive! All that we deserved, all that was ours by choice and by right, he took upon himself so that we could receive what was his.
Balthazar knelt and presented the myrrh that brought into Bethlehem the death that was to come. Jesus laid aside all that was kingly and powerful about himself so that he could present himself as a living sacrifice, bringing out of death not what we deserved, but what could be ours by the gracious gift of his life so that we could live, even beyond death and the grave. We may smell the smell of death today as myrrh floats through the air, but we cry out with the Scriptures, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). The smell of myrrh is there, but it is not just for the dead, it is for the living, and we live forever if we live in Christ.
1. Myrrh is for the dead - 2. Myrrh is for the living
III. MYRRH IS FOR REMEMBERING. One thing that strikes me about my Christmas routine is that nothing about it has really changed all of my life. I try to watch “Shrek the Halls” and the Jim Carrey live action version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same. Decorations. Presents. Songs. Fudge. And that is true for generations in the church. Advent. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Epiphany. Candles. Christmas carols. Every Christmas, we celebrate and remember the same things! Myrrh is one of the ways that we stir up those memories. And we need to have those memories every year, because if we do not, we will lose track of the important things about Christmas. As has often been said, Jesus is the reason for the season.
“In New York’s Hayden Planetarium a special Christmas holiday show was enhanced by an added feature. A giant lollipop tree was projected onto the planetarium dome, surrounded by a horizon filled with brilliantly colored toys which came to life and.. (bounced around) to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’. At the climax a huge figure of Santa Claus faded out in a snow storm, and the star of Bethlehem broke through into a sky that produced exactly the Palestine sky on the night of the nativity. The designer of this show may not realize that he dramatically staged the supreme Christmas message our world needs to understand: The recovery of the lost meaning of Christmas. This is not said in any criticism of Santa Claus; the effect must have delighted the hearts of all the children who saw it, without doing violence to their love of Bethlehem. But for adults it is a tragic loss to substitute ‘Jingle Bells’ for ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing’, and a lollipop tree for the manger of Bethlehem. The instinct is right to fade out these things in the light of the Christmas star. It is about God's incarnation that the angels sing - God with us” (Robert E. Luccock in James W. Cox, The Minister's Manual: 1994, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 218; posted on sermonillustrations.com).
Because our instinct is to forget, to move on to the glitz and the glamor and take it what excites us and brings us something that we want, the smell of the myrrh is a wake-up call to remember. It is a call back to the cradle that sat there in the shadow of the Cross. Myrrh tells us that our Savior was just as real at Bethlehem as he was at Calvary, that the Child we love, loves us so much more than we can love him. With myrrh, we remember that Jesus is Lord over all the universe, and that he will return one day as King and Conqueror, and it will be our privilege to worship and adore him forever and forever!
CON. It has been our privilege to hang around the manger the last three Sundays as we see the wise men give their gifts to Jesus of gold, frankincense and myrrh. “There is one scene... (in The Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, where) the Ghost of Christmas Past has just paid a very discomforting visit to Ebenezer Scrooge. Clearly the old miser is shaken by the entire ordeal. But when he awakens from his sleep... he (doesn’t) take the message to heart. No, he simply dismisses it by saying: Bah, humbug, it wasn’t real. ‘Just a bit of last night’s undigested beef,’ he says to himself, ‘There is more gravy about you than the grave’” (sermonillustrations.com).
That is what we can do with the wise men and anything else in the Christmas story. We can water them down, we can take away the meaning of what they did, we can treat it as cute or entertaining and not full of the life-changing power that God invested it with. But myrrh gets in the way of that. It tells us that these things ARE real. It helps us realize that they truly turned the world upside down and we are not the same for what took place there in Bethlehem.
“Long ago, there ruled in Persia a wise and good king. He loved his people. He wanted to know how they lived. He wanted to know about their hardships. Often he dressed in the clothes of a working man or a beggar, and went to the homes of the poor. No one whom he visited thought that he was their ruler. One time he visited a very poor man who lived in a cellar. He ate the... (simple) food the poor man ate. He spoke cheerful, kind words to him. Then he left. Later he visited the poor man again and disclosed his identity by saying, ‘I am your king!’ The king thought the man would surely ask for some gift or favor, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘You left your palace and your glory to visit me in this dark, dreary place. You ate the... (simple) food I ate. You brought gladness to my heart! To others you have given your rich gifts. To me you have given yourself!’ The King of glory, the Lord Jesus Christ, gave himself to you and me. The Bible calls him, ‘the unspeakable gift!’” (sermonillustrations.com). With the wise men, let us bow down, and worship, and give him the gift of our hearts.
