Home By Another Road

 Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

One of the familiar stories of this time of year is the story of the magi from the east or, as I knew them growing up, the Three Wise Men.

Most people probably associate the magi with the Christmas story as the two often get blended together in the popular imagination. In actuality, however, the magi are traditionally a part of an entirely different Christian holiday: the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the nations.

Celebrated each year on Jan. 6 (after the Twelve Days of Christmas), the Feast of the Epiphany is actually the more ancient of the incarnational feasts. It was celebrated in the church before Christmas was ever observed. Indeed, in some countries, it is still the more important of the two celebrations.

There is one line near the end of the Epiphany story that I’ve always found curious, a line that often gets overlooked. After the magi find the child Jesus, offer their gifts, and fall down in worship, Matthew tells us something deceptively simple: “And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”

By another road.

It’s easy to miss just how consequential that decision is. As we know from Matthew’s story, Herod was not merely curious about the child. He was a violent ruler who saw any threat to his power as something to be eliminated. The magi don’t seem to have known this at first – that’s why when the arrive in Judea, they go to Jerusalem, the capital city. The believe the star has been leading them to a new king and that is where they expect to find him.

What they encounter, however, is a grown man who is terrified of any threat to his power – even anything that might be perceived by others as a threat. He asks the religious leaders where the Messiah will be born and they are the ones who point him (and the magi) to Bethlehem. He sends them on their way, a sort of advance mission to see if the birth is true and asks them to report back so that he can pay homage (a promise we know is a ruse).

They find the family, offer their gifts, but then God warns them in a dream that they have drawn into Herod’s designs, urges them not to return to Herod. And so the magi listen, they don’t return, they choose not to cooperate, they go home by another road.

Make no mistake, the magi did not confront Herod. They did not overthrow him. They didn’t do any of the things we might be sure faithfulness demands (God doesn’t even seem to ask them to do that). They learn from God what Herod is up to and simply refused to help him. And that refusal mattered.

Epiphany is often described as a feast about revelation – that Christ is revealed to the nations, that God’s light shines for all people. And that part of the Epiphany feast is essential. By putting Persian astrologers at the feet of the Christ child while the Judean king murders and rages, it is clear that the boundaries of what constitutes God’s people has begun to shift and transform.

But revelation always carries consequences. Once you see clearly, you are responsible for what you do with that knowledge.

The magi could not unknow what they now knew. They had seen the vulnerability of God made flesh. They had glimpsed a different kind of power – one that does not dominate, invade, or destroy in order to secure itself. And once they saw that, they could no longer play the old political games as though nothing had changed.

So they went home by another road.

That phrase has echoed through Christian imagination for centuries because it names something deeply human and deeply difficult: the moment when conscience interrupts routine, when obedience to power collides with fidelity to truth.

We live in a world where the familiar roads are increasingly well-worn. Roads built on fear of the other. Roads that promise security through force. Roads that justify violence as necessary, inevitable, or regrettable but unavoidable. Roads that tell us we must cooperate, must look away, must accept “the way things are.”

And yet Epiphany insists that encountering the truth changes our direction.

The magi do not save the day and change everything by going home by another road. Their choice does not even prevent Herod’s violence in other arenas. Matthew makes that abundantly clear. But their refusal matters, nonetheless. It draws a line between participation and resistance, between inevitability and moral agency.

Sometimes faith calls us to dramatic acts of resistance, courageous moments of standing for justice, mercy and compassion. But often, faith actually doesn’t call us to be the dramatic heroes we might imagine ourselves to be. Rather, it invites us first, before even considering the dramatic and the bold, to first choose to stop helping Herod.

As a new year begins, many of us feel the weight of a world that seems increasingly unsteady – politically, morally, spiritually. There is a temptation to believe that we have no real choices, that the roads laid before us are fixed, that all we can do is endure. Epiphany tells a different story.

It suggests that faithfulness sometimes looks like quiet refusals: refusing to trade our neighbor’s dignity for our own comfort, refusing to repeat dehumanizing language just because it is popular, refusing to support policies or practices that depend on fear, exclusion, or violence – even when those policies promise us security in return.

Epiphany reminds us that revelation is not given so we can admire it, but so we can respond to it. God’s light does not merely illuminate the world; it exposes the paths we have been walking and asks whether we are willing to change course. The question this feast leaves us with is not whether we have seen the light. It is whether we are willing, when conscience demands it, to stop helping Herod – and to go home by another road.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.