Gospel of Matthew 2:2 does not necessarily suggest astrology led the Magi to seek the baby Jesus on what is now known as the Feast of Epiphany. "We saw his star dawning" suggests that they had read the times foretold in scriptures and the star confirmed their inner readiness to receive the incarnated God of the Universe who is not barred from entering, challenging, and testing our recognition of God's transcendent power with the earth.
The Piebald Advent is finished. Christ has been returning on the clouds (Rev. 1:7-9) that few have either been allowed by algorithm to read, or could be bothered to do so. Satan has been eclipsed, the Antichrist identified.
The eclipsing Day of the Lord is becoming manifest: comes the flood of judgments of Noanic proportion (Amos 5:24). An “everflowing stream” of righteousness that leads to life. Those who survive the accounting meekly inherit what endures on earth (Matt. 5:5). Those who do not are not raptured into pie-in-the-sky. Substrate accountability matters, not algorithmics.
God came to earth in the birth of Jesus the Messiah:
God’s “incarnation.” Some perceive early. The Shepherds hearing the song of angels in the star-filled supersaturating night. Later every generation come to know:
By our following Jesus's walk, God comes into us. We cannot erect a scaffold of cognition to ascend to God from our own survey.
Golden Rule virtue ethics are the gate to victory, not a superior “intelligence” that brings forth our favored ideas of the future.
After Advent comes the 12 Days of Christmas concluded by the Church's Feast of the Epiphany.
The Gospel of Matthew's (2: 1-2) narrative about wise men from the East deals with an historical event taken as a miracle: that unexpectedly Gentiles (!) from distant places came to witness the Christchild, aligning by gifts with grace, thereby becoming incorporated into God's people.
"For we saw his star rising and have come to pay him [Christ] homage."
I do not take this as only an astronomical event. Instead, I believe these probably Zoroastrian sages were learned in the international religious literatures of their day and were monitoring the Hebrew prophecies that predicted a rising, specifically Daniel 9 which gave a chronology of "the anointed" according to historical events. These historical events in Daniel 9 can be dated, for example, by referral to the Greek historian Herodotus. For more about this prophetic chronology, see my linked essay. This an historical event linked with astronomy, like in contemparary events. during this years Advent extending into Christmas.
Every January 6 is the Twelfth Day of Christmas when the Church recognizes the wisdom of pagan visitation, whose leaders recognize and bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child. A date also timed by the Church to his baptism and wedding miracle, heaven's gift of dove and wine to Noah now spiritualized by Christ's miracles to sustain and transform us on this ark sojourn. Under the temple rainbow's mix of air, sun, and rain, the universal gifts to mortals. In these elements is the offered path of reconciliation by their sharing so long as one breathes and eats and drinks responsibly from the earth's account.
January 6 has become signified by another, inverted epiphany: an anniversary of recognizing the political manifestation of a skewed mob nation that brought its effigies, shofars, and scaffolds to the place of people's deliberative assembly of moral policymaking. Some with ideas to lynch duly elected officials and redirect governance by bullhorn. To kick others off the ark.
Both in literary structure and meaning, the Book of Proverbs lays out two paths: one of righteousness, one of strife. There is NO middle course allowed in the way of Christ: Any coercive blend leads to inner and outer moral chaos--naming Christ while bearing guns and flashing fangs.
Today is marked as Epiphany of this manifest and daily choice: to follow flag and fang toward death
or a cross and virtue toward life,
the Caesarean or Nazorean, the wolf or the lamb.
The way of peace or the escalator of conflict.
To follow a flag or the Cross.
Bearing Christ in the name of de-arming and letting God's will flow through you, or naming a dream of a strife-constructed order of merit and letting your all hang out, shooting first and letting an idol of God sort it out later.
Heaven only comes in the purity of the one path.
"Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain made low. The rough places as a level plain and the crooked course straightened" (Isaiah 40:4; cf. Matthew 7:13-14).
Ours is by virtue to correct, straighten, and smooth our daily course and align with Christ's wisdom while time, never an intrinsic enemy, allows.
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