Three Kings Walk Into Bethlehem (Not a Joke Setup) | January 4, 2026

In this episode, we trace Christmas beyond the manger to Epiphany, where the Magi reveal a Messiah meant for every nation and not just one people. From creation’s scope to early Church debates, we show why inclusion is baked into the Gospel and how to watch for God in nature and culture.

• Epiphany as culmination of Christmas 
• Gift giving rooted in the Magi’s homage 
• Creation narratives showing God for all nations 
• Prophetic vision of peoples streaming to God 
• Tension of chosen status and universal mission 
• Natural revelation guiding the Magi by a star 
• Early Church debates on Gentile inclusion 
• Reading God’s work in science and the cosmos 
• Seekers moving while insiders hesitate 
• Call to openness, pilgrimage, and welcome

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Setting The Christmas Scene

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is Living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. This should be deals with living the Catholic faith in the time. And now you're with Father Don Wolf.

The Epiphany Behind Gift Giving

Creation, Choice, And God’s Scope

Prophets, Nations, And A Wider Promise

Why The Nations Must Have Access

The Star, Natural Revelation, And Response

Names And Myths Of The Magi

Early Church Controversies On Inclusion

Grace For All And Openness To Mystery

Finding God In Science And Creation

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Roth there in Oklahoma City. Christmas in all of its glory has come among us. We celebrate all that happened in the land of Judea at the birth of the Savior, after the promises of the patriarchs, after the new world of order and freedom given through Moses, after the kingdom of David, after the loss of the temple, after the promises of the prophets, the Messiah was born. The angels sang, the world was advised, and the coming of the king was celebrated. The day of Jesus' birth was the inflection point of the day of days for the future of the world. The land of the patriarchs and the people of the promise could rejoice. God had been faithful and had fulfilled what had been entrusted to the people. But the story had not yet ended. There was more to come concerning the birth of the anointed one, a transfiguration of the beginning, a completion of the narration, both odd and unexpected. Arriving on the scene to a stable where a couple from a far distance had sought refuge from the rigors of state policy, magi from the east presented themselves. They came to bring tribute to the newborn king and to render all due respect to one whose birth would change the valence of the kingdoms of the world. Bowing before him, they offered their gifts. It's a powerful story, all the more so when we consider its meaning in the fullest context. But at first, it's a story that has prompted the gift giving so much a part of our celebration. It's somewhat odd that we focus on Christmas as the time when wrapping paper and bows seem to define its meaning and sharpen its focus. In truth, the custom of giving gifts comes from this moment of the story, when the Magi from the East decamped to Bethlehem to give gifts to the newborn king. In most Catholic countries, the date of the Epiphany is the moment of real celebration. Christmas, it seems, is simply the beginning of the long feast culminating in the visit of the three kings. We've transferred the practice to the earlier date at the expense of nearly forgetting this one. And in the process, we've forgotten the importance of this part of the story. It comes to us as a sort of add-on rather than a culmination of what takes place. And so, since we're most used to the epiphany being little more than a tertiary aspect of our celebrations, Christmas Eve being the big one, Christmas Day the second, and the three kings the third, our attention is usually scattered. As a people, we seldom pay attention to its purpose or its promise in the grand story of salvation. It escapes us, which is too bad, since the roots of the story are as deep as the story of the Garden of Eden, and the fruit of the encounter with the Magi is a church that is Catholic. It's a good idea to pay attention to what's going on here, because it's not trivial. And the first place to begin is to note a usually forgotten aspect of the creation stories in Genesis, that is, from the first page of the Bible, which is, who are these stories for? The people of Israel have them in their sacred scriptures and value them for the important revelations they contain, especially about the value and beauty of the world. Yet in the story of how everything came to be, there's no overt claim that what was created belongs exclusively to Israel. The God of creation is the one God, the supreme being who creates in true freedom, who has no competition or rival, who's not struggling for dominance or security. When God creates, it's to form a creation according to the divine initiative as God wants it. God establishes the world in all of its parts, including the primordial couple to whom he grants dominion and to whom the whole world is entrusted, which is to say, God isn't only for the Jews. The attributes of the divine are for everyone. In the course of the formation of God's people, the conundrum of God's selection was always at the forefront. God chose the people of Abraham, not another people. By choosing, there were those who did not receive the revelation Abraham received. There were those who were not deeded the land entrusted to the patriarchs, and the people of the promise were entrusted with the knowledge that they were set apart from the rest of the nations by God's initiative with them. They became the chosen people. The famous quit by William Norman Ewer has it, how odd of God to choose the Jews, and even more odd that in the self-explanation of the choosing, God reveals to the chosen that they were nothing special. They weren't the biggest, the most faithful, the greatest, or the best as an attribute of their being selected by God. It was simply the fact that God chose them rather than some other group. They shouldn't be proud of the fact of their selection according to God's own communication with them. It's all on God, not on them. Their being chosen was comprehensive, though. They were entrusted land which they could claim but had to defend and fight for. In the course of time they left their land and were enslaved, but eventually were set free. God led them back to their own heritage, but they had to take it from those who occupied it and fight for it as their own. Returning to their inheritance, they were also entrusted with the law to bring them out of chaos and into good order. They were delivered from the fate of all other peoples by a hope instilled in the decency they could expect from one another, in the very image of what God had desired for them. In the process, the people had to learn to live and govern themselves according with God's leadership and with the possibilities of their day and time. This gave them no promises of ultimate victory or eternal ease. After all, they were defeated in battle and promised recovery. They were allied with great kingdoms and humiliated by small enemies. Building great monuments, they held themselves apart from others, only to be carried off into exile and demeaned by their enemies. Some returned, others stayed in perpetual separation, all were challenged to understand how they could remain chosen and yet suffer all they had to endure. And ultimately, in all this, Israel was promised a savior. But what becomes of God's work in the world with regard to the chosen people? How does Israel relate to the rest of the world or the rest of the world to Israel? The prophets talked of a time in which the world would come to the insights and laws of the people and ask to be led to the same life as the chosen. That was a long-standing insight among them. They could live their lives within the promises of eventual triumph as the world made their way to the doorsteps of the people of the Word to learn the ways of God. It was unclear, though, how such a thing would happen. What would be the great attraction to all that Israel had to offer? This was especially the question when the people themselves proved to be unfaithful to their own law and unresponsive to the prophets and leaders among them. How could the world learn if their teachers were unreliable? Which attributes of a faithless chosen people would be the one galvanizing the attention of everybody else? Exactly what would bring the great nations to make their way to, quote, maggot Israel, unquote, the words of the prophet Isaiah to describe his people. The future of the chosen people always seemed indefinite when imagined by those who looked beyond the horizons of their own day. Not only that, there was the great insight that God was not only the God of Israel, but also the inspiration and divine aid to all the nations. The prophet Amos spelled this out when he wrote in God's voice, quote, Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O men of Israel, says the Lord? Did I not bring the Israelites from the land of Egypt as I brought the Philistines from Kaftor and the Aramaeans from Kir, unquote? That's from the Prophet Amos chapter 9. The prophet insists that God saved Israel in the same way as the divine protection was extended to Ethiopia and to the Philistines and to the Arameans. That is, God didn't only care for Israel just because they were special and good. God cared for them because it's the work of God to care for all people. Israel just happened to be the next in line. Good for the chosen, but they're not unique. God cares about the rest of the world, too. That casts a difficult shadow over every scripture and each attribute of God's people. They're chosen, but they're not unique. They're cared for, but not solely. Israel has a place among the nations and is God's instrument for the whole world, and yet not the only one. God is sovereign and can leverage every part of creation and all the elements of life to bring the divine intention into being. It's all up to God. Even the Messiah, the promised one, is not for Israel alone, but is instead for the whole world. It's not clear, though, exactly how. This isn't disqualifying since it's not clear how the Messiah will arrive and in what form he'll be recognized. Longing for the one who is to come is endemic among all the people, but the means and the time of his coming is unknown. How is he how is he to be known? And how will anyone or everyone how will they respond? That's unknown as well. In the face of the great vacuum of uncertainty, there were questions that flourished, including the one concerning the rest of the nations. God's chosen is for his own people, but he's also for the world. The distance from the one to the other isn't measured out, nor is the map of the journey clear to anyone. Israel, the chosen of God and the rest of the world, it's complicated, even in God's word. But the conundrum is overwhelming. How will God save the world through his chosen people? Which is another way to say, what are the people chosen for? They're not chosen just for themselves. They're not as if God had decided humanity had to have a kind of Noah who would float above the everyday, the everyday destruction and decay of what was good and decent, keeping households and the balance of creation together until all would begin to flourish eventually. But even in the story of Noah, his family was to become the seed of all humanity, since they were the ones to survive the flood. Every nation, according to the strict lineage described in the ark, points to Noah's sons as their fathers. Saving the world was for the world, not just for one family or for one people. It wasn't just for Israel. The sign of rescue, the rainbow, was for every people, not just one people. Apparently being chosen is for everyone, not just for some. And, along with the revelations from the prophets, all are the product of God's initiative to save and to protect, not just a few, and not just the elect. The chosen are chosen to be for those not chosen at all. This is the concern. If God sends the divinely chosen one, the Messiah, to be the remedy for the world, then the world has to have some access to this revelation. Some means must be in place for the gift of God to become a part of the history of all. And since Israel is not supreme among all nations in its self-regard or self-understanding, and since the people of God's chosen are not superhuman in their dealing with others, it may not be reasonable to presume that in the rescue the Messiah offers, the other nations will be offered his gift freely. Like people everywhere, the natural tendency in Israel would be to hang on, to presume superiority, to keep what's there close, even at the expense of denying the gift to those who need it most. The chosen people wanted to remain chosen, set apart, elect, soul, and saved from the rot and the decay of all others. They wanted to stay apart from all others. After all, there's nothing more exclusive than exclusion. God's revelation, however, precludes this, which is the story of the visit of the three kings at Epiphany. Jesus is revealed as the King of the Jews and the gift of the Messiah to all the nations from the beginning. And this is the important part. Even before Israel had awakened to the presence of God's saving action, the nations were making their way to the crib of the chosen one to offer their gifts of recognition and gratitude. Jesus, the hope of the world, was revealed to the world by the world. We should pay attention to the details. These strangers from the East arrived because they had seen a star in the heavens noting the birth of someone extraordinary. Natural signs announced the fulfillment of God's plans for the world. These men had not received word of the entrance of God's Messiah by way of seepage from Israel's scriptures. They hadn't heard a rumor of what these peculiar people to the West were looking forward to. And these cultures that looked and kept track of the configuration of the heavens, they didn't wait for an invitation to come and visit the libraries and universities lying among the mountain passes in the wadis of the land of Judah. The signs of God at work were read and understood by them from nature. They made their way to Jerusalem in search of what had been revealed to them and to the world at that time. That's the message from the gospel story. Israel was the source of the one chosen. They were the guardians of the promise of his presence, but they were only the beginning part of the message. The rest of it was written into the heavens by the arrangement of the stars and the changes in the normal cycle of the seasons. The Magi were able to read it and to respond. The message was powerful enough to animate the latent potential in their interest and their capability. They saw and responded, motivated enough to make the long journey from their places in the East. In the course of time, names were ascribed to these men. Now we should point out there's no determination of how many kings there were in the gospel story, only that there were three gifts offered. But the names have come to us as Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Gaspar is said to be an Indian name. Get this, the town of Kandahar in Afghanistan is said to be derived from this name, which is certainly a gigantic irony in the story of the recognition of Jesus by the nations in the East, but which fits into the plot twist of the story. After all, the Gospels relate that they came from the East, and the peoples from the Hindu Kush certainly qualify. Melchior is said to be a Persian name, and Balthazar is derived from an Arabic or Ethiopian name. It was only in the eighth century that these names were ascribed. No doubt they've been passed down in oral traditions, but there's no requirement that anyone hold on to them as something definite. From the East is sufficient. They are from mysterious places far away. The description provided by the brief details from the story. They were the mythic men who knew the secrets of nature and could discern the truths hidden from most people. Thus they could read the signs and know the truths obscured by these the complications and ambiguities of the forces of nature, which is how they came to arrive. This news was a cornerstone support for the one side of the great controversies swirling throughout the whole church in the first century. The anxiety was obvious and deep. Could those who were not Jews, who had not inherited the promise of the prophets, fully accept the identity and the mission of Jesus? How could someone who didn't know the law, who hadn't sung the Psalms, who knew nothing of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, who had not heard the accounts of the creation of the world and its fall into this into sin, how could they really understand who Jesus was and what he had come to do? One side of the controversy was to acknowledge that strangers to the culture and the scriptures were rightly intrigued by what they saw and heard from the church, but they first had to know the depth of what was offered before they could say yes to it. It was kind of a due diligence concern among those who would say yes to baptizing these from outside Jerusalem. The other side of the polemic was that the gift of God embodied in the Messiah was offered to everyone. However they came to know about it, or whatever of it they could understand, if they could say yes to its potential in their lives and enact the promise it communicated, then they were welcome. It wasn't an easy choice to make. Both sides had their reasons and their logic. And certainly Jesus and his disciples and the principal characters of the revelation, they were all Jewish. It wasn't too much to point out that in f in the in following these great men, the followers should have to submit themselves to what made these men distinctive. This is one of the great anxieties present throughout the New Testament. The language, customs, understandings, presumptions which were present among those who were inspired to follow Jesus all became battlefields where churchmen staked their claims and contested with one another. But to know that Jesus had been revealed to the world, not just to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, bolstered the claims of those from outside the presumptions of the chosen people. Jesus was for everyone, not just one tribe, even if it was the one singular people, God had prepared to recognize and respond to his Messiah. Most importantly, the revelation had been present for all to see, as long as they disposed themselves to the message and did not dismiss it as too strange or too obscure. It was an introductory fragment leading to the conclusion that God reaches out to all people with the message of hope in the Messiah. Paying attention to the awareness of mystery and cohesion already at work in their cultures, they could come to know the Messiah and his mission. And if they were willing, they could come to meet him, which is the hope for all of us. We are not so far removed from the promise of the three kings, nor are we distant from the promises uncovered by the conclusions reached in the early church. God is at work in our lives and among our cultures, as surely and as thoroughly as was once the case among the wise men from the East, except Exclusion or banishment from God's promise is not how the mission of the Messiah unfolds. Rather, we are enfolded in the rich excess of graces and goodness God offers as the mission of His chosen ripens among us. And we should also know the invitation is for us to trust that God wants us and wants to invite us by whatever means we can listen and respond. Father Richard Rohr once expressed a notion of spiritual life and formation that I found most meaningful. It touched on the same energy the kings discovered as they looked into the night sky to discover the rising of the star in the west. Father Rohr mentioned that retreat houses everywhere have books on psychology and human behavior. Those who spend time there are interested in reading about and finding some meaning in the details of their lives, especially in their interstices of their experiences and behaviors. And that's all to the good. After all, in the mysteries of the human heart, God acts to reveal the divine initiative. Yet God is active and moves among us in the sum of creation. Why don't we include books on astronomy or cosmology or geology or bacteriology in retreat houses? Surely the curious mind and the active intellect could discern the work of God and the facts and operations of the world around us. If we're attentive to the discourse of the disclosure of the divine, perhaps we could find it convincingly present to us in these areas, not just in the shadows of our thoughts and feelings. We proclaim, because the gift of the Epiphany, God desires uh we and we proclaim that God desires us to come to know the divine work in the world. We're invited to open our eyes wherever we see the divine work and to notice it is divine. When these foreigners arrived in Jerusalem to ask about where the king of the Jews was to be born, they didn't have to wait to find the answer. It wasn't hidden. Nor did Herod have to send after the oldest rabbi whose learning was the most obscure and mystical. The question was asked and then answered. Go to Bethlehem, the scripture says, you'll find the Messiah there. And so they went. But those most invested in his coming, those who were the progeny of the promise, they stayed at home. It was those whose hearts were hungry and whose minds were open who found the one who was promised. The Messiah was disclosed to the questing men from the East. That's the ultimate lesson we receive on this feast day. The Lord is revealed to the nations, to those who are ready to find him. And being ready, they do find him and open their gifts to him, to the babe lying in a manger. Back in just a moment. We invest too much time on our devices for a healthy life. The ripened fruits of these devilish vices are in each place rife. They're everywhere we look, if we look closely at all. When did you last see anyone hold a book but sat slack jawed? As the world speeds by and the landscapes blur into no interest, color and character and object flurries past ignored, a mess. We have to wake up and write soon, lest we atrophy, our lives devoid of range and room, a real catastrophe. So many worry about the sci-fi scenario when machines rebel and rule. In truth it's happening now, not a daring old coup, but a ship of fools. We only have a little while until we're late and all is locked up. Look around, break away. It's not fate we drink from this cup. That's our devices.org.