Epiphany #2 of 14:

King Herod gave Orders to Kill.

(Matthew 2:16)

Things don’t go well after the magi “return to their country by another way” (Mt 2:13). Their visit, through no fault of their own, turns malice in the hands of King Herod resulting in the flight of the Holy Family from Bethlehem into Egypt to escape the State ordered “killing of all the boys two years and younger in the vicinity of Bethlehem” (Mt 2:16). One can’t help but be troubled. Jesus escapes, but what about the others? Couldn’t they be saved? Why would God have to flee from such earthy powers as King Herod?

Magi comes from the Greek word magos from which we get our word “magic". The Wise Men from the east were not magi (magoi) or magicians in a trickster sort of way. They were scholars and their knowledge seemed like magic. C.S. Lewis calls science “the magic that works.” Like all such magic, it can be used for good or for ill.

Shortly after Christmas, this computer that seems all magical to me, turned malicious—“malware” they told me (From the Latin mal meaning bad from which we get words like “malice,” or “malign,” or “malignancy”). That’s why I’ve missed Morning Fire. It took weeks to get the bad magic out. That’s the trouble with science and technology; people of power, like King Herod, have a way of using science for their own evil purposes. It’s the story of the “One Ring to rule …and in darkness bind them” (Tolkien).

That’s why it is best for such magicians/scholars/scientist, like the magi, to lay their gifts at the feet of the One true King. Knowledge, in the hands of mortal kings, often leads to the kind of malice that results in the massacre of the innocents.