The magi's coming to Jerusalem...shows that they seek in Israel, in the messianic light of the star of David, the one who will be king of the nations. Their coming means that pagans can discover Jesus and worship him as Son of God and Savior of the world only by turning toward the Jews and receiving from them the messianic promise as contained in the Old Testament.
CCC 528
OK, its official! You may NOW take down your Christmas tree; the Christmas season is over with the feast of the Epiphany. Many of you know that in the Catholic Christian liturgical calendar, Christmas actually starts at sundown on Dec. 24th and always traditionally ends on January 6 (The 12 days of Christmas). For the feast day of Epiphany, the Roman church commemorates the visit by the 3 kings, Christ's baptism by John the Baptist and the miracle at Cana (where we get the sacrament of marriage, Jesus' first miracle). Now what you may NOT know is that the names of the wise men cannot be found in the bible. In addition to the fact that we really have no evidence of how many kings there actually were. Tradition tells us that there were 3 kings and that their names are Casper, Melchior, and Balthazar. Another interesting misconception shows that the Magi are present at the Nativity, but in actuality, the book of Matthew 2:11 says that the wise men visited Jesus as a child maybe 1 or 2 years old. Interesting....
1 comment:
But MUST we now take down the decorations. There seem to be a lot of people who think it is an enormous faux pas, or perhaps and indication of great personal irresponsibility to leave decorations up past the Christmas season (or even past Jan 1!!) I'm never in a hurry to take them down. Perhaps it's laziness. It's so much effort to put them up and they look so pretty I like to leave them up as long as I can get away with.
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