At our first meeting in 2011 in keeping with the season (Epiphany) we looked at the story of the wise men. We had a wide ranging decision which, if I recall correctly, included wondering how people who are deaf speak with regional accents, but we were wondering off the point by then.
We did think that in some ways it was strange that astrologers should play such a prominent role in this infancy narrative given the Israelites aversion to such ideas. We then tried to see if we could marry up the two infancy stories that are in the gospels, something that we do at some level every time we have a Nativity service. It looked like it might just be possible, but would mean that Mary, Joseph and Jesus would have had to take a lot of journeys, some quite long. It was an interesting exercise, but in the end I think it showed that these narratives are actually quite separate, written by different people for quite different reasons.
In Matthew and the story of the wise men from the East we are being told something about Jesus and his significance. He is not just King of the Jews, but rather has come for everyone, including the gentiles. In Luke we have Jesus born in stable and visited by shepherds, he is poor and his visitors are poor too, this Jesus has come for the excluded of society. In Matthew they live in a house and are visited by rich people and given expensive gifts, in Luke they live in stable and are visited by poor shepherds who bring no gifts except the message from the angels.
This two pictures of the significance of Jesus are not contradictory, but rather complementary. Jesus did come for rich and poor, Jew and gentile.
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