I really appreciated Brian Zahnd’s meditation on the Magi this morning. Riffing off of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, Zahnd considers what having one’s eyes opened to Jesus may really cost:

When the Magi made their way home, we’re told they went by “another way.”
Of course they did.
Once you see the King, once you have the Epiphany—
You have to travel through this life by “another way.” (Or betray all you have been granted to see.)
And to an “alien people clutching their gods”—
You will seem at best odd, and at worse…well, something quite bad.
Truth doesn’t come cheap.
The hard journey to a real Epiphany will cost you more than some…
Gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It will cost you the way you look at the world.
Something will have to die. And you may well mourn it.
To really see the birth of Christ for what it is,
Will bring you face to face with death—
Death to what you were once so comfortable with.

Zahnd specifically relates this death to his own journey dying to Christian nationalism and the pursuit of political power. But his final question is gripping regardless of your country or century.

The old magi says, “I should be glad of another death.”
What about you? Are you ready for the Birth of the New?—
If it means the Death of the Old?