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Not much is known about the three Unwise Men. They saw a new star in the east and they followed it. It wasn’t a tremendously bright star. But then, they weren’t tremendously bright men. Nonetheless, it was new and it was shiny, and they decided to follow it.
Their journey was long and full of adventure, and it brought them in the end to the mighty Pacific Ocean, on the coast of China. After that, as they had no boat, they could go no further.
No one knows what happened to those three Unwise Men after that. Perhaps they settled down and married nice Chinese girls. But we can be fairly sure that they never found what they were looking for, because they never stopped to wonder what they were looking for in the first place. They just saw a shiny, new star, and off they went after it. Not very wise of them.
The Wise Men, on the other hand, have a different story. They saw the new star and paused to think about it. That’s what wise people do. They thought that only the Creator could put a new star in the sky. And they surmised that if the Creator was doing something so new and so different in the heavens, He was probably doing something equally new and different on the earth. A new kind of king, perhaps.
A little research informed them that the people who knew most about the Creator were the Jews, who lived to the west, near the shores of the humble Mediterranean Sea. So they packed their bags, turned their backs to the new star, and headed straight for the Jewish capital – Jerusalem.
It has to be said that the Wise Men, didn’t quite hit the target. But they had only missed by four miles, unlike the three Unwise men, who were an impressive seven thousand miles astray. And here’s the crunch. Whereas the Unwise Men got to see the mighty Pacific Ocean, and may or may not have married nice Chinese girls, the Wise Men got to see a tiny baby, new-born of the Creator in a bold attempt to show Homo Sapiens (and Homo not-so-Sapiens) just how much he loves them.
By Rob Harrison
