Preaching Matthew last year, I learned that the Magi are not without biblical precedent. There is actually a typology of magi throughout scripture. But virtually every instance of the type before the Magi is negative: Pharaoh's magicians, Balaam, Daniel's court rivals.

I had always seen the Magi in a "popular crèche" way, as a symbol and foreshadowing of all the nations coming to Christ. And there is some figural merit to this.

But if you consider the figural chain across scripture, the Magi are also something more: they embody the salvation of the court magician, a type character who has only so far appeared as an outright enemy of God.

In his long poem For the Time Being, W. H. Auden reimagines the shepherds as gloomy capitalist laborers and the Magi as bored professors. Blissfully forgiving the anachronism, Auden does unlock something of the meaning of the salvation of the Magi.

In the same way that the centurion at the cross in Mark 15 scrambles the oppressor/oppressed equation, the salvation of the Magi scrambles a bunch of other binaries.

If the magicians, those who formerly studied and fought against God and God's anointed ones on behalf of the powers and the principalities, can enter the kingdom, who else might?

The book of Proverbs is one of the weirdest books of the canon for me. How is it that a bunch of proverbs, many of them Egyptian or otherwise non-Israelite, ended up lodged, undigested, within the canon of Holy Scripture?

And yet, the book of Proverbs is also a key text for constructing a high wisdom christology. All these random worldly proverbs are swirling around in this book but at the center is a person, Lady Wisdom.

In the same way that the personification of Wisdom is the magnetic center of the book of Proverbs, the incarnate Christ is the magnet to which the Magi, the personification of the world's proverbial wisdom, are drawn.

The Magi, then, are a figure not just of the world coming to Christ, but the world's *wisdom* coming under the lordship of Christ, the world's wisdom not rejected but redeemed.