I know some people may not understand why Church separates the Feast of Epiphany from our Christmas Mass celebration. It's understandable because up to about the year 300 AD we used to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the Feast of Epiphany not on December 25. There's a lot of disagreement on how the date of December 25 was picked for Christmas. Many argue that the Church founded backwards from Jesus's recorded death. Regardless of how it was picked, from the fourth century on, December 25 became the date to celebrate Christ's birth. Epiphany celebrates the "making known" of Jesus Christ to the world. For example, this is where we get the "12 days of Christmas" which runs from December 25 twelve days to the Feast of the Epiphany.

Epiphany was not created just to celebrate the visit of three kings, but it is what happened after the visitors arrived and made known to the world the birth of our Savior. In a traditional Christmas song, we are told about the three kings, but there are no records there were only "three kings". Scripture tells us that there were three gifts presented to the Christ child. So people assumed that there were three visitors who might have been kings, but most likely they were Magi's. A magi could've been anything from an astronomer, magician, or possibly a prince or king. What we do know is that they were from Persia and traveled a great distance from the east following the bright star that appeared in the sky. One gift presented was gold, which signifies royalty as in Jesus, the king of the Jews. The second gift was myrrh which is for the humanity of Jesus Christ, this was something that they used in those days when embalming their dead. The third gift was frankincense which is for Divinity, like when we burned incense at mass to offer our prayers up to God. So we have gold, myrrh, and frankincense signifying the royalty, humanity, and divinity of Christ.

Interesting how 2000 years ago the bright light from a star directed visitors not to the large city of Jerusalem, but six miles away to a small town called Bethlehem, which literally translates to "house of bread". A s Catholics we are taught to believe the Eucharist we receive at communion is the "bread of life."

As we read about baby Jesus's first visitors we can see the example that they set for us. We know they traveled a great distance to worship Christ. In reality, it doesn't matter who or how many Magi there were. What we should remember is that these people did whatever they had to do to get there. They shared their "gifts" with God and more importantly they made the effort to go and worship Jesus.

We need to ask ourselves, do we make our best efforts to worship our Lord? And when we do, do we share the gifts and talents that God gave us?

Finally, do we worship because we are "supposed" to be there or are we there to truly be thankful for all our blessings? The reason Catholics kneel at mass is because it helps us forget our egos and it is our gesture to worship our King an savior!