Matthew 2:11 Meaning They Came Into the House and Saw

When the seeking mind at last comes to where innocence rests, it does not stand apart in judgment; it kneels. To bow before the newborn is to let go of the belief that the self is the center and to honor what love has brought forth. Then the mind opens its treasures, which are all it has valued and held back, and gives them freely, for recognition of the holy makes withholding impossible.

The threefold offering is the whole self surrendered: its sense of worth, its longing turned toward heaven, and even its acceptance of what must pass away. What the mind once guarded it now lays down, having found the one thing before which all its holdings become a gladly given gift.

House: the inner place where innocence can at last be found, the mind made ready to receive what it sought Young child: the newborn innocence within, the awakened Self before which the seeking mind bows Gold: the mind's sense of its own worth, offered up in recognition of what is holy Frankincense: the longing of the heart turned toward heaven, devotion no longer held back Myrrh: the willing acceptance of what the body must someday release, surrendered without fear

The Magi bowing low before the child is the everyday self surrendering to the whole, true self, the deepest center of wholeness suddenly made visible in the world.

The three gifts unfold the meaning of the scene. Gold stands for the highest, unfading value the old craftsmen linked to the true self. Frankincense rises as spirit lifting up from matter. Myrrh, from which Adonis himself "was born" and which in the old imagination perfumed the sacred beloved as "chosen myrrh," marks this newborn sense of God for death at its very first appearance. The true self reaches wholeness through the joining of opposites only by passing through undoing, and the gifts name that sacrificial fate before a word is spoken.

What a person is willing to spend is the only honest measure of what they decided something means.

Ordinariness is what lets most people off, and a small child on a dirt floor supplied no reason to kneel, so the kneeling came out of the meaning carried in rather than anything in the room. Attention aimed at one thing for months leaves only one reading available when the thing finally shows up.

Opening the treasures made the first two decisions real, because a meaning nobody pays for stays an opinion. Gold, frankincense and myrrh priced a child at the level of a king. Scholars in the capital held the same information and never left home. Decide what something means and keep your hands closed, and the meaning quietly reverts to whatever the behavior says instead.