In $\sf ZFC$, as said, every object in the universe is a set. Including the objects we use to represent the natural numbers with.
Note, by the way, that this is not a very peculiar idea. We use Dedekind cuts to represent real numbers. In that case $\{1_\Bbb R,2_\Bbb R,3_\Bbb R\}$ is a set of subsets of the rational numbers, and their union is actually $3_\Bbb R$.
If we consider the real numbers as equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences instead then the union is not a real number itself, but rather just a set of sequences of rational numbers with certain properties.
I'm pointing this out, because while we often think about the real numbers as "absolute" and the rest of the number systems defined from them, we also learn in the first couple of weeks of our mathematical degrees that the real numbers can be seen as subsets of the rational numbers instead.
But, back to $\sf ZFC$. In $\sf ZFC$ everything is a set. In particular, $1,2,3$ are all sets. So the question what is $\bigcup\{1,2,3\}$ makes a lot of sense in $\sf ZFC$. The answer depends on many things.
How did you decide to represent $1,2,3$?
Are these real numbers, natural numbers, rational numbers, complex numbers, etc. etc., since in set theory we often begin by defining the natural numbers and construct the rest of these systems from the ground up, it follows that $1_\Bbb N\neq 1_\Bbb Z\neq 1_\Bbb Q\neq 1_\Bbb R$. But that's not new, in many algebraic contexts one thinks about these systems as different with canonical embeddings from one to the other.
The same is true in set theory. Here though, after all the construction you can decide that now you have the real numbers and you forget everything that you had before and define $\Bbb{N,Z,Q}$ as subsets of the real numbers. In that case, the above $\neq$ become $=$.
Perhaps you mean ordinals? Ordinals are canonical objects in set theory, and they have rather concrete representations. In that case, $\bigcup\{1,2,3\}=3$. But these are still sets.
Maybe we go beyond $\sf ZFC$. Maybe we assume the existence of atoms, or urelements, which are not sets. These are some "non sets" objects, and we can assume that they exist. We can even assume that there are $2^{\aleph_0}$ of them and we can fix a structure of the real numbers on them. (Or we can assume there are $\aleph_0$ of them and give them a different structure instead).
In that case, $\{1,2,3\}$ is a set of objects which are not sets. So $\bigcup\{1,2,3\}=\varnothing$. Because none of $1,2,3$ have elements of its own.
But commonly, we consider the natural numbers to be represented by the finite ordinals, and the ordinals to be represented by the von Neumann ordinals. So these are fairly canonical sets, and so $\bigcup\{1,2,3\}=3$.
This is the same representation as in Henning's answer, which explains nicely why the above equality holds.