Epiphany

 

JANUARY 5TH, 2024

So yesterday, the sixth of January, is the 12th and last day of Christmas. Along with giving your true love the dubious gift of twelve drummers drumming, it’s the correct day for taking down the Christmas tree and packing away the nativity set, and it’s also the date of the ancient festival of the Epiphany on which the early Church celebrated the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And the day for celebrating pagans getting it right, wealthy foreign stargazers who recognised the signs in the heavens that showed them the global importance of Jesus’ birth. Basically, the ancient world’s equivalent of scientists, in today’s terms astrologers, Matthew names them as magi or sorcerers from the East. Kings? Maybe not, but certainly rich and powerful and well-connected politically - and all of it set aside to traipse across the desert and pay homage to a baby born to a poor couple made homeless by a census.

These days, the word ‘epiphany’ means a sudden happy realisation, the lightbulb moment when we just get something significant. In the ancient world the word epiphaneia or "glorious appearing" was used for the solemn visit of a ruler to the cities of his realm – but the early Church applied the word to the visit of earthly rulers who seek out the newborn Christ to pay him homage. In other words, the ancient Church took the usual meaning of the word Epiphany and subverted it – the real kingship belongs to God and is revealed - not in human dreams of power and importance but in the birth of a vulnerable child born into poverty who is God with us and for us.

But Matthew’s Epiphany story written for a community living under military occupation is even more subversive than that. Modern sceptics who point out the plot holes, patiently explaining for example that stars don’t normally travel at camel’s pace, hovering just up ahead of us until we get to the right stable - simply miss the point. Because Matthew’s story says: ‘no, the hope of the world isn’t the Pax Romana’ – not the much-advertised peace and stability of the Roman Empire based on Rome having the best equipped and best-trained army the world had ever seen, the most sophisticated technologies of engineering and law and government control – not the brute force of military power or technology or economic superiority that still today produce fear and insecurity among both the haves and the have nots – no, the only real promise of peace is the humble vulnerability of God with us that we see revealed in a helpless child. This is both a powerful and a much-contested assertion, isn’t it? – an assertion that many in our own time assume has simply run out of steam – and we do our faith a disservice if we reduce Matthew’s story to a cute fairy tale of stars and camels and birthday presents.

I think Epiphany is the ‘adults-only’ version of the Christmas tale. Sometimes I wish that the Church would forget about Christmas – the ancient pagan festival of midwinter that somewhere around the fourth century became associated with the birth of Jesus. Forget Christmas – leave that to Santa and K-Mart and Harvey Norman and good luck to them – and vigorously proclaim the ‘good news for grownups’ story of the Incarnation at Epiphany.

Yes, of course there is a children’s version of Epiphany, and it’s worth telling. It’s a good message. The astrologer-kings bring precious gifts because they realise that the birth of this king changes everything, that the epiphaneia of God announced in the stars and revealed in the baby Jesus makes all our dreams and all our aspirations relative. The magi lay before the baby the symbols of their own earthly importance, and so should we. What do you most treasure? What is most important in your life – measured by how much of your time and resources it consumes? What would it mean for you to hand over that part of your life to Jesus, to put Jesus ahead of your own most treasured dreams and possessions? So if you go home today wondering what the astrologers’ camel-journey through the desert tells you about your own priorities that is not a bad start.

But the adult version is this. There is a darker streak to Matthew’s tale of the travelling astrologers that gets lost in the tinsel, and it’s about the persistence of hope amidst the terror and opposition surrounding Jesus' birth right from the start. The gift of myrrh should tip us off for a start – did you notice? the costly embalming spice that Nicodemus donates after Jesus’ crucifixion is also one of the gifts at his birth! This king is going to attract some powerful opposition! And it’s not just symbolic – Herod, the local ruler to whom the magi have to pay a quick visit if they want to avoid an international incident – Herod isn’t exactly overjoyed at their news, nor does he immediately go out shopping for Christmas presents for baby Jesus.

And not just Herod. Matthew ominously tells us that ‘all Jerusalem’ - all the religious and political elites - are afraid! Why? Because the one thing the powerful seek more than anything else is to stay in power. Herod and his court no longer model themselves on the kind of servant leadership that Israel’s prophets had consistently preached about. They have long since forgotten the tradition that God placed them in their positions to serve rather than be served. Herod’s main aim is to stay in power, and so he is immediately threatened by even the mention of another – and therefore rival – king.

The arrival of the magi and their quest for God’s messiah announces that the world is changing, that God has come near, and that nothing can ever be the same again. This mysterious visitation signals that the reach of God’s embrace has just got wider, that there is no longer "insider" and "outsider," but that all human beings are included in God’s plan for salvation. This isn’t a new theme in Judaism. From the very beginning of the story, for example, God promises to bless Abraham so that he, in turn, could be a blessing to the pagan tribes he encounters. But it’s always disconcerting to those who seek to reassure themselves that they are the insiders - that they are the ones for whom God’s promises are intended - by pointing to others who are excluded.

Fear, of course, is a powerful emotion. In response to their fear, Herod, along with the ruling elites in Jerusalem, conspire to find the child and kill him. The slaughter of the innocents around Bethlehem sends shudders down our spines even today – because it echoes uncomfortably with our own dark experiences of the world we live in – with contemporary realities of ethnic cleansing and massacres of innocent children, and women and men.

You may have heard, incidentally, that the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank cancelled its Christmas celebrations this year? Instead, a nativity scene was constructed in Manger Square showing a child wrapped in a Palestinian scarf, the keffiyah, lying in a mess of twisted steel and broken concrete. St Matthew’s nativity story reveals God’s inbreaking into human history at the intersection of our human suffering and our most demonic fantasies of power. And it is our own complicity in the domination of others that is exposed by the vulnerability of God.

The slaughter of the innocents is a kind of prequel in Matthew’s story, a dark reminder of the opposition that Jesus’ testimony to the compassionate solidarity of God will attract. A reminder that if Jesus’ earthly life begins with joy and hope it will end encircled by the violence that time and again exposes the contradictions between human insecurity and divine love.

The adult version of Matthew’s nativity story moves quickly from the glad moment of the adoration and gifts of the magi to a darker, more ambivalent world of political intrigue, deception, and fear-induced violence. But if Matthew’s version is more sobering, it is also ultimately liberating. Because we live in a world riddled with violence and fear. Matthew’s story of the visit of the magi – and the subsequent slaughter of the innocents – holds up a disturbing mirror of the world as it is – and of ourselves both as we are and as we could be.

And this is at the heart of Matthew’s darker, grown-up story of the nativity: the promise that it is precisely this world that God comes into, this world so diminished by fear that God loves, this gaping need that we have that God remedies. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, the living, breathing, and vulnerable promise that God chose to come and live and die for us, in all our dividedness and inconstancy, so that in Christ’s resurrection we, too might experience newness of life.

So, what gifts do you have that you can lay before the baby Jesus? Not just the gold and the frankincense – what burden of myrrh are you carrying? What unshareable secret, what paralysing fear, what ancient failure, what destructive fantasies or self-loathing that might be transformed by the grown-up message of the Incarnation that both in our darkness and our light, God desires and loves us just as we are?