Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany

admin | 10 January 2021

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Did you not know? Jesus says to Mary and to us. There are things which God wants us to know. In a way that is the burden of the Epiphany season. It is about the manifestation of the essential things of God, about what is being made known to us through the humanity of Christ. Through God being with us, God himself is made known to us. The mystery lies not in what is hidden but in what is made known, an inexhaustible mystery that commands our attention and reflection.

Nothing says education quite like epiphany. It is one of many words about knowing that have been bequeathed to us from the richness of Greek philosophy in the intensity of its investigations into what it means to know. I teach a course in the International Baccalaureate Programme called The Theory of Knowledge, ToK. It focuses on the question: ‘how do we know?’ The question presupposes that there are things to be known.

Epiphany means manifestation or making known. It is altogether about the making known of the essential divinity of Christ. It marks the transition from the Christmas emphasis on the humble birth of Christ in Bethlehem to his being the Word and Son of God, to the idea of God himself, to what is being made known through his humanity. The emphasis is emphatically on teaching. The church which is not a teaching church is not the church. Epiphany recalls us to the primacy of teaching as belonging to worship.

We meet today on the First Sunday after the Epiphany within the Octave of the Epiphany. Thus the Epiphany story in all of its evocative and exotic wonder is still very much before us. With the coming of “the Magoi from Anatolia”, the wise ones from the East, from the vast expanse of Asia Minor and, perhaps, even Persian, (the term encompasses what we now know as Turkey but extends in antiquity beyond the modern boundaries of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation states). There is something wonderfully intriguing about these celebrated ‘come-from-aways’ who make the great journey, first, to Jerusalem and, then, to Bethlehem, highlighting for us the twin centers of Christian contemplation. Their journey has a twofold aspect: first, an investigative journey to find out “where is he that should be born King of the Jews” and, secondly, a reflective journey, after having been directed to Bethlehem by the prophecy of Micah recalled by the chief priests and the scribes and by Herod who has another and more sinister motive. Beholding the child and his mother, “they fell down and worshipped him”, and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” They are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach us about the radical meaning of the one whom they have sought.

With the coming of the Magi the tableaux of Christmas at Bethlehem is complete but it inaugurates another journey, the journey of reflection signalled in their gifts and their departure from Bethlehem. “They departed into their own country another way.” Very little is said about the identity of the Magi. They are unnamed and unnumbered but they have had an enormous impact upon holy imagination especially in literature and in art. Legends and stories grow up around Matthew’s sparse account. They soon come to be seen in one way or another as representatives of our humanity: one young, one middle-aged, and one elderly; and one European, one Asian, and one African, for example. In every way, the Magi themselves signal the strong doctrinal point of the Christmas mystery that Christ’s birth is for all people; it is omni populo, universal. With the coming of the Magi, Christmas goes global, we might say.

The gifts teach. They teach us about the radical meaning of Christ. They belong to the reflective journey so central to human life, a reflection on the mystery of God and of God with us in the Christian understanding; in short, a reflection on truth itself, on the idea of things being made known and our essential quest for truth. We are already prepared for certain aspects of this scene. Isaiah in one of the wonderful lessons in Advent and Christmas service of Lessons spoke about the light of God coming to us. Epiphany is all light. “Nations”, he said “shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising … they shall bring gold and frankincense and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord,” naming for us two of the gifts the Magi bring to Christ. The third gift is myrrh. The gifts are all symbolic. They teach us that Christ is King, and God and Sacrifice – myrrh (derived from Smryna) is an ancient burying perfume or spice. But the gifts themselves, like all true gifts, are a reflection upon what has been made known and given. They are a response to the gift of God, to the idea of truth. Worship is about our honouring what is worthy of our attention. God manifests himself and loses nothing of himself in making himself known to his creation and especially human creation which is made in his own image.

But the Magi do not follow the second half of Herod’s bidding. They do not return to Jerusalem from Bethlehem to tell him about the child King. We know that Herod has another agenda; that the child King is for him a threat to his reign and power and that he seeks not to worship him but to destroy a potential rival. And so the story reveals a feature of the betrayals of political power seen only too well in our world and day. They return another way to their own country.

This belongs to the reflective journey of the Epiphany. It has to do with our pondering and thinking upon what is being made known. They return, as the poet, T.S. Eliot, suggests, “no longer at ease,” no longer comfortable in their old patterns and ways, their assumptions and opinions. The whole point of reflection is about our being changed by what we have been given to see and know. Epiphany is transformative. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”, as Paul reminds us.

That idea underlies the project of the Epiphany season as the season of teaching. Thus the first Sunday presents us with the powerful and wonderful story of Christ teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem as a boy of twelve. Humanly speaking, it marks his bar mitzvah, the transition from childhood to adulthood, to the entering into new responsibilities and tasks. He is presented to us in a two-fold way as the divine teacher and the human student, but it is the former, the idea of thinking and teaching that is most prominent. It is captured in our text, in his response to the anxious question of Mary, his mother. It is a strong affirmation of the radical meaning of the Incarnation. Christ has come to make known to us the infinite riches of God. He is, as the text puts it, “about [his] Father’s business”.

It is an epiphany about his essential divinity and belongs to the concept of God in his own infinite activity. The first of the Anglican Articles of Religion is on God as Trinity and sets before us the essential attributes of God which are to be known and which are being manifest in Christ for us to learn; God in his “infinite wisdom, power, and goodness”; God as “the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible”; God being “of one substance, power, and eternity”; God who is ultimately the Trinity, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”.

Such teaching belongs to the Epiphany Octave seen in the Baptism of Christ, itself a revelation of the Trinity through the Father’s voice, the Son in the river Jordan coming up out of the waters, and the Holy Ghost, like a dove descending upon him. It is an epiphany of the essential divinity of Christ. That, in turn, is complemented by the propers honouring the Missionary Work of the Church Overseas which sets before us the apostolic commission to go forth and “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Disciples are learners. It is all about our learning the things that are being made known to us about God and his will for our humanity.

The story of Christ teaching in the Temple is unique to Luke’s Gospel. But it underscores an important philosophical point about truth and about us as knowers in heart and mind. There are things which God wants us to know, things which belong to the truth of our humanity as the seekers of truth, what Plato calls the eros, the passionate desire to know which presupposes that there are things to be known. Thus the Epiphany in all of its forms locates the Christian story within the larger pageant of human inquiry. To be human is to want to know. We are always and necessarily on a journey of learning the things which God wants us to know.

That is highlighted by Jesus’ questioning response to Mary. The King James Version wisely keeps the older English of Tyndale with its Germanic overtones (gewissen) about one of the words for knowing. Wist ye not? Did you not know? In so speaking he shows us two things: something about his essential divinity and something about our humanity in relation to the truth of God “of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding,” as one of our prayers beautifully puts it (BCP, p. 45). Wisdom belongs to God and to our participation in God’s self-knowing. The reflective journey is essential to our lives and to the being of the Church.