Epiphany Meditation
“They saw…they came…they worshipped”
It may be, as someone recently remarked to me, that had the wise men been women, they would have gotten there on time and presented more practical gifts! Yet the gifts of the Magi have another purpose. They are profoundly symbolic: “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, as one of our hymns puts it. In short, they are gifts that teach. Both the gifts of the Magi and the journey of the Magi wonderfully illustrate something of the nature of the Epiphany.
Epiphany marks at once the beginning and the end of Christmas. With the story of the coming of the wise men from the east who brought gifts to the child Christ, it seems, thereby breaking-in to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people – and so there is the beginning of Christmas for the whole world. But with the break-out from Bethlehem which Epiphany also signifies, there is a new and different focus. There is a journey, both a journeying to Bethlehem and a journeying from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. And yet, the deeper meaning and significance of God with us is the critical lesson in the journeying from Bethlehem. Something of Bethlehem continues with us.
The mystery of God with us is the mystery revealed, the mystery made manifest. Epiphany is more than a day and a season. It signals a doctrine – a teaching. Indeed, the teaching that it signals is the teaching of God – God making himself known to us through the conditions of our humanity; God teaching us something about what he wants and seeks for us. We are opened out to the mystery of God with us. We are taught something about what belongs to the truth of our humanity from within the conditions of our brokenness. We learn, it seems, even from the little ones.
Christ is God’s “great little one” to whom the great of the earth – kings in their power and the wise in their wisdom – “come and worship”. The mystery of Christmas cannot stay hidden in some remote corner of the world; it must needs break out from the confines of little Bethlehem. In the coming of the Magi from afar (they are the prototypical come-from-aways!) the whole world in its desiring to know is understood to have its place and its fulfillment in this story.
