Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”
With the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, Christmas goes global. It becomes omni populo, for all people, simply by the journeying to and from Bethlehem by those who are simply called the Magi from Anatolia, the wise ones from the east. We know next to nothing about them; only their gifts, their “sacred gifts of mystic meaning” as an ancient hymn puts it, point to the larger dimension of the reality and the universality of the Incarnation. The one before whom they kneel in adoration is signified in the gifts they bring as nothing less than King and God and Sacrifice.
The gifts teach. Epiphany emphasises the fundamental feature of all revealed religion. God teaches. God makes something of himself known to us and in so doing reveals something of ourselves to us as well, both the good and the bad.
The idea of Revelation honours our humanity; the theological assumption contained in the idea of Revelation is that we are capax dei, capable of God, not by virtue of any presumption on our part, of course, but by the grace of Revelation itself. For Christians Revelation has its fullest expression in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. What greater honour could be bestowed upon our humanity than the divine condescension to enter into the very fabric of our humanity? “Thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb” as the Te Deum wonderfully puts it. An honour and a dignity have been bestowed upon us. To what end? To teach and to redeem so that our humanity which is capax dei can also participate in the divine life opened to view in Jesus Christ; “he in us and we in him”, as our liturgy puts it. We are meant to be changed by what we are given to see. In a way, it is as simple as that.
