“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.
God bestows an incredible dignity upon our humanity by virtue of Christ’s birth. But it is far more than a feel-good story as the Epiphany itself makes clear. Wary of Herod, “they departed into their own country another way”, “having been warned of God in a dream.” It inaugurates one of the most disturbing scenes of the Christmas and Epiphany story; the flight into Egypt of the Holy Family to escape Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents in his attempt to eradicate a potential rival to his throne. What havoc we wreak, just because we can.
That disturbing story is part of the deeper mystery of Christmas; but it belongs as well to the Epiphany to make known to us the deeper potentialities of human evil in the form of genocide. Herod enacts a policy of genocide to kill all the boys of Bethlehem; echoing Pharaoh’s attempt in The Book of Exodus to control the ancient Hebrew slaves in Egypt by killing all the male children. It is an example of what happens when power is divorced from wisdom and when wisdom is without humility. Power without wisdom and wisdom without humility become diabolical as the mind-numbing and devastating atrocities of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have so disturbingly taught us. If we have learned, learning from our outright denials of God and the degradation of our humanity which such denials entail.
This past week at King’s-Edgehill, one of the last survivors of the Holocaust, Philip Riteman, spoke to the School. A man haunted by the horrifying memories of death and loss, he had the courage to exhort us to love rather than to give into the ideologies that dehumanise us all when we forget the limits of our humanity; the atheistic ideologies of the totalitarian regimes that presume that Hitler is God, that Stalin is God, and so on. To love is what the Magi do when they come to Bethlehem; they kneel down and adore. They honour the humanity of God in Jesus Christ. They teach us to honour one another.
But that is the challenge and focus of the Epiphany season. It is simply about learning the things of God revealed in and through the humanity of Christ who engages all of the disorders and follies of our humanity. What we are given to see is meant to change us, ultimately for the better.
Nowhere, perhaps, has the meaning of the Epiphany been better captured for our contemporary world than in T.S. Eliot’s remarkable meditation, The Journey of the Magi. “A cold coming we had of it,” his poem begins, quoting from one of Lancelot Andrewes’ rich sermons on the Mystery of the Incarnation, sermons which played an important role in Eliot’s own conversion to orthodox Christianity in the form of Anglicanism, “just the worst time of the year/For a journey, and such a long journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, /The very dead of winter.” Andrewes’ own sense of the ambiguities and the difficulties of travelling (and this was before the shoe and underwear bombers of our present-day confusions) are developed further by Eliot, who like Andrewes, wants to place us imaginatively in this journey. It is a journey fraught with uncertainty and discomfort, with fear and even the sense of futility; “the voices singing in our ears, saying/That this was all folly.”
“Bearing gifts we traverse afar, field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star” but we travel without that sense of exultant, exuberant confidence signalled in the familiar 19th century carol, We Three Kings of Orient Are. Eliot mentions neither the star nor the gifts; neither the number of the magi, nor even that they were kings. The journey is concentrated on what we come to see and how it challenges us. “Were we led all that way for/Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,/But had thought they were different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” The contemplation of the Christmas mystery of Christ’s holy birth brings forth the deeper realization of the nature of redemption and sacrifice. In a way, the poem anticipates the theme of Archbishop Thomas à Becket’s Christmas morning sermon in Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. “We both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason.” We celebrate at once Christ’s holy birth and his passion and death upon the cross. The two are inescapably interconnected and have no meaning apart from each other.
What is the effect of this manifestation? Epiphany means manifestation. Something is made known and it changes us. As Eliot puts it, “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease,” capturing profoundly the nature of the effect of Revelation on human consciousness. Its comfort and strength lies precisely in challenging all our complacencies. And our follies, such as the folly of trying to take God’s Word captive to our projects and plans, trying to reduce God to our immediate concerns and interests.
Epiphany is the counter to such follies by confronting us with the idea of the divine teaching, the teaching which both honours and challenges our humanity. Luke presents us with what is the only story in the gospels of the boyhood of Christ. He is found in the temple as student and teacher. It is his bar mitzvah, we might say, or his confirmation, if you will. It marks a moment of transition from boyhood to adulthood. It is at once the fullest confirmation of his human reality and testimony to his essential divinity. The mystery of the Incarnation made manifest in the Epiphany is about those two aspects of the reality of Christ. He is true God and true man. His humanity is not merely a disguise, the Gnostic denial of the material and physical world which is the counter-point to the denial of Christ’s divinity and to the destructive atheisms of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Part of the reality of his humanity concerns the stages of our lives, stages that are marked, in some sense, through education.
Epiphany is transformative, not by being “conformed to this world”, as Paul reminds us but by being “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds”. Where and how? In the Temple, in the holy places dedicated to the mystery of the Revelation of God’s Word and Truth incarnate in Christ. By the divine teaching which opens us out to a wisdom which is greater than human devising, a wisdom that confronts and changes us, if we will learn.
Once again, Eliot in another work, Choruses from the Rock, signals the challenge and the difficulty. “Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her/ laws?/She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would/ forget./She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they/ like to be soft./She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts./They constantly try to escape/From the darkness outside and within/By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be/good.” There is at once the deeper darkness of the disorders of our sinful humanity and the greater light of the divine teaching that redeems our humanity. If we will learn.
“Human kind”, after all, “cannot bear too much reality” (Murder in the Cathedral). Epiphany is about the making known of the divine reality which engages our humanity and seeks its perfection. It opens us out to things beyond our prosaic and limited imaginations, the things of God which bring dignity and honour to our humanity. But only if we will learn. Only if we will be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” in the holy things of God opened to view in the pageant of Revelation. Such is the divine teaching by the one who is both God and man, Jesus Christ, whose Incarnation we honour only to find ourselves honoured and blessed by him.
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany I, January 10th, 2010