“When they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts;
gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”
Epiphany. Such a rich and wonderful word. It signals something intellectual, something grasped in the mind but in such a way as to move our hearts. Christmas gives way, finally, to Epiphany. But what is Epiphany? The after-glow of Christmas? The post-Christmas ‘hang-over’ as we enter into the dreaded and dreary bleakness of the winter? January, as the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, reminds us is about the truth of winter, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.”
So it is good to stay inside where challenges of another sort await us. They are the deep and great challenges of the Epiphany season. Our thoughts turn away from what has so easily become the cloying sentimentalities of Christmas, all tinsel and wrap, on the one hand, and so over-laden with impossible expectations, on the other hand. Our thoughts are turned from the God made flesh to the God who came in the flesh. We are awakened to the mystery of God. We turn, as the 17th century Anglican Bishop John Cosin puts it, from considering “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; in short, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.”
The paradox is great. In making this turn we discover a far greater truth about our humanity. In thinking God we learn the deeper truth and meaning of ourselves. There is no greater truth for our sad and weary world where we are well along the way to losing our humanity. And in a myriad of ways: the nihilism of terrorism and consumerism; the techno-gnosticism which negates ourselves by the folly of turning ourselves into little more than digital apps; and the techno-scientific exploitation which wreaks such havoc upon the natural world and the human community. All signal a loss of our humanity through human arrogance and over-reach, on the one hand, and intellectual and moral folly and blindness, on the other hand.
Epiphany is about regaining our humanity. It is found in thinking God, the God who reveals himself to us and in so doing reveals so much of ourselves to ourselves. The Feast of the Epiphany shows us this in the Gifts of the Magi. They are not gifts which are particularly practical; they are not gifts which have to do with reciprocity – getting something out of what you have given to others. They are entirely gifts which teach. They teach us something about the child Christ. They reveal something about worship and honour. They challenge us about what matters most for us and in our lives.
The magi-kings from Anatolia are the ‘Johnny-come-latelies,’ par excellence. How many they were and where they came from exactly remains unclear. It is enough to say they were from the East, from outside the lands of ancient Israel. They represent two things at the very least: first, the idea of the universality of the Christian Gospel, for all come to Christ both rich and poor, both Jews and Gentiles, both Shepherds and Kings; secondly, in their coming, the birth of Christ goes global. With Epiphany, Christmas is omni populo – for all people. It is made known outside of Bethlehem. “They return,” we are told, “to their own country” albeit “another way”. They return, as T.S. Eliot suggests, “no longer at ease” but changed by what they have seen and worshipped.
Their gifts reveal the truth of the Nativity. Christ is King and God and Man. Gold for a King, frankincense that honours him as God; and myrrh which signifies his humanity and his sacrifice. They are, as the hymn puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They reveal the one before whom they and we fall in worship. Something is revealed in the coming of the Magi and in the Gifts of the Magi. There is epiphany.
Something of the truth of our humanity is found only in our being opened out to the truth of God. It is the great lesson of the Epiphany – the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ. It is what is opened out to us in the opening of their treasures.
“When they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts;
gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of the Epiphany
January 6th, 2015