by CCW | 6 January 2016 01:01
Epiphany marks the completion of the mystery of Christmas with the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem. They are the proverbial Johnny-come-latelies as well as the come-from-aways. They add a certain exotic quality to the humble scene at Bethlehem. Suddenly we realise that Christmas is omni populo, for all people, for rich and poor, for humble shepherds and wise kings, for men and women.
The coming of the Magi-Kings elevates the vision of paradise that Bethlehem represents into something more. It becomes a polis, a city-state, as it were. The social and the political aspects of our humanity are added to the simpler, more agrarian and humble features of our humanity. God’s great little one is not just for the little ones of our society and world but importantly for all. Little Bethlehem, “great among the cities of Judah,” is great not just because of the coming of the wise men but because their coming reveals something more than simply the harmonies of the created order; something more than paradise renewed. Suddenly, the paradise of Bethlehem becomes an image of the City of God!
The coming of the Magi-Kings also marks the beginning of the tradition of gift-giving. Yet, importantly, their gifts are more than the stuff they bring: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Their gifts reveal the greater gift of Christ, the gift of divine love incarnate in the child before whom they fall and worship. Their gifts honour the greatest gift of all, the gift of God’s love for us in the Child Christ. Their gifts reveal who he is both in himself and for us. No greater gift and no greater way for us to be gathered into the circle of eternal glory.
Their gifts of sacred meaning reveal Christ to us as King, and God, and Sacrifice. They at once complete the circle of Christmas love and set us upon another journey into a greater circle, one which is implicit already in everything that belongs to the celebration of Christmas in the cycle of holy days that belong to the Christ Child’s crown of glory. The transition from paradise restored to an image of the heavenly city deepens the mystery of Christmas; nostalgia for a lost past changes into a prophetic present. Bethlehem is complete; everything has been gathered around the Word made flesh.
Angels and Shepherds heralded the meaning of this child’s birth. He has been named Jesus, Saviour, by the Angels, by Mary, and by Joseph. He has been signalled out to the Shepherds by an angel as Saviour and as Christ the Lord. John in his great Prologue has proclaimed the deeper and fuller meaning of Christ’s Incarnation theologically and philosophically. In a way, that is possible because of these gifts of mystic meaning that illumine so much of the mystery of Christ to us. The gifts of the Magi-Kings herald Christ emphatically as the King of Kings, as the God of all creation, and as the redeemer of the world.
They at once complete Christmas and inaugurate a new journey. It is a journey of the understanding into the more radical meaning of the God made man and the purpose of his coming. God and King and Sacrifice capture the idea of God’s revelation and of human redemption. But in the mysterious story of their coming, there is already the mystery of another journey, a journey into the understanding of Christ’s holy birth, a journey of the soul into God, we might say, an itinerarium ad mentis ad Deum, per Bonaventure.
That other journey is signalled here at the end of the story of the Magi-Kings. Led by a star and not by angels as the Shepherds were, the Magi-Kings represent the activity of human reason in its highest form, the quest to know, the journey of the mind. They aren’t just told; it seems that they have to search and think things out. But like Joseph, they too learn what God wants in another way than simply through discursive reason. They, too, learn from God in a dream. They learn not to return to Herod. The text is succinct, indeed understated in its economy, but the sense is that being warned of Herod is one thing, departing into their own country another way something else, something belonging to their reasoning and acting upon the warning of God to them in a dream.
Epiphany will be about opening out to us the deeper understanding of the God who became man in Christ Jesus. It will catapult us into a kind of theological reasoning, into thinking about the nature of God made manifest “in substance of our mortal flesh”, about God as Eternal Light and Truth. A season of teaching, the teaching is about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ, the sine qua non of Christian understanding. John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham, captures wonderfully the intellectual sensibility of the Epiphany. Our thinking, he says, now turns from “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.”
That is the wonder of the Epiphany, an elevation of our thinking and being that is only possible because of the wondrous humility of God in the child Christ. This gives a positive turn to our returning, to our circling back to our own places, but in another way, changed because of what we have been given to behold in the mystery of Bethlehem.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Epiphany, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/01/06/sermon-for-the-epiphany-2/
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