by CCW | 12 January 2020 15:00
They found him in the temple
“They found him in the temple,” Luke tells us. The only question for us and for our world is “will we?” Nothing highlights better the symbolic significance of Epiphany than the story of Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple. Doing what? You might ask. Asking and answering questions, teaching and learning, we might say. Nothing counters more completely the anti-intellectualism of our contemporary age. If anything we are in flight from thought and its demands. Epiphany suggests otherwise.
The Magoi of Anatolia, “wise men from the East”, as Matthew tells us, show us something of the universal desire for truth. They reveal the eros to know as Plato and Aristotle suggest about the desire to know truth in accord with each of our capacities to know. At issue is whether those capacities are alive in us or not.
Luke’s account is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. There are various stories invented much later that seek to fill in the gaps between the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke and the stories of the ministry of Christ as an adult, stories which, in my view, diminish and distort both the humanity and the divinity of Christ presented in the Gospels. Only Luke gives us this rich and powerful story of Christ as a boy of twelve. It is, we might say, his bar mitzvah. It marks the transition from boyhood to manhood, to the responsibilities of adulthood and conveys to us the idea of maturing in faith.
But even more, it highlights the important Epiphany theme of teaching, of the idea of things being made known to us about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. Here Jesus is found in the company of the learned doctors of the Jewish Law, the Law or Torah of our humanity, we might say, at least in terms of its concentrated form in the Ten Commandments, something given and yet given for thought, known and grasped as belonging to universal reason. Christ is placed with the doctors of the Law in the temple of Jerusalem, a place dedicated to the honour, the glory, and the truth of God. There is a rich significance to these allusions. That Christ is found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is not accidental.
It signals the epiphany theme about the things of God revealed in the humanity of Christ. We might, in the manner of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, focus on the precociousness of Christ and indeed exaggerate that even more fully and in so doing miss the essential doctrinal point. Epiphany is all about the revelation of the divinity of Christ, about what are known as the essential attributes of God. The focus is on God and what that means for us. Our humanity finds its truth in God.
Perhaps nothing troubles us more in our current confusions and preoccupations than the very concept and idea of God. We have become accustomed to turning God into some likeness of ourselves. We miss the great wonder and glory of the Epiphany season which is all about the wonder of God as the antidote to the limitations and follies of our humanity and to the senseless violence of our troubled world.
The story of the Magi concludes the Christmas mystery and inaugurates the Epiphany. The Magoi of Anatolia, as Matthew alone tells us, follow a star and make their way to Jerusalem and to Herod, and then to Bethlehem to worship the child Christ with their gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” gifts that teach. Christ is King, and God, and Sacrifice.
They come from afar, the proverbial ‘come-from-aways’ and the ‘Johnny-come-latelys’, but they come symbolic of the universal desire of our humanity to seek the truth of God in which we find the truth of our humanity. They come and worship and depart another way. They are, as T.S. Eliot suggests in his magisterial poem, “The Journey of the Magi”, changed by what they see and so are “no longer at ease.” The encounter with the truth of Christ as God made man changes everything. The simple point is that we are changed by what we have been given to see.
Today’s focus is on the place where we learn the things of God. We are reminded of the temple, of the purpose of the Church as the place where Christ is proclaimed and celebrated, known and adored in Word and Sacrament, the place where we are incorporated into his life and body; if indeed the Church is the Church, true to its purpose and life. It is through the life and mission of the Church that we learn and live the things of God. The temple, the Church, is part of the mystery of God with us, part of the Christian faith itself. Not as institutional idolatry but as the place where God’s love and truth are proclaimed even, and, especially, in the face of human wickedness and evil. Especially in the face of the devastating and senseless loss of life in Tehran this week which leaves us all bereft. How do we make sense of the loss of innocent life? Perhaps through the difficult but necessary Christmas story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents which is also part of the Epiphany. Certainly, we, too, are “no longer at ease.”
Magnified and sanctified
Be thy holy name
Vilified and crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the love which never came.
You want it darker
We kill the flame.
Such is the powerful insight of Leonard Cohen’s late and last album about the human condition, its longing and its untruth. “We kill the flame.”
“Did you not know,” Jesus challenges Mary and Joseph, “that I must be about my father’s business?” Or as it can also be translated, “did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?” Either way the strong point is being made about the essential divinity of Christ shining out to us through the face of Jesus Christ. And in beholding him face-to-face we are changed by what we are given to see, changed from glory into glory, no longer at ease in our old patterns and usual ways. “In thy light shall we see light,” the psalmist says (Ps. 36.9). Not our light. For there is no human comfort only the comfort of God. “You want it darker. We kill the flame.” Andrewes turns the psalm into a prayer: “Grant that in thy light we may see light, the light of thy grace today and the light of thy glory evermore.” Epiphany is all the light of Christ illuminating our lives with the grace of God. All because “they found him in the temple” and so may we, if indeed the Church will be herself the place where the things of God are taught and learned.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 1, 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/01/12/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-after-the-epiphany-11/
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