Year: 2021

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Did you not know? Jesus says to Mary and to us. There are things which God wants us to know. In a way that is the burden of the Epiphany season. It is about the manifestation of the essential things of God, about what is being made known to us through the humanity of Christ. Through God being with us, God himself is made known to us. The mystery lies not in what is hidden but in what is made known, an inexhaustible mystery that commands our attention and reflection.

Nothing says education quite like epiphany. It is one of many words about knowing that have been bequeathed to us from the richness of Greek philosophy in the intensity of its investigations into what it means to know. I teach a course in the International Baccalaureate Programme called The Theory of Knowledge, ToK. It focuses on the question: ‘how do we know?’ The question presupposes that there are things to be known.

Epiphany means manifestation or making known. It is altogether about the making known of the essential divinity of Christ. It marks the transition from the Christmas emphasis on the humble birth of Christ in Bethlehem to his being the Word and Son of God, to the idea of God himself, to what is being made known through his humanity. The emphasis is emphatically on teaching. The church which is not a teaching church is not the church. Epiphany recalls us to the primacy of teaching as belonging to worship.

We meet today on the First Sunday after the Epiphany within the Octave of the Epiphany. Thus the Epiphany story in all of its evocative and exotic wonder is still very much before us. With the coming of “the Magoi from Anatolia”, the wise ones from the East, from the vast expanse of Asia Minor and, perhaps, even Persian, (the term encompasses what we now know as Turkey but extends in antiquity beyond the modern boundaries of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation states). There is something wonderfully intriguing about these celebrated ‘come-from-aways’ who make the great journey, first, to Jerusalem and, then, to Bethlehem, highlighting for us the twin centers of Christian contemplation. Their journey has a twofold aspect: first, an investigative journey to find out “where is he that should be born King of the Jews” and,  secondly, a reflective journey, after having been directed to Bethlehem by the prophecy of Micah recalled by the chief priests and the scribes and by Herod who has another and more sinister motive. Beholding the child and his mother, “they fell down and worshipped him”, and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” They are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach us about the radical meaning of the one whom they have sought.

With the coming of the Magi the tableaux of Christmas at Bethlehem is complete but it inaugurates another journey, the journey of reflection signalled in their gifts and their departure from Bethlehem. “They departed into their own country another way.” Very little is said about the identity of the Magi. They are unnamed and unnumbered but they have had an enormous impact upon holy imagination especially in literature and in art. Legends and stories grow up around Matthew’s sparse account.  They soon come to be seen in one way or another as representatives of our humanity: one young, one middle-aged, and one elderly; and one European, one Asian, and one African, for example. In every way, the Magi themselves signal the strong doctrinal point of the Christmas mystery that Christ’s birth is for all people; it is omni populo, universal. With the coming of the Magi, Christmas goes global, we might say.

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“They presented unto him gifts”

One of the most beloved aspects of the Christmas scene is the image of the Magi-kings coming to Bethlehem. There is something intriguingly strange and exotic, something mysterious and wonderful in the coming of “the Magi from Anatolia” that complements and completes the tableaux of glory that surrounds the infant Christ in the humble lowliness of the stable scene. The Magi have captured the imaginations of the artists down throughout the centuries both in terms of the literary arts and in terms of the visual arts. Legends and stories have gathered around the Magi-kings both in numbering and naming what is otherwise unnumbered and unnamed by Matthew in his Gospel. In these works of holy imagination, something of the universal aspects of our humanity are signified with the Magi imaged as young, middle-aged, and elderly or as representative of the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Such are the traditions of the holy exotica of the Magi.

What is said about them scripturally is sparse and yet so suggestive. Yet nothing says education quite so clearly as epiphany which is what the Magi are all about. Epiphany has to do with the making known, the manifestation of things worth honouring and worth knowing. The whole scene is about their coming to see, their coming to know, their willingness to enter into the arduous quest to know, the passion or eros to know, as Plato puts it. The Epiphany Gospel begins with an investigative journey, we might say, and ends with a reflective journey about what has been seen and heard, worshipped and honoured. They return not to Jerusalem but to their own country another way, “no longer at ease”, the modern poet T.S. Eliot suggests, because they have been changed inwardly by what they have seen.

They journey first to Jerusalem inquiring about “where is he that is born King of the Jews?” They have followed his star, following the light into the greater light. Herod in Jerusalem is troubled and worried at their coming. He gathers the chief priests and the scribes to find out the answer to the birth of this “King of the Jews”. For Herod it is really about a potential rival to his own power. The chief priests and scribes recall Micah’s prophecy about little Bethlehem. And so, paradoxically, at Herod’s direction the Magi set off to Bethlehem where they see “the young child and Mary his mother”. They fall down and worship him and, opening their treasures, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”. The gifts are, as one of the great hymns puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts that teach and illuminate our understanding.

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“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass”

Christmas is more than a three-day wonder or even a nine-day wonder. The festival of Christmas extends to twelve days, an octave and a half, as it were. The readings from the Octave Day of Christmas are appointed to be used until the Epiphany. The Gospel reading from St. Luke continues directly from the Christmas morning Gospel. The shepherds, having heard the angelic Gloria, make their way to Bethlehem.

Along with the poetic, prophetic and philosophical reading from Isaiah, these readings bid us ponder more carefully and more thoughtfully the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. The shepherds say one to another, quite literally, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this saying which has happened”, capturing something of the very idea of the Word made flesh, the very wonder of Emmanuel, the great Christmas name of Jesus, we might say. The emphasis of these readings is on that which is heard and seen and which occasions two things: the “mak[ing] known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child”; and the sense of wonder “at those things which were told” by the shepherds.

The quiet focus of this Gospel reading is on the activity of Mary in relation to the making known and to the sense of wonder. Her activity is the profoundly spiritual activity of the Church. It is, first and foremost, about contemplation, the highest activity of the human spirit, as Aristotle teaches. Mary is the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one who bears God into the world, the mother of God, as the orthodox faith confesses. Not the source of divinity which she cannot be but the human source of God becoming man in Jesus Christ. What that means concerns the more radical meaning of what it means to be human and in ways that challenge and counter our contemporary assumptions about the autonomous self. That more radical meaning is captured wonderfully in Mary’s fiat mihi at the Annunciation, “be it unto me according to thy Word”, her willing acquiescence, her ‘yes’ to God so central to the mystery of God with us. But it is equally captured in this Gospel reading: “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”. That is to attend to God in his Word and in his Word with us.

Pondus meum, amor meus. “My love is my weight”, Augustine famously says in his Confessions (Bk. 13). The entirety of his being, he has come to recognise, is defined by the love of God, just like Mary. Her activity here is the activity and mission of the Church. It is about our constant and steadfast attention to the Word of God and to the motions of his grace in our lives. To keep all these things and to ponder them in our hearts is to pay serious attention to all that is said concerning this child.

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