KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 6 January
They presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.
Epiphany marks the end of Christmas, in one way, and the further extension of its mystery and meaning, in another way. The word, epiphany, means manifestation. It signals the idea of what is made known to us. In the Christian understanding, Epiphany celebrates the making known of the essential divinity of Christ. It is made known through the humanity of Christ.
It is difficult to know which is harder to understand: the things of God or the things of our humanity? The Christian view is that both are bound up in each other; we cannot know God apart from our relation to one another and the world, and we cannot know ourselves, our world, and one another apart from God. Epiphany, meaning the feast which culminates the festival of Christmas, and the doctrine and season which it inaugurates, illuminates the dialectic of the human and the divine but with a focus on the divine attributes of Christ as made known through his humanity.
The Magi are the magoi, the wise ones from Anatolia, from the East as Matthew tells us. It is a strong reminder to the West of how much is owed to the East. As such something universal is opened to view. Classically speaking, Epiphany proclaims that Christ’s holy birth is omni populo, for all people, a point made, to be sure, in the Christmas readings but here more than amply and strongly emphasized in the coming and going of the wise men. The Magi, after all, are the proverbial ‘come-from-aways’ and in our rather disturbed times which manifests a certain amount of allophobia (fear of the other) and or xenophobia (fear of the stranger), a kind of misanthropy, their coming is a welcome antidote to our preoccupations and concerns about ourselves in relation to the omicron variant of COVID-19. How? Because Epiphany makes manifest what is for all regardless of times and places, regardless of circumstances and events, and despite our fears and anxieties about ‘others’. It opens us out to a deeper insight into human dignity and purpose universally considered.
It is found in worship of which the gifts of the Magi are themselves the stellar expression. Here are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach and signify the meaning of Christ as King, as God, and as, well, what else? That is the question about the gift of myrrh. Gold and frankincense are foretold and forementioned by Isaiah, but myrrh? What are we to make of that?
