KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 January
Epiphany – The Gift of the Magi
Epiphany means manifestation, the idea of making things known. Such a concept speaks directly to the meaning of schools as places of learning because of what is made manifest, what is made known to students and teachers alike. Epiphany speaks to an essential feature of our humanity as intellectual and spiritual beings who, in some sense or another “by nature desire to know,” as Aristotle put it. No doubt that is true though only to one degree or another in terms of how much one desires to know.
Epiphany is also the term used for one of the more familiar features of the Christmas story. It is the term used for the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, the proverbial ‘wise-men.’ The story has caught the imagination of artists and thinkers down throughout the ages. Yet the story, like so much of the Christmas story, is rather sparse on details. It is, however, rich in symbol and significance which is very much a feature of learning through what is made manifest and taught. A star, it seems, led the Magi-Kings, though we easily forget that Matthew, who alone gives us this story, tells us that it is Herod who actually sends them to Bethlehem. He is hardly in favour of the idea of a King arising in his territory. His fear will lead to one of the most disturbing and yet most significant stories in the Christmas mystery, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
Who are the Magi-Kings? How many come? We know very little about them, neither their names nor their number. Holy Imagination will go to work to fill in the gaps and give them names and cultural identities. We assume there were three simply on the basis of the three gifts which they bring to the child Christ. The most we can say is that they ‘came from away’ – the proverbial ‘come-from-aways’ – and the proverbial ‘Johnny-come-latelies,’ too. They are not from Israel but from Anatolia, whether what we call Turkey in Asia Minor or perhaps even Persia. The point is that they are Gentiles – a term that simply refers to those from outside of Israel. Their coming means symbolically that Christmas is omni populo, for all people. This speaks to the universality of the Christian story.
Other religions and philosophies also convey a sense of things universal, things which are for all and not just for some. There is, it seems to me, a wonderful creative tension between the universal and the particular as well as the idea that we come to the former through the latter. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddah, for instance, comes to learn about the universality of human suffering, dukkah, out of which develops the various forms of Buddhism and the idea that suffering arises from our desires. This leads to the idea of the non-self; no self, no desires, no suffering. There is no you, in this view. That is very different from the assumptions about the self in western cultures.