by CCW | 19 January 2025 10:00
The Epiphany event of the Magi-Kings coming to Bethlehem focuses on the gifts they bring. The gifts manifest the meaning of the one whom they seek and find in Bethlehem. The gifts they present belong to the nature and meaning of adoration. Adoration is a kind of focused wonder. It belongs to the highest feature of our humanity as contemplative beings. Adoration speaks to the greatest dignity of our humanity in the contemplation of the greatest good in itself and for us. The gifts they bring belong more profoundly to the gift that has brought them to Bethlehem. The greater and greatest gift is Christ. Our finding him is really about our being found in him.
The Magi-Kings found him in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph found him in the Temple. But all because we are found in him. Christ is the gift through whom all gifts are given, the gifts that adorn and dignify our humanity as found in God’s love for us. This is truly astounding, an astonishment that should awaken in us philosophical wonder. It is what we see in the readings both today and last Sunday.
To be recalled to the God who is the giver of every good gift is the deeper meaning of Epiphany. God makes himself known to us and makes known the qualities of our life in Christ by virtue of the gifts that are given to us. The gifts differ according to the grace that is given to us, gifts that vary with the differences in our created being. Yet the gifts belong to the restoration and perfection of our humanity.
Epiphany signifies the manifestation of God in Christ but also in the world as creation. It is not by accident that the Second Sunday after Epiphany presents us with the first miracle of Christ. “This beginning of signs,” John tells us, “did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.” It is an epiphany which makes known the divinity of Christ as the Lord of Creation who seeks the greater good of our humanity. There is in these readings a sense of cosmic consciousness, of creation itself as partaking of the divine nature. Our good is inseparable from the good of creation itself. In this way, we might begin to make sense of the idea of miracles as essentially making known the greater miracle of life itself, the greater miracle of creation as given by God.
Paul in his list of gifts which are given for our good in our lives together bids us to be “kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love” and to be “given to hospitality.” John’s Gospel shows us the divine hospitality in the story of Christ who comes as guest to a country wedding feast but is revealed as Lord. This story complements and expands upon last week’s Gospel about the purpose of Christ’s coming. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Jesus asked Mary rhetorically. Here he points us to the meaning of his coming by way of reference to his “hour;” in short, to his passion and death and its meaning for us. This beginning of signs contains the meaning of all the signs or miracles of Christ which belong to nothing less than the will of God in creation and in redemption. God seeks our social joys, giving us the good wine of divinity that perfects our humanity in holy joy. We are made partakers of the divine nature through Word and Sacrament in a kind of sacred conversation between God, our humanity, and creation.
This contrasts with the disorders and confusions of our world and day. We are, it seems, captive also to a great list of sayings and directives about what to say, think, and do as defined by the tyranny of the managerial and technocratic culture of the governmental and corporate world of regulatory compliance, on the one hand, and the tyranny of the therapeutic culture about the care of the self, via diagnostic categories that are at best hypotheses but easily become constraining reifications of behaviour as things, on the other hand. Both have co-opted the language and concepts that belong to religion and philosophical culture. As such they have some truth in them. But they are really parodies of the Good and the True and as such are empty and meaningless. As Robert Bellah and others show in ‘Habits of the Heart,’ both utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism can only say what they think is good for themselves individually, materially and psychologically, but are utterly incapable of saying what the Good is in itself and for all. Nonetheless as parodies of the Good and the True, they point us to what they presuppose in their incompleteness which masquerades as absolute.
These readings offer a corrective and a way of redeeming the times. Epiphany speaks profoundly to the divine will and purpose for our humanity and for the whole of creation and nowhere more wonderfully than here. The divinity of Christ is made manifest not as a wonder-worker, not as a spectacle for our entertainment, not as a distraction from the harsh and difficult realities of human suffering and evil, but as the one who seeks our good in the absolute goodness of God himself.
Water being turned into wine? Isn’t that a contradiction and a negation of creation? And yet what do we seek in our techno-utopian fantasies except the same thing – changing nature and indeed human nature itself through various forms of technological manipulation? Treating nature and ourselves as things to be manipulated and used. Dante coined an Italian term in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, “trashumanar,” transhumanised. For him it was about the ways in which human lives attain a higher perfection of their being by God’s grace but only according to the capacities of each person who retain their essential creation and individuation. The term has been co-opted to various ideological projects driven not by grace but by human presumption and technology in flight from the real that negates the givenness of creation.
Bread and wine are the material elements of the eucharistic sacrament, “the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.” Bread and wine are not natural things per se but the result of human interaction with the created order. Wheat from a thousand fields and grapes from a thousand vineyards are transformed into bread and wine which have become symbolic of civilized life. Yet bread and wine become the sacraments of our incorporation into the life of God through the body and blood of Christ. Bread and wine do not cease to be what they are in becoming the sacraments.
God uses the things of this world to teach us about our life and our end in God. The things of the world become the sacramental means of our being transformed by the restoration of our humanity to who we are in Christ. The God who creates the world in the distinctiveness of each thing is not constrained by what he makes. The miracles of Christ show the greater end and purpose of creation itself. This beginning of signs reveals the thinking that belongs to all the miracles by pointing us to his hour, to his passion and death out of which flows life and salvation for our humanity and for the whole of creation.
This is our joy and astonishment, our awakening to the wonder of God and to the wonder of our being found in Christ. The gifts of God are alive in us according to the grace that is given to us, the grace that does not destroy nature but perfects it.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2025
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