Author: CCW

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

Epiphany concentrates our minds upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity. The word means manifestation; it is the idea of things that are made known to us. God makes himself known to us through the Word and Son of the Father.

This is why this story, read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and often within the Octave of the Epiphany, is so important. It reminds us that the Epiphany story of the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, is at once the completion of Christmas and the beginning of a new journey, a new orientation. The Magi-Kings, to be sure, came to Bethlehem by way of Jerusalem but “they departed to their own country another way,” being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. In a deeper and more spiritual sense, they are changed by what they have seen. There is a transformation of intellect and heart. T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Journey of the Magi, intuits that deeper transformation. “We returned to our places,” he has them say, “but no longer at ease.” The phrase becomes the title of Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel, No Longer at Ease, which treats the collision of cultures between Europeans and the tribal world of the Igbo peoples of Nigeria. Something changes irrevocably. There is no going back.

With Epiphany there is a double journey: a journey from Anatolia to Bethlehem and a journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. They are the two centers of Christian contemplation, the two centers of an ellipse around which the Christian understanding moves. It is, above all else, a journey of the understanding. It is all about teaching. What is the teaching? It is altogether about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ. What does that have to do with us, we might ask? The essential divinity of Christ has everything to do with us because the truth and dignity of our humanity is found not in ourselves but in our life with Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” St. Paul powerfully reminds us. “Be not conformed to this world,” for that is atheism in its many and varied forms, from the aggressive and antagonistic to the melancholic and wistful, from the dogmatic to the confused.

Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th will be marked in Halifax by the book launch of the two books by Fr. Robert Crouse, the outstanding teacher and scholar who was the inspiration and mentor of so many priests and people across the world. St. Paul’s words in today’s Epistle were among his most favourite and most frequently quoted passages. For him they captured so much of what belongs to the pilgrimage of the soul to God, the pilgrimage of the redemption of human desire, and especially with respect to the confusions, conflicts and concerns of contemporary culture. The transformation of our minds upon the things of God made known to us contrasts with our being conformed to the bad infinity of the endless and competing claims of the world.

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“He thought on these things”

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

Love comes down at Christmas to enfold us in God’s eternal embrace. Christ, the babe of Bethlehem, is God’s “great little one,” in the poet Richard Crashaw’s lovely phrase, who speaks to us even as an unspeaking infant, one who is, literally, without speech. Such are the paradoxes of Christmas, “all wonders in one sight.” The wonder and mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity, a double mystery, the mystery of God and the mystery of God with us. Today we are meant to be like Joseph who “thought on these things.” What things? Mary being “found with child of the Holy Ghost.” Tomorrow, on the Octave Day of Christmas, we are meant to be like Mary who “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart;” all these things concerning this child. There is something profoundly meditative and reflective about Christmas; the counter and corrective to all our calculative thinking.

Christmas is not about things as objects that can be wrapped in tinsel and ribbon. They last but for a day or a season only to be tossed away on the rubbish heap of the New Year, like Christmas trees, bedraggled and forlorn, lying at the end of driveways before Christmastide has hardly begun. It is as if Christmas is over and done with, merely a passing moment in the endless rush of things that belong to human calculation and interest. This is not Christmas.

It is not simply that there are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas; it is the greater wonder of the meaning of Christmas itself that abides and embraces us in something eternal, something of everlasting truth. In a way, Christmas is the opening to the mystery that cannot be reduced to the parade of things, to objects, or to the thinking that turns ourselves into things, ourselves as objects to be used and manipulated by one another. The wonder of Christmastide is our abiding in the abiding mystery of God. Love is not something which can be wrapped in a box of transitory delights; the chocolates, after all, are already gone.

The readings of the Christmas season show us the wonder of divine love and place us within its embrace. “The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise,” Matthew tells us in his account of the Christmas story; it signifies the unique and special nature of Mary’s holy child. She is “found with child of the Holy Ghost.” “When the fulness of the time was come,” Paul tells us in Galatians, “God sent forth his Son,” the Son who already was and always is God’s Son, but now “made of a woman, made under the law.” The imagery is rich and profound about what ultimately is professed in the Creed and which we heard on Christmas Eve and Christmas Morn. God’s great little one is “God of God; Light of Light; very God, of very God; Begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father,” and yet, as the Christmas Preface puts it, he was “made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin.” The mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity are before us in one and at the same time. In Christ.

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