6th January 2013
: EPIPHANY : Year C
8:00am and 9:30am Kalamunda
Isaiah 60:1-6 : Psalm
72:1-7, 10-14 : Ephesians 3:1-12 : Matthew 2:1-12
I began Friday’s by referring to the huge number of
biblical phrases that have entered the English language over the centuries,
mostly, it seems, thanks to the print revolution, movable type and the
Authorised Version of the bible, AKA the King James Version. One such phrase
hits us immediately – Arise, shine…
It was a favourite of my mother’s, and doubtless many another, usually in the
form, “Arise and shine!”
It might be a stimulating icebreaker or after-dinner
game – discovering how many such phrases we can think of.
But the point I want to make is that over time we
become very familiar with words, phrases, stories. They enter our consciousness
through our language, their original meaning lost or skewed or pressed into
service for a similar but not exact same purpose.
Stories such as those we’ve encountered in the last
few weeks – the stories around the birth and childhood of Jesus – and today,
the arrival of the “wise men from the East”, have become very familiar to us.
Even non-Christians know them at least as well as most of the faithful.
Maybe it’s this feeling of familiarity, or some desire
to claim a special relationship with the narrative, that prevents us – as it
did me for many years – from reading the scriptures that are the most common,
if not authoritative source for our Christmass and Epiphany stories. When we
read what is actually present in the gospel accounts we discover that much of
what has passed through our Tradition and traditions is absent.
Matthew is the sole evangelist to recount the coming
of the Magoi to pay homage to Jesus. Twelve verses is all we get. Out of those
dozen lines Tradition has created for us three kings named Balthazar, Melchior
and Gaspar, who arrive on the scene twelve days after the birth of the Messiah.
All of that is a mixture of speculation and fiction. None of it is included in
Matthew’s narrative.
The “wise men” are not kings in holy scripture.
They’re simply designated Magoi [Magoi] in the Greek text,
or Magi in its Latin form. They were most likely the First Century equivalent
of astronomers or spiritually-attuned philosophers. Matthew never refers to
them as kings.
The Magoi are unnamed. The naming comes a century or
two later, in Europe. That they numbered three is speculation probably based on
the number of gifts they offer; but three kinds of gift do not conclusively
mean only three givers.
From Matthew’s account, which includes Herod’s seeking
the “exact time when the star had appeared”, and the later mass murder of boys
two years old and under, the Magoi may have shown up anywhere up to two years
after Jesus was born. Matthew’s Jesus is not described as a baby: he’s simply “the
child with Mary his mother”. They’re in a house – no longer in the stable or
cave where Jesus was likely born – so perhaps Joseph had decided to stay put in
Bethlehem till Jesus was a little older, rather than put Mary through another
donkey trip, this time with a nursing baby.
It’s worth mentioning all this because we face the
danger of losing the importance of the visitation of the Magoi if we allow the
fictions to be our only point of contact with the Epiphany story. As we know,
an epiphany is a sudden moment of revelation – a realisation, an uncovering of
something previously-hidden or –veiled. The Greek behind that word epiphany[1]
gives us English words like fantastic.
In other words, something hidden in darkness becomes
visible when a bright light is shone upon it. So we find the continuing imagery
of darkness and light, and hidden and revealed in the Christmass-Epiphany
stories.
But this is not some kind of blasé “Oh, there you
are,” experience, as if we’ve just found the car keys, or the cat that went
missing in the morning but turned up demanding a banquet in the evening.
No. This is something worth getting excited about!
This is front-page news! Breaking news!
It’s the confirmation of something – Someone –
expected and maybe only half-believed, half-forsaken. And suddenly – VOILA! – here he is!
But wait! We got something weird here. What’s a
Messiah to a bunch of blokes from the East? After all, they’re not Jewish.
And that’s exactly it. God is making known, through
this event we celebrate as the Feast of the Epiphany, that Messiah is for
everyone – Jew and Gentile, black and white, male and female. …Which is why we
also give this Feast the longwinded title of The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Thankfully, “Epiphany”
is much easier to fit into a Service Register…
But however we name the Feast, it’s deepest meaning is
this revelation of Jesus to people who would ordinarily attach little or no
significance to it. Yet the Magoi do understand something. They do understand
that what the floodlights reveal is for them as well as the Jewish people.
And that means the revelation is for us also, that we,
like the Magoi, are people floodlit with the glory of God in Jesus.
And cool and fantastic as that surely is, it’s not
given so that we can preen ourselves. It’s given so that we can play our part
in bringing that same fantastic floodlight of revelation – that Jesus is for
all people – to everyone in and out of our lives.
That becomes the question. Is this what we are doing?
Are we in S. Barnabas’ church in the Anglican Worshipping Community of
Kalamunda bringing that light to our worlds? How are we doing so? What else might
we try? What needs to be re-thought, re-worked or re-directed? And what,
rightly, shall we celebrate, in the name of the Living God?
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