The Epiphany brings an almost magical atmosphere to Christmas. It is filled with light. Yet this light is not from the golden legend from which Matthew has partially borrowed, but from the frail Child – the Son of the Eternal Father, Messiah for the Jews and God for the world. ‘Epiphany’ means ‘revelation.’ It celebrates the ‘manifestation’ of the Saviour to whole world, the world of the Gentiles which is our world, we who are ‘the wild shoot’ grafted on to the parent stem of the Jews (Rom).
Isaiah 60:1-6. Returning from exile the deported Jews have set out on a journey to Jerusalem, a Jerusalem now lit up with multiple candles of the rebuilt temple. It was Isaiah who said the vocation of Israel was to be ‘a light to the nations’, and a Christian interpretation would say that here the prophet sees farther and beyond, to another light which will draw all peoples from far away places, ‘bringing gold and incense’ to a reborn Jerusalem.
Ephesians 3:2-3a. 5-6. The theologian Paul takes us right into the present. ‘The mystery has now been revealed,’ he says. He implies that there is no longer a need for privileged places or lands or cities for our journey to the Lord. The Lord’s revelation is the work of the Spirit in us, and it occurs primarily in the hearts of believers. The boundaries between Jew and Gentile have been crossed (although we must respect the fact that the Jewish people may not think so). The ‘Gospel’/the ‘good news’ of God’s presence in Jesus, is the proof that we have now been brought into the community of faith.
Matt 2:1-12. We sing in the carol:’We Three Kings of Orient are,’ but Matthew does not speak of kings but of ‘wise men’ from the east, the ‘Magi’. Regarding these Magi or wise people, it is widely considered that the translation ‘astrologers’ fits best, because of their link with a star. There is little point in looking for their homeland, or for a comet to account for the star. They have persisted in the tradition as romantic and loveable figures, also conflicted, in that they were preyed upon by a murderous king. In including the Magi story, Matthew had a catechetical purpose. He was writing at a time when many Gentiles were entering the Christian community. ‘Many will come from the east and the west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob within the kingdom of heaven’ (8:11), while the Jews (Herod, the scribes and the chief priests) who were the people with the God-given scriptures, were failing to see.
What was different about the Magi was that they came from ‘beyond’ the ambience of the covenant; in their own setting they mysteriously heard a word of God and a call to faith just where they were, in their own culture, with its natural phenomena, and the not so natural star. And in going forth and making the long journey to Bethlehem under the star’s guidance, they were enacting once again the drama of faith of Abraham, the great father in faith, who left all his possessions in Mesopotamia, and got up and went in response to Yahweh’s promise. But this time it was to a fulfilment of that promise that the ‘good-hearted’ Magi came – God’s giving of his very self in the new-born Child.
In the prayer of St. Helena to the Magi in the Evelyn Waugh novel, ‘how laboriously you came’, she said, ‘taking sights and calculating, where shepherds had run barefoot.’ Richly clad, possibly accompanied by a retinue of providers and servants, the Magi came with their gifts. Like them, we too come to Bethlehem with the baggage of our culture, fettered by consumerism and pretensions of self-importance, we come with responsibilities and attachments we think we cannot do without. Like the Magi we come weighed down. But the Divine Child accepts us as we are, and with the Empress Helena we ask these wise men to pray to Him for us – us ‘the learned, the oblique, the delicate’, that we be ‘not forgotten at the throne of God, when the simple come into the kingdom.’
Jo O’Donovan rsm
South Central Province
