Epiphany: recapitulation

Like most of us, the Jews we hear about in today’s Gospel were likely going about their daily routines, working, focusing on the political and social events of the day, conversations with friends and neighbours, frustrations with this or that person or situation, going about their regular worship routines. In the midst of these things, we often develop habits to harden ourselves against challenges to our expectations because they throw us off our routines; moreover, they often challenge our sense of identity and autonomy; so more deeply, our sense of security about the present and future.

This is the reality we encounter this morning as we hear our Epiphany Gospel lesson about the gentile magi who bring Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This whole story utterly flips the expectations of anyone - Jew or Gentile - about who the creator and redeemer of the world is, and how he would reconcile people to himself. And it’s precisely this challenge to expectations that Jesus embodies throughout his ministry, and that he presses his followers to be attentive to throughout their lives. This of course begins with his humble birth as a vulnerable infant into poverty and danger that we celebrated on Christmas. But the unexpected does not end there. 

On the one hand, we might think to ourselves, of course we see Jesus as the King not merely of the earthly world, but of both heaven and Earth. So it makes sense that he would be brought gifts, particularly, gold, for it is a common gift to be brought to a king. But here’s the shocker: the ones who bring him gold are not his own people; they’re not expecting a Messiah! They are Gentiles.

And so here it is, the first moment of Epiphany, the inflection point not just of history, but of reality, when all expectations are turned upside down: God doesn’t do a new thing. No, God forces us - gentiles that is - to attend to Israel’s own scriptures, to recall his promise to Abraham: through your faithfulness, I will reach beyond my own people to gather other nations. And so it is that God dries up the Red Sea once again; the gentiles cross and are released, with Israel, from their slavery to sin; the gates are raised, the Messiah, the Christ has come as God promised Abraham and the prophets; and all nations - marked by these three magi - are being gathered, quite apart from their own full understanding! 

Meanwhile Israel stands still; they remain hardened in their expectations of how God will show up to them. As they so often do, they quote their own Scriptures and their prophets and yet they fail to recognize Jesus as the one these Scriptures are testifying to: “calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people [of Israel], [Herod] inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet: 'And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"

Their stubbornness is prophesied but will not thwart God’s plan to gather all nations - including them - to himself. And so it is that God fulfills his promise to gather all nations, to gather Israel by making them jealous of gentile inclusion, as Paul will recount in Romans, and to warn the gentiles that they can so easily follow Israel’s own path of self righteously defined entitlement and expectation, reminding them that they have been grafted into Christ not by birth but only by faith. So it is that God will gather all nations to himself not by doing a new thing, but by doing what he promised, in a most unexpected way. 

We see this confirmed in the second gift the gentile magis bring, frankincense, which is typically used in Jewish worship as a sign of God’s presence. And finally, pointing to what will lie ahead for this God-King, the magis bring Jesus myrrh, which is used to embalm the dead. We’re not told that the magis recognize Jesus as both God and man, or that he will therefore suffer and die for his faithfulness to God; but the gifts they bring suggest recognition and so the faith to approach God that surpasses their own understanding. 

God’s self revelation to the magi enables us to see through them that God works in ways that we often cannot see clearly. Think for a moment about the star they follow. It appears to stop over Jesus - something no mere cosmological star would do. The star then stands for yet another epiphanic moment, an inflection or transition point of reality. A sign that points beyond what we finite creatures can see, to what God is doing with all his creation. The stars which once guided the gentile astrologers are no longer their true light. One is used as a bridge between what they expect and know now - the stars of the night sky - and what they will come to embody because of Christ: a light that enlightens all gentiles.

How does this take place? Here is our epiphany---that "ah ha!” moment that brings it all together and sends us in a new direction. As the magi go and seek this king they lay down their own expectations - their understandings and ways are expanded; the blinders are torn off just like the scales from Paul’s eyes, and they can see Christ through whom God is fully revealed. The star they followed then was not a mere created star, but is a divine sign, like the manna signifying Christ as the bread of life that God uses to feed the Israelites in the desert. And so this story reaches beyond the magi, beyond Herod, just as Abraham’s story does with the magi; it reaches out and touches us and draws us into God’s own Word, into the very words of Scripture, and so into God’s own life. 

Simply because we are gentiles, Christians, we should not presume that we do not fall into the same blindness to God that the Israelites did. Paul warns us of this in his letter to the Roman Church. You were grafted in through faith i.e. through following, although you cannot necessarily see or know God’s will with certainty. Like Herod, we often become kings or queens of our own little world, seeking to protect our own expectations and demands concerning what ought to be and who we think we are and what we think we deserve in liu of having control and certainty.

It’s easy, when we see our lives only through our own limited lens, to respond to challenges to what we think and believe like Herod, with fear; fear of losing control, fear of losing autonomy, fear of losing ourselves. To this God responds: do not fear, follow me. Do not, dear magi, do not my dear Christians, go back to Herod, back to slavery in Egypt, back to sin, back to death. Seek life. Bring the fullness of who you are and all that you have and give it over to Christ. Ask, seek, and you will find your rest in the only one who gives life and life eternal: God in Christ. AMEN