Preached at St John’s Devizes, and on Sunday 8th January at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend
Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12
“Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…”
Epiphany (1940) by Max Ernst.
The Epiphany is the fourth most important date in the Church’s year, after Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. Yet it is often neglected by secular society, and church-goers don’t generally turn out in great numbers for Epiphany services in my experience. Yet it’s a feast of great significance because, with Christ still in His cradle, it established Christianity as an explicitly universalising religion: by that, I mean one that seeks to make followers of people of every nation and language, rather than just from the Palestinian Jewish community who supplied Christ’s followers while He was on earth.
A lot is going on in our two readings this evening, so let me try to unpack some of it.
The fact that these men are identified by St Matthew as coming from the East, specifically, has interesting implications. The East was a place associated with wisdom and spiritual insight. The Wise Men are being identified by Matthew not as any old gentiles but some of the holiest and most intellectually gifted representatives of the entire gentile world. They already know that the new-born child they seek is destined to be king. In contrast, Herod, the temporal king of the Jews, is spiritually blind. This short-sighted and intolerant man can’t see anything in the arrival of these foreign visitors beyond a potential threat to his power. Wisdom and holiness do not come through ancestry: early in his story of Jesus’ life, Matthew has established an important principle.
Yet there is an obvious tension between universalism and the particular here. If Christianity is a universal religion, one might ask why Jesus should have been born as a Jew, as a male, in the Holy Land, in the 1st Century. Why there, and then, and in the form of this little baby born of Mary? Part of the answer must be that if Christian faith truly does encapsulate God’s plan for humanity, then God had to become human as someone in particular. None of us are blank slates. All of us have a culture and a heritage, and no single one of us can be everyman or everywoman. Indeed love can only truly be love if it is directed towards someone or something in particular; love in the abstract remains something unconsummated and unfulfilled.
So, given that God had to come into the world as some human being in particular, I suppose it made perfect sense for Him to come as someone who lived near the centre of the Old World, among a people who had long believed in a single universal creator God. Yet while the Jews of the Holy Land were near the geographical centre of the Old World, they were at the same time peripheral in terms of political p0wer and cultural prestige. As we see time-and-time again in both Matthew’s and Luke’s narrative of His birth and early life, Jesus is identified repeatedly with an aspect of traditional kingship or temporal power, only for a rather subversive slant to be given to those concepts.
Our Old Testament reading from Isaiah sheds further interesting light on where the universalist ideas of the Epiphany came from. The reading is from the so-called Third Isaiah, the last ten chapters of the prophecy, which were by far the last to be written, almost certainly by the group of people who returned to Jerusalem from Babylon after the Persian conquest had set them free.
These were people busy trying to rebuild The Temple, which had been destroyed about two generations before during the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem. Those who had kept faith that God would eventually liberate them had been vindicated, which helps explain this passage’s optimism. But it also a classic example of the universal concerns that become so prominent in Jewish writings after the Exile. “Nations will come to you”, the people of Jerusalem are told, and “your sons will come from far away”. This sort of universal concern had been present in the some passages by the pre-Exile prophets; but we see it much more clearly in the parts of the Old Testament such as this one which were written after the return from Exile. An Exile, let us not forget, that was in “the east”.
How might we handle what we might metaphorically see as our own ‘exile’ in what is now a post-Christian country? Exile was an agonising experience for the Jewish élite, but it shifted their thought-world, and forced them to reflect on what they had always assumed about God and the ways in which they might have been too limited in their thinking. Moreover, the exiles have been exposed to sophisticated Eastern philosophies held by of some the cleverest and most morally impressive people in the rich, highly populated, multi-ethnic city in which they had been a small and powerless minority. Indeed, they had been exposed to these ideas by people rather like the Wise Men. Through pain and tragedy, the Jewish people had their perceptions expanded and reshaped to bring them closer to God’s.
In our own context, I’m not convinced that the anti-religious order that currently prevails in the West is as secure as it likes to think, and it certainly isn’t especially logical or rational. To be fair, however, some of its challenge to Christianity, is well-made and has been well-merited by us. A millennium and a half of cultural dominance on our part – such an unimaginably long time – certainly made us smug and complacent. Here is an opportunity for us to grow as Christians, to deepen our faith, to be challenged as to where God is actually at work in the world and as to whom He is working through. We are living through a bleak midwinter of faith in this country and it will take courage and imagination to grow through it. The alternatives, however, are either to give up, or to retreat into a sort of embittered tribalism of a minor sect. Neither of those appeal to me; and bleak midwinters always end in springtime.
Let me leave you with a final thought: if Epiphany is such an important festival, should we be disappointed that we only ever see the faithful few in church for it, rather than the crowds of Christmas? It would be lovely if it were otherwise, but I’m not sure it matters all that much. Remember that most of the really important moments in the Church’s history saw only a few people present. Not just the first Epiphany, but the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection appearances, the Upper Room at Pentecost. I have no doubt that God is at work in vital ways through those of us gathered here this evening, no matter that we are few in number. We should set aside the presumptions of the world that important things are things that are done by the rich and powerful and are paid attention to by billions, and remember that God is often most actively at work where most people notice him least. After all, what else would we expect, when we worship the tiny baby born in terrible poverty; a tiny and poor baby whom Wise Men travelled hundreds of miles to bow down before and worship?
And now let glory and honour, dominion and power, be ascribed to God the Father the creator of the universe; God the Son, the babe of Bethlehem; and God the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary; as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
