The Gift of Christ
The Epiphany. Fr Colin Carr encourages us to see what’s in front of us.
We don’t always see what’s going on in front of us. Some time ago on a weekday morning I was saying Mass in St Dominic’s Church in Newcastle; a young man who had been coming once or twice recently was wandering up and down, apparently looking at the stations of the cross; later he went into the inner porch and propped open the door between the porches and one of the doors into the church. Then towards the end of communion I saw a lady rushing out into the porch: she’d had her purse stolen out of her bag during communion, and I realised that the strange behaviour of the young man had been a preparation for a snatch and a getaway, and I kicked myself for not realising it sooner. It hadn’t, as we say, dawned on me.
‘The nations come to your light, and kings to your dawning brightness’, as the prophecy of Isaiah says in promising a new life for Jerusalem.
Epiphany is about God allowing it to dawn on us that something great is happening. But just because God allows it to dawn on us doesn’t mean that it does dawn on us. The contrast in Matthew’s Gospel is between those who are attracted by the light and those who are troubled; between those who are delighted by the star and those who are threatened; and between those who worship the Christ child and those who wish to destroy him.
The pagan wise men are attracted by the sight of the star. They are ready for the truth; they are prepared to suffer inconvenience to find the truth. They are willing to move from where they are to a new place. Herod and the people around him are merely troubled by the idea that there might be something new around. They are upset at the idea of something different, a new meaning to the word ‘king’. The contrast really is between those who realise that there is always something more to learn, and those who want to stick with what they’re used to; those who are willing to venture into the unknown and those who want the certainty of the familiar.
The pagan wise men are delighted when they see the star again – after their brief stay in a capital city which obscures the star. They know that it is leading them in the right direction, and that when it stops they have reached their destination. They are open to whatever is going to be revealed, and they know that the name of what they seek is joy. The reigning king is threatened by what he does not know; he thinks of this new ‘king’ as a usurper; Herod has power of a kind, and anything which might challenge the status quo is obviously a threat to that power. Like so many power-hungry people – perhaps we should say, like all power hungry people – he is deeply insecure, because his life is centred on his rather fragile self, rather than on the God who is the source of all power, all value, all status.
So the final contrast is between the pagan wise men who respond to the Christ child by worshipping him, and the insecure king who only wishes to destroy him. The worship is accompanied by the giving of gifts; worship and giving are the acts of free people who do not have to hold on to their own dignity or their own possessions. Those who have to cling to what they have are slaves to their own dignity, their own power. Rather than find their life outside and beyond themselves, they would destroy anything which challenges them, and in the end destroy themselves and everything they love.
This Christmas time we are invited to worship the one who did not cling to his riches, to his equality with God, but emptied himself and made himself poor so that we could be rich and enjoy the status of the children of God.
Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12
Image: detail of the central panel of the St Columba altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
