The Feast of the Epiphany of our Lord 2013

Epiphany is a strange festival, and in many ways our readings this morning don’t even begin to consider the breadth of the meaning that the Church has attributed to it over the centuries. We have heard the story of the Magi and their bringing of gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Our reading from Isaiah and our psalm foretold that event.

Our brothers and sisters in the churches of the Orthodox tradition would however be very quick to remind us that this was not originally even the principal theme of today’s feast. They would encourage us to turn on in our bibles and remember two events at the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. One of these we will visit next week, when we celebrate the Festival of the Baptism of our Lord. They would also be quick to encourage to us to turn our thoughts to our Lord’s first miracle, when he turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana. They preserve this link to this day, even if we in the Western Church have lost the connection. But why has the Church associated these three events so closely?

On the face of it, there are no immediate links. The magi come to visit the Holy Infant before his second birthday. The other events seem to have occurred nearly three decades later.  The wedding miracle takes place at a party; our Lord’s baptism is at the hands of a man you definitely wouldn’t want to invite to a party. 

However, these three events are intimately linked – they all carry the same purpose. Isaiah tells us ‘Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.’ Or in the words of Christopher Wordsworth,

‘Manifest at Jordan’s stream,

Prophet, Priest and King supreme;

and at Cana wedding-guest

in thy Godhead manifest.’

St. Matthew, in his gospel, is keen on prophecy and quotes Isaiah and the like at every opportunity, but instead of quoting ancient prophecies, we have heard today the evangelist recount a prophetic event. We are not told exactly where the Magi came from, beyond ‘the East’, or even how many of them there were. The popular tradition of three comes from the number of gifts the evangelist mentions. Tradition names them Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar and suggests they came from India, Persia and Arabia respectively. I suggest we need not dwell on this question, but there is something important hidden behind the legend. Here the God of Israel is being revealed to the people from all corners of the world. But they also reveal something of God to God’s own people.

They reveal to Herod the coming of the promised King, and in their gifts they reveal much of what lies ahead for the Christ-child. Gold is a gift for a king – the promised descendant of David who would sit on David’s throne forever. Incense, much as we use it in our Mass today, has been offered in all manner of cultures to their deities as a symbol of prayer rising into the presence of the divine as a sweet smell. Myrrh was until quite recently used to anoint the bodies of the dead to prepare them for burial. Origen, writing in the third century, described the gifts thusly ‘gold, as to a king; myrrh, as to one who was mortal; and incense, as to a God.’ The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and gave his life for us.

The uniting factor in the three events associated with this feast of the Church is the revelation of God to humanity. Our collect this morning summed this up: ‘O God, who by the leading of a star manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth.’

How today does God manifest his only Son to the peoples of the earth? Is it by strange visitors from lands afar? Or by the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, and solemn proclamations ‘this is my son’? Or what about miraculously transforming water into wine? Well perhaps sometimes. Much of the world came to hear the good news of Christ through travellers heading out into far off lands, in a reversal of the Magi. And yes, God does work through miraculous signs and wonders, but only sometimes. 

Let me repeat to you the prophecy of Isaiah. ‘Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.’ Yes, our light has come. The glory of the Lord has risen upon us. The light that is the life of all people has come into the world. This prophecy is also a call to us. We are called to rise and shine with the glory of the only Begotten Son of the Father. We are called to leave the manger and take the good news out into the world – to make it manifest to the world.

And that is why today we solemnly proclaim the date of Easter. In this day and age when we all have diaries, or all sorts of gadgets, to tell us when these things occur, we must still proclaim that the story continues on from Christmas time. We do not just proclaim when Easter will come: we also announce what we celebrate then, and all that goes with it. We proclaim that we will leave the manger and head towards our Lord’s crucifixion and death, His Burial and His Rising. We proclaim this because our good news lies not just in God coming amongst us, or making himself known to us, but in what follows as well.

We proclaim that our God and King has taken mortal flesh and come to dwell amongst us, to take up the cross to save us from our sins, to gather all peoples to himself, to welcome them to be the adopted children, the co-heirs with Christ, to become the children of God. Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.