Matthew 2:1-12
“Epiphany”, the season after
Christmas, gets its name from a Greek word that means “appearance” or “manifestation”. It has the sense of something suddenly
becoming clear. If someone has an
epiphany, they have one of those light-bulb moments of sudden recognition or
insight. At one church I served, there
was a pair of identical twins who were in their forties and still looked and
sounded identical. They didn’t dress
alike or go out of their way to match – it was just natural. Then one day I saw them standing beside each
other and – just like that! – I could tell them apart. (One combed his hair in one direction and the
other in the other direction. How could
I not have seen that?)
Epiphany, as a season, concentrates
on the ways that God shows himself to the nations of the world, having begun
with Israel but going on to all the rest of us when he came among us in a
person named Jesus. So Epiphany begins
with the first Gentiles to recognize (or at least suspect) that Jesus was no
ordinary infant.
“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of
Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is
the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its
rising, and have come to pay him homage.’” [Matthew 2:1]
These
are not people familiar with Judaism or the scriptures. These people are not even coming from within
the Roman Empire. They’re from away out
there in the East, someplace in the Persian Empire, Rome’s only significant
counterpart or rival at that time. We
call them wise men but they seem politically naïve and unaware of the danger
they bring upon the baby just by mentioning his existence and they are sort of bumbling
in the way that they act in Herod’s jurisdiction. Yet these are the people, along with a bunch
of shepherds working the night shift and two old folks in the Temple, to whom
God decides to announce his Son’s presence in the world.
Now, it isn’t that the others did
not let anyone know about the child Jesus.
Luke says that after visiting the baby in the manger,
“The
shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and
seen.” [Luke 2:20]
When
Jesus was taken to the Temple for the first time, Simeon met Mary and Joseph
carrying Jesus and took him into his own arms, declaring,
“Master,
now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
for
my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the
presence of all peoples,
a
light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.” [Luke 2:29-32]
So,
too, his female counterpart Anna.
“At
that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to
all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” [Luke
2:38]
But
when the wise men came along, they brought with them not only some awareness
that this child was chosen above others, but also in what ways.
You know the story of their visit,
and even people who don’t still know about the gifts that they took him: gold,
frankincense, and myrrh. Traditionally,
interpreters have looked at those gifts as emblematic of Jesus role in the salvation
of the world. We’ve already sung about
them this morning: gold, to surround a king; incense, to burn on an altar in
the presence of God; myrrh, to anoint a prophet’s brow or to embalm the dead.
“Glorious now behold him
arise;
King and God and
sacrifice. …”
So
at the same time that God’s Son is being shown to the world beyond Bethlehem
and Nazareth and Jerusalem, people who are strangers to those places are
showing God’s people something about him of which they themselves had been
unaware.
We need to be shown things that are
right under our own noses sometimes. We
need epiphanies brought to us by those who see things we miss, perhaps out of
sheer familiarity. An epiphany moment
might be like me pointing out that this flag to my right – one that many of you
have been looking at your entire lives – has 48 stars. Now try to un-see that. You can’t.
Those Persians point out the complexity of Jesus’ work of salvation as
king and God and sacrifice, and we look back at his life and see him acting,
from childhood, in ways that overturn the kingdoms of this world and show God’s
power among the people and reveal the costly and self-giving love that would
find itself on a cross.
We
cannot talk about Jesus without all of those purposes being there all at once
and combined. We cannot only say that he
was a good man, even the best person ever.
He was and is more than that. We
cannot only say that he was God, because his is also human and subject to our
weaknesses, which is why it matters to see him tempted but not falling into
sin. It’s why we can say he really and
truly suffered and died. We cannot only
say that he sacrificed his life for our sin, without recognizing that he was
also God and his mere presence in this world involved infinite sacrifice from
the very start, trading heaven for all that we face on earth, even death.
Throughout
the coming weeks we will look at and give thanks for the many things we learn
of God’s grace and Jesus’ love through people from cultures and societies that
are not our own (always remembering that Jesus and the disciples were not
twenty-first century Americans). We’ll
consider what we can learn from believers in China and South Africa and Italy
and even Canada. But first of all we stop
and remember the profound revelation brought to God’s people by these strangers
and their gifts, and then look at the long line of strangers and offerings that
they hold in their hands to lay down also before the Christ Child. Perhaps they see gifts in our own hands that
we don’t even realize yet that we are carrying.
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