HOMILY EPIPHANY 2024
Learning from the Magi
(Is 60:1-6; Ps 72; Eph 3:2-6; Mt 2:1-12)
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When a topic pertaining to wisdom, theology or academia comes up, Bishop Emeritus Gerry Wiesner, who lives, taught and ministers in Western Canada, often quips, “All wise persons come from the East – and the wiser they are, the sooner they come!”
Today’s feast of the Epiphany offers us a wise message: be like the Magi – seek Jesus, recognize Jesus, worship Jesus, and I would add, do his will and serve him.
Our purpose here on earth, according to an old catechism, is to “know, love and serve God, and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” If that is our primary purpose for being alive on this planet, it makes sense we would seek out this God we are to know, and make that our priority. We are created in the image and likeness of God, and some would say unconsciously remember being kissed by God before we were born, and long to be reunited with God again, a holy longing.
The Magi may have been astrologers, men of science, who felt that yearning and longing for more, for wholeness and completion, and made the pursuit of the star leading them to Jesus their top priority. It must be the same with us – seeking an intimate relationship with Jesus should be the top priority in our lives, and he should be at the centre of our lives, as he was for the Magi.
The next step is to be able to recognize Jesus in the Incarnation, as he comes to us each day, in the flesh. As Ron Rolheiser OMI points, the privileged place to recognize Jesus today is in all the refugee children around the world who have no home, no place to rest. That was how Jesus came into the world, and continues to come into the world today. There was no room for him then, and there still is no room for him almost everywhere. Not only was he not welcome except by a few; he was also a “wanted person”, in trouble with the civil government from the moment of his birth. Perhaps that is in indication that whistle blowers who point out injustice and suffer because of their courageous act, may also be another privileged place where we can recognize Jesus today.
The Incarnation continues to be a challenge for us, and perhaps especially for those of us who like our religion tidy and sanitized, not messy and dirty, as was the stable. It is much easier to relate to Jesus in a gold tabernacle, than in a very ordinary, lowly and perhaps somewhat uncouth person or a person who is of another culture and religion. One day, I had gone with a priest I knew to the university chapel to obtain a consecrated host to take communion to a parishioner in the hospital. When I went to bid farewell to him, whom I would probably never see again, he admonished me, “Shh – you can’t talk to me, you’re carrying the Blessed Sacrament!”
I was taken aback – what kind of Christology is this, that I can no longer talk to him because I was carrying Jesus? Did not Jesus walk this earth, invite the disciples to his home to spend time talking with him, and also teach us that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him? When I greet someone quietly at the back of the church to ask how his wife is after an operation, am I not talking to Jesus? I once received a letter informing me that unlike the Protestants, we had the Real Presence in the Church, and so there should be no worldly conversation in a church. But what is a worldly conversation? Would greeting someone and asking about their welfare be considered worldly?
This is a very pertinent point on this feast day that celebrates the manifestation of Jesus to the world. Can we realize that the primary manifestation and presence of Jesus is in the other, and where we are to meet him and encounter him, before we can recognize him in the tabernacle? And if we can’t recognize him in each other, I suspect we are not really recognizing him in the tabernacle either, no matter how much time we spend in pious prayer there. The Magi were able to recognize the Messiah, the King of the Jews, in a little child born in a barn, and so should we.
Worshipping Jesus is easier to do than seeking and recognizing him, although that has also dropped to the bottom of the list of importance for most people in our society today. Adoration, prayer celebrations, discursive prayer and devotions, contemplative prayer and especially celebrating the Eucharist are all ways that we can worship Jesus. Bob Mitchel OFM used to say “most people lead lives of great activity into which they try to insert periods of prayer, but it should be the other way around – we should be living prayerful lives into which we insert periods of activity!” Can we at least try to move in that direction to be more like the Magi?
Finally, we are to serve him and do his will. As St. James put it, show me your faith and I will show you my works. Faith without charity is dead. Our faith in Jesus must be expressed by acts of love towards all others, especially the ones most in need. That too can be a subtle challenge, because it is very easy to slip into what T. S. Eliot described as, “To do the right thing for the wrong reason is the greatest kind of treason.” The danger is that we end up doing not so much God’s will, but our will in God’s name, and that would be a kind of treason. I learned that lesson the hard way in my first mission, when after a rather frustrating first year as a young priest, it dawned on me that I was doing ministry my way, and not really God’s way – I was doing my will in God’s name, and that danger we must always guard against. Genuine charity and ministry will always be humble, effective and a source of joy.
The Eucharist we celebrate on this feast day is a true encounter with Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, which means “House of bread” and placed in a manger where animals eat – a powerful symbol that this child is not just the Light of the world, the long-awaited Messiah, king of the universe, but also the Word made flesh for the world, the bread of life meant to nourish us all.
Let us celebrate with joy this multi-layered feast celebrating the manifestation of God in our world through the Magi, the wedding feast of Cana that was his first miracle, and his baptism in the Jordan when the Father blessed him and identified him as his beloved Son, whom we should seek above all, recognize in the poor, worship from the heart, humbly obey and obediently serve.
