Feast of the Epiphany - Homily 8

Homily 8 – 2012 

What was Matthew up to by prefacing his Gospel with this story of a wandering star, of exotic wise men from unnamed foreign lands, bringing unusual, quite impractical and useless gifts of gold, and frankincense and myrrh to an uninteresting, lower class family and their infant child – whom they expected to become a future Jewish king?

One of Matthew’s reasons is fairly clear.  He was writing his Gospel for his community – which was made up of both Jews and non-Jewish, Gentile, converts.

The adult Jew, Jesus, whom he would write about scarcely ever set foot outside his native land, and was certainly quite unknown beyond its borders.  Yet, Matthew wished to emphasise, right from the start, that Jesus was nevertheless crucially relevant to the salvation of the whole world and of everyone in it – whether Jews like himself, or Gentiles.  Matthew would conclude his Gospel with the scene of the risen Jesus sending his Jewish disciples to preach the Gospel to every creature and to make disciples of all the nations.

But I think that Matthew also wanted to foreshadow something else that would pervade the storyline of the public life and death of the adult Jesus.  Where do we find God? How do we find God? and Who is the God we might find? 

To me, Matthew’s story of the wise men raises the theme of expectations.  In today’s story, the new-born child hardly met the wise-men’s expectations.  He wasn’t a child of the reigning royal family of Herod.  He turned out to be a “nobody” – a nondescript child of nondescript parents in a “back-blocks” village, fussed around by no one, except themselves.  To add to the challenge, Matthew would have the birth of Jesus be the occasion of the heartless massacre of other new-born children in the district – hardly Good News for mothers or fathers.

What was Matthew up to? I think that Matthew was rehearsing the theme that the adult Jesus also failed expectations.  Jesus created a stir for a while, briefly became relatively famous up in rural Galilee; but then, once he set foot in the capital, Jerusalem, he was rejected, officially condemned as a blasphemer – as dishonoring God, and helplessly, brutally murdered by the local Roman strong-man, Pilate.  He had even failed the expectations of his own disciples.  Certainly, Matthew’s Gospel also told of resurrection; but that was experienced only by a small inner circle, and mainly by women, who, in the patriarchal culture of the time, simply didn’t count.

Let’s jump twenty centuries to our own time.  Epiphany means revelation, specifically, the revealing of God.  What was Matthew saying about a God revealed through all this? To many people, in our Western World at least, God has become irrelevant.  There are many different reasons for this.  But perhaps, significant among them, is the fact that God has simply failed people’s expectations.  People want a God who pulls the strings, who, among other things, prevents suffering and sickness and death.  A God who pulls no strings is a scandal to many.

And here we are today.  Perhaps life has led us, [or is leading us], to look more closely at our expectations.  Do we want a God who pulls strings? Or is our deeper yearning for a God who loves? and Does one alternative rule out the other? Perhaps, our answer to that reflects how much we have progressed in our understanding and our experience of the mystery of love.   Perhaps, not unexpectedly, we’re in the middle of mystery. [I might even say: in the muddle of mystery!].  Yet, surprisingly, wonderfully, we’re hanging in; and we’re still exploring – even thankful that Jesus turned out the way he did.

That’s what we’re remembering and celebrating in this Eucharist.