Feast of the Epiphany - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

Epiphany brings the Christmas season to its end. What a staggering time Christmas is! To be awake to it, however, we may need to take a leaf from Mary’s book. Like her [and with her, if we like], we need to treasure these things and ponder them in our hearts. The opposite is so easy. We can get anaesthetised, and miss the reality. 

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God became human. Had that always been God’s plan? From the moment of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, had God intended the whole evolutionary process to lead to this – God in Jesus becoming part of the created world? or, putting it another way, Did God always intend to draw creation closer and closer to himself? indeed, eventually in Jesus to divinise creation?

The process did not stop with Christmas, with the Incarnation. Jesus’ incarnation went on to issue in what we call resurrection. The human nature that Jesus took to himself was raised, not back to life, but further into life, into what the Gospel of John calls into eternal life, the inner life of the Trinity. It was not just for Jesus. God intended all humanity to be united with Christ’s risen humanity and brought to share eternal life, the life proper to God. The Epistle of Peter claims that we become sharers in the divine nature. The early Church Fathers claimed that in Jesus God became human so that humans might become divine! What began with the Big Bang will finish there.

John’s Gospel has that beautiful statement: God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son so that all who believe in him might have eternal life.  God loved the world, creation. God always did. No surprise! That is all God could do. God’s life, God’s reality, is love. God cannot not love. There is nothing more to God! That is wonderful. But to think that God destined us, or creation in us, to be drawn into that vortex of Trinitarian love that is God, is more wonderful.

God is certainly the God of surprises! The stories of Christmas added further detail to eternal life. How do love and power fit together? God became human in the infant Jesus. Powerless? or powerful? or, Do we come to see that love that surrenders power is the only truly creative, life-giving energy there is? We are slow to learn this lesson. 

Matthew was on to something when he described the reaction to the birth of the Christ of the secular power, represented in Herod, and Jerusalem’s religious elite – so paranoid about their own authority and preserving their status. They were perturbed – no doubt an understatement! It is surprising that the possibility of eternal life, God’s offer of eternal life in Christ, comes across as threatening.  

The stars that seem to interest us these days are sports stars and professional entertainers. In fact, it was the Magi, foreigners without visas, who recognised and responded to Jesus. Apparently, border protection does not figure high on God’s list of priorities. Crusades against any axis of evil are not God’s way of responding to terrorism.  Only as we slowly begin to live that eternal life that God calls us into, to live in and with the love of God, do we begin to experience being saved, or saving each other, from the terrible things we do to each other and to our world. We move from narrow self-interest to compassionate, expansive, inclusive, unconditional, no-holds-barred outreach to anyone and everyone. 

As St John’s Gospel went on to say, God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but so that through him the world might be saved. Being saved is part of the process, part of the package deal, in coming to live eternal life.

Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.