Feast of the Epiphany

Homily 1 - 2006

With the Feast of Epiphany we celebrate the fact that the first people, after Joseph and Mary, to recognise and adore Jesus were foreigners.

Matthew was not so much interested in building up the number of figures around the crib. Right from the start of his Gospel he wanted to insist that a key message of the gospel was inclusiveness. He needed to emphasise this because he was writing for a community that experienced tension. On the one hand were converts from Judaism familiar with and comfortable in their Jewish ways, perhaps instinctively elitist, and very sensitive to boundaries. In the other hand were converts from the pagan Hellenistic world of the wider Middle East, probably Syrian, enthusiastic, but without much knowledge of Jewish background and not sensitive to Jewish taboos. The combination was a recipe for headaches.

In some ways the Church today, like Matthew’s community, experiences tension. We live in a time of amazing cultural change, and we are children of our times. How do we approach the tensions as disciples of Jesus?

The central Christian concern at all times is to love. The birth of Christ reminds us of that. And that love is often quite difficult. In a Church of people with differing attitudes what does love mean?

We often distinguish loving from liking. I think that that distinction can sometimes be dangerous. I think that loving involves being open to like, hoping to like, even when not succeeding at it.
Except in very rare instances, loving means presuming honesty in the other. Presumably we’re all doing our best to know, love and follow Jesus.
Loving, then, means seeking to see the heart of the other, a readiness to listen to what the other is saying, to the depth of feeling there and finding out their reason for saying it. We can’t argue with the feeling, but we can often discuss the reasons behind the attitudes.
Loving means being ready to reveal what we think, how we feel, and (if we know) why we think and feel the way we do.

Loving doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with one another. In a community of people with different attitudes, we can’t all get our own way. We will often have to compromise. What matters is not what I but what we, the community, can realistically, given our differences, arrive at. We can’t compromise conscience, of course, and we’re never asked to. The problem area is usually that of practical issues of Church order – what we choose to do together how we do things when we are together.

It is the responsibility of the leader of the local Church community, the Parish Priest, to make certain decisions. As well as being responsible to the local community, he is also responsible to the bishop, and through the bishop, to the constantly developing tradition of the wider Church. It is a difficult role, and the leader doesn’t always, from our point of view, get it right.

What then? We make our view known to the leader –first. We try to get the leader to change, not by bringing pressure to bear but by sharing our point of view. That was Jesus’ way. If we are not prepared to do that, then we keep quiet. Among the immature, destructive responses we can get trapped in, are the perennials: gossip and instinctive criticism.

It can be hard work loving in a time of cultural change, but it does give unequalled opportunity for human and Christian growth. Getting back to Matthew’s concern in bringing a group of foreigners right into the crib – Can we handle the fact that others, different from us, whatever the differences might be, really do recognise and love Christ, possibly even more than we do?

Homily 2 - 2009

Matthew’s story of the visit of the Magi to the new-born child was his way to bring out imaginatively, right from the start, aspects of the significance and purpose of Jesus’ later life and death.

It is a message that is so poignantly, and frustratingly, highlighted by its opposite that is happening in Israel and Gaza right at this moment while we’re here reflecting.

Today’s First Reading from Isaiah, along with the Responsorial Psalm – their mood, their message and their images – provided the material for Matthew’s narrative construction.

Writing at a time when the dispirited and struggling survivors of fifty years of exile in Babylon. had just recently returned to their homeland, Isaiah dreamed of a glorious future.

His was a dream of universal peace - though a peace, nevertheless, in which Israel would be top nation.

The nations come to your light

and kings to your dawning brightness …

the riches of the sea,

the wealth of the nations come to you …

Everyone will come

bringing gold and incense

and singing the praise of the Lord.

The Psalm, from an earlier period, thought of that glorious future in terms of a just and powerful king:

The kings of Sheba and Seba will bring him gifts.

Before him all kings shall fall prostrate,

all nations shall serve him.

At the time that Matthew composed his visionary narrative, he was clearly aware that Jesus had been rejected, condemned and humiliatingly crucified by the local Roman governor in Judea. So much for all the nations serving him!

What, then, was Matthew up to? For Matthew and the early Christians, Jesus’ death did not negate his significance or his message. Rather, it was the message – it illustrated the message. Jesus’ death was not just the price but the greatest proof of his message: Jesus promised peace; Jesus taught peace. More than that, Jesus’ death made peace – universal peace – graspable.

Lasting peace has only one possible basis – not military might, not coercion, not bargaining, not smart diplomacy – but mutual respect and love. That’s its greatness – but it’s also its greatest problem. Who can love? Who is strong enough to be able to love, and to accept the vulnerability and powerlessness inherent in all love? Jesus was. His death illustrated that. It also illustrated the mind and the power of God who enabled, supported and empowered him. There will be peace when and as we let God make us strong enough to love.

While I was down in Melbourne last week with my sister, I came across a quotation from a book by Daniel Berrigan, an American Jesuit and a committed peace campaigner:

He wrote:

But what of the price of peace?

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people

I have known by the thousands, and I wonder.

How many of them are so afflicted

by the wasting disease of normalcy, that,

even as they declare for peace,

their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm

in the direction … of their comforts,

their homes, their security, their incomes,

their futures, their plans?

“Of course, let us have peace”, we cry,

“but at the same time let us have our normalcy,

let us lose nothing,

let our lives stand intact…”

And because we must encompass this and protect that,

and because at all cost – at all costs –

our hopes must march on schedule …

because it is unheard of that good men and women

should suffer injustice

or families be sundered

or good repute be lost –

because of this we cry peace,

and cry peace,

and there is no peace.

There is no peace because there are no peace-makers.

Peacemaking is hard. Almost as hard as war.”

Reading Berrigan, I feel guilty. Reading the Gospels, I feel guilty. But, of itself, guilt, or rather shame, just paralyses.

We sin – and God forgives sin. If only we would believe that, God’s love would begin to set us free, would change us, would empower us to love like God – and peace would be spread irresistibly. That is what resurrection is about. That was the hope that inspired Matthew’s story of the wise men from the East who, falling on their knees before the infant Christ, did him homage.

Or, as the Responsorial Psalm put it:

Before him all kings shall fall prostrate,

all nations shall serve him …

In his days justice shall flourish

and peace till the moon fails.

Homily 3 - 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 this evening/morning. 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.

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.

Homily 5 - 2018

I was lucky to study in Rome for six years immediately before and after my ordination – many long years ago. I stayed in two colleges, both of them international colleges. In the first one there were about fifty nationalities represented. The whole experience had a profound influence on my sense of belonging. Ever since then, I have felt myself to be not only a member of an extraordinarily universal Church but also a citizen of the world. For me, it served to put Australia in context.

Not surprisingly, at both colleges we claimed the Feast of Epiphany as our own special feast day. As Matthew shaped his infancy narrative, Epiphany was the day when representatives of the nations paid their homage to the infant Christ. While the political leader of Jesus’ own nation sought to kill him, men from foreign countries brought him gifts. Matthew’s Gospel went to considerable lengths to emphasise that there are no favorites with God. God’s love embraces the world.

Remember the photograph taken of the earth by the astronauts who first landed on the moon. We made a lot of it at the time to remind ourselves that, from space, it is blindingly obvious that we are one single globe, and that national boundaries are only human agreements. When God sees us, God sees us as the persons we are, unique but equal, different but interdependent. Nationality is irrelevant. We are citizens, as it were, of the one global village.

It is the mark of sin that so often we see others as threats, not as daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, in the one universal family of God. Instinctively [or is it?], we seem drawn to separateness rather than to unity. We have to work deliberately to love; but when we do, we recognise how right, how appropriate, how deeply fulfilling, how truly human, loving is.

Sadly, our present age seems to be moving more and more in the direction of nationalism and isolationism. National interests seem to override all other interests – Australia obsessively protecting our borders, the United States making America great again, Britain going it alone from the European Union, countries of the European Union closing their borders to refugees. And now we have the leaders of two nuclear-armed nations, the United States and North Korea, puffing out their chests like little boys and boasting how much of the world they can annihilate at the push of a button – just to show who is the greatest. Did we learn nothing lasting from the Second World War, and the succession of wars that have happened all around the globe since then?

Nor does what is happening nearer to home reassure me. Pressure groups proliferate, claiming more and more personal rights for themselves, which could be a good thing, except that rights make little sense other than within the context of the common good. Rights without responsibilities eventually self-destruct.

In the field of global politics, we feel powerless. In the realm of national politics, our power is limited. Yet, we are not helpless. Today’s Feast of Epiphany reminds us where the priorities of God lie. God’s love is universal, and that love has flowed out into God’s creation. The energies that drive the world are expressions in different guises of what the great Italian poet Dante, centuries ago, referred to as … “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

To accept that, of course, is an act of faith. I might add, an act of adult faith, of practised adult faith. But we can allow that faith to develop as we school ourselves to seek the presence of God in every experience, in whatever is truly real. We synchronise with the world’s hidden energy as we seek to live with integrity and honesty, always open to the way of loving, and so of inclusivity.

Happy Epiphany!

Homily 6 - 2021

Today’s story of the visit to Jesus of the “wise men from the east” picked up something of the hopes of Israel — as we heard in today’s First Reading from Isaiah and in the Psalm response: “The nations come to your light” … , “all are assembling and coming towards you” … , “the kings of Sheba and Sea shall bring him gifts”. But notice, at least in these passages, it was all one-way traffic. Matthew concluded his Gospel with Jesus’ directive to his disciples to “go out into the whole world and preach the Good News to every creature”. One-way traffic again, but this time going in the reverse direction, going out to encounter the whole world, bringing not “gold, frankincense and myrrh”, but the “Good News” of Jesus.

To bring the Good News effectively, we need to be saturated with it. As I look at our world today, the world hardly seems interested in what we have. Then, as I look back over my life, I wonder how much I have been saturated with Jesus’ Good News. It is not enough, perhaps not even our job, to tell people how to behave. Our example will also be useless unless it is recognised immediately as Good News. It may not even be noticed as different from anyone else’s lifestyle. It won’t be attractive. In my more depressed moments, I wonder if I have had a clear sense of, and appreciated enough myself, just what was the Good News I was called to live.

How to behave depends on a deeper realisation: why behave. The “Good News” will be the answer to that question. And the answer is always, in some way or other: because every person has a wonderful dignity springing simply from our humanity, because we are created and loved by God. That is what I need to realise, firstly in regard to myself. That is what I need to appreciate, to be obviously saturated with.

How to become saturated? Mary, we are told, “treasured” her experience and “pondered it”. Her experience at times was bewildering, perplexing — to say the least. I imagine that she became better at it as she practised it. She came to recognise the presence and action, there in her life, of the God who respected her, who respected her freedom, who respected her choices, who took her seriously, who, simply, loved her. That is why she “treasured” her experience. That is how she learnt to say “yes” to the difficult choices of life. And Joseph, too, was able to say “yes” to the disconcerting, life-changing, decisions indicated to him in his dreams because he had already learnt through experience to recognise the hand of God, to know that God loved him, and so to be sure that God could be trusted.

Until we have “treasured” the same discovery as Mary and Joseph, we shall have little Good News to bring to our struggling, seeking, needy world.