Feast of the Epiphany - Homily 3

 Homily 3 - 2016

The wise men … At least that is how they were regarded in their own country. I wonder if they saw themselves that way. They did not have all the answers, but they were convinced enough that the star was special. They got together their wealth, loaded up their camels and headed West, following their star. They saw the child, left their gifts; but they went home, back to their own country, as Matthew told his story, “by a different way”. I wonder if it was more than the way home that was different, if they were different. Having seen the child, I wonder if they were no longer so sure whether they were all that wise, as wise as others thought them, as wise as they might once have thought themselves.

We are dealing with a story, of course, that Matthew was telling with another purpose in mind. Yet the Spirit of God can use a story, or life, or the combination of both, to start us wondering.

They went looking for an infant king. They found a poor child, with poor parents, in a poor residence. And yet there was the unexplainable star. Former certainties were undermined. They were different men as they made their different way home. All they really had now were questions. I wonder if that is how Christmas should leave us. If we do not move on into 2016 along a different road, perhaps we have missed the point of Christmas. We might be more like the chief priests and scribes whom Matthew referred to there in Jerusalem – thinking we know the answers but unwilling to face the questions. Might we even have our sense of God quite wrong? or partly wrong?

As we approach a New Year, we can spend a lot of time asking God… asking God to change things, to pull a few strings, to arrange things the way we would like them to be. The Gospels seem to encourage us to. They even tell us that our prayers will be answered. But the message we hear will largely depend on what we think God is like, on how we relate to God. Interestingly, the Gospels usually add that we ask in the name of Jesus; or they promise that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. What does asking in the name of Jesus involve? I think that it means approaching God with a similar mind-set to that of Jesus, working from the kind of relationship that existed between Jesus, a grown adult, and his Father, an adult God. The Lord’s Prayer provides an excellent illustration.

As we look at our world with all its problems, we are easily tempted to ask God to intervene. Nothing much has changed over the last two thousand years in that regard. The world had it problems then, too. God’s answer was to come among people, at first as a helpless, powerless, infant, but who slowly grew in wisdom and age and grace to become an adult, who showed us an alternative way to face the world’s problems and challenged us really to repent, to convert, to think differently, to take a different way home.

God is still in our world, immersed in reality, whatever and however it is. God does not need reminders from us; God is infinitely more sensitive to our world and concerned about it than we ever could be. We need to learn to discern the presence of God already in the mess. We need to tune in to what God is asking of us. We need to allow God to empower us to face our world and its problems. And the power that he is yearning to share with us is the power of love. 

Once again at Christmas we have met the child in the manger. Have we learnt its message? I wonder how we might return to our familiar world by that different way? how we might help each other find that way?