Epiphany

by lay preacher, Will Harron
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All rulers shall bow down before him,
and all the nations do him service.
For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress
and the oppressed who has no helper.

Amen

Good morning saints!

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. So begins today’s gospel passage, the story of the three wise men, sometimes kings, sometimes Magi. These mysterious figures travel from the east to find a King they scried in the stars and encounter Jesus. Not minding the lowliness of his appearance, they bestow gifts on him from their treasure chest - gold and the sacred anointing spices of frankincense and myrrh, before travelling back to their homeland - and outfoxing Herod the schemer king in the bargain. 

This is such a great story, and it bookends a season of story. 

Christmas is a twelve-day-long feast, beginning in the evening of Christmas Eve and ending on the eve of Epiphany, the Twelfth-night. January sixth marks the formal Feast of the Epiphany, and the start of the Epiphany season between Christmas and Lent, a brief return to the regular weekly cycle of Christian life. But all throughout the twelve days and Epiphany, we are treated to the vivid stories of the birth and first days of Jesus. Christmas Eve and Christmas give us the stories of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter and finding it in a barn and the angels appearing to the shepherds announcing glad tidings. Holy Innocents tells the shocking story of the aftermath of the Wise Men’s visit, and the precarity of life amidst the brutal paranoia of empire.  Holy Name enfolds Jesus into the Jewish life of his family. And at the Epiphany, we have this story of kingship, of mystery, and of wisdom. What are we to make of all of this?

I think this set of stories is so striking partially because it is only through Matthew and Luke’s gospels that we get them. The literary quality of Mark is so striking in part because of its insistent pacing, opening with an adult Jesus beginning his ministry, and the style of John is expressed by opening with the creation of the Universe, and Jesus’s place in it. 

Luke and Matthew have different but often similar stylistic goals in their telling of the gospel. They both build richer settings, embellishing the spare stories told in Mark with additional details, settings, and explanations. Luke and Matthew feel more story-like, in part because they are aware of and playing into tropes - both in the Hebrew scriptures and in the Greek society they are enmeshed in. They are telling stories that their listeners are primed to hear, and understand.

I think this is especially present in Matthew’s story of the Epiphany. His Gospel begins by situating Jesus in the genealogy of David, claiming Jesus’s kingship by tying it to the power of David’s special relationship with God. Matthew then tells of Jesus’s conception and birth by situating Jesus as the answer to prophetic riddles and cyphers about the continuation of Israel after the exile to Babylon and the destruction of the ancient kingdoms of David - another sign of Jesus being the long-promised king, right down to being born in Bethlehem, the ancient city of David.

But the story of the Epiphany uses a different set of literary allusions. Wise men from the east - Magi, a word that in Greek derives from the Zoroastrian priests of the ancient Persian Empire, have arrived in Jerusalem. Practicing the arcane and scientific craft of astrology, which requires precise knowledge about the movement of the stars and the meanings of each possible configuration, these mysterious foreigners have determined that a King of the Jews has been born, and they have arrived, inexplicably and with no warning or expectation or further explanation, to give him homage. 

This isn’t like any other story in the bible. This is a set of tropes out of Greek literature, sounding more like Herotodus or Xenophon than Moses or Jeremiah. But it fits the setting - the Greek-speaking Hellenistic culture overlaid on the region by the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors, even more than the Roman occupation, have deeply shaped the Judaea of this time. And even if Matthew is writing to an audience further afield, Hellenistic Greek culture and literature dominates the Eastern Mediterranean.

Even with this shift in literary genre, Matthew continues to underscore his theme - Jesus is the promised King. The heavens and earth are bending themselves to proclaim it - a universal kingship that is both enmeshed in and greater than any previous understanding of kingship. 

Imagine the story set today, using some of our current frames of reference:
Headline: Nuclear scientists from Los Alamos have just arrived in Jerusalem looking for the next President, because their isotopes have determined that he will be born in the West Bank. 

This reflects some of the strangeness of this story - and also the authority that the Magi have to make their particular claim, finding meaning in the unfathomable makings of the universe.
 
I think another retelling, using a different set of modern literary references, can give us insight from a different angle. 

In ancient days, three wizards arrived at the great city in search of the promised king. The usurping lord of the city sought to turn the encounter to his advantage, but the wizards evaded the evil lord and made their way to the most unlikely place, to the most unlikely boy, in a humble village. 

Bowing to him, they offered him three gifts to use on his quest to kingship: Gold, frankincense and myrrh. They then disappeared, returning to their homeland and confusing the evil lord, who struck out in anger. 

The mythical, mystical dimensions of the Epiphany are apparent in this retelling. The echos of the hero’s journey, one of our current cultural tropes, give us places to anchor ourselves in the story. We know the child faces a long journey, that the visit of these wizards will send him far from his home, and that even when he triumphs at the end, there will be a bittersweet note to that ending. We can guess that these gifts will have some place in the real or symbolic ending of the story. And we can cheer the fall of the evil lord, whose power seems so real and tangible at the beginning.

All of these stories, and all of our Christmas stories, and the Epiphany itself - teach us to pay attention. The Advent imperative to keep awake is redoubled. Incredible things are afoot - the powers of princes and potentates are of no account to the order of the universe, which is bending towards one born in the most lowly and unlikely of places. At the rising of his star, Jesus is born and the world takes notice - even Herod is forced to pay attention, and his cruellest orders are unable to halt the progress of the King of Kings. 

And this infant grows up, and just as we’ve heard this story before, we’ve heard the story of his ministry, his journey towards Jerusalem, and his kingship, which does not lead where the tropes, ancient and modern, lead us to look, leading conquering armies, being sworn into earthly office, being crowned and anointed atop glittering palaces - but instead leads to something more horrible and more amazing - the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the full re-ordering of life over death, the deliverance from the triumph of evil and the horror of death. This re-ordering is ongoing amidst us to this day. 

Even amidst the deaths of Holy Innocents, the journey of refugee families fleeing oppression and war, the forces of Empire rampant and rampaging in all of their power and paranoia - there is a star rising, a hope among us, and a child, a king, a promise, that shows us where God is: 

For he shall deliver the poor who cries out in distress
and the oppressed who has no helper.
He shall have pity on the lowly and poor;
he shall preserve the lives of the needy.
He shall redeem their lives from oppression and violence, 
and dear shall their blood be in his sight

Amen

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