Homily for Sunday, 4 January 2015– Epiphany of the Lord

Readings of the day: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada.

Who are these “wise men from the East” of whom we hear in our Gospel reading today from Matthew, on this feast of the Epiphany of our Lord? What is the significance of the gifts they bring: Gold, frankincense, and myrrh? Who are some other important people in this event? Today’s celebration and our readings for it present us with many strange details, words, images, and people.

First, our celebration today is called “the Epiphany of the Lord.” Strange words for five hundred (for our Daily Double): What is “Epiphany”? This word means a “showing forth.” We celebrate today the showing forth of our Lord to the world, only not as we would expect. God, our Lord, is shown forth as a tiny, weak human baby to the “wise men,” strange men from a strange land to the East, in a stinky stable, in a small town, in a troubled land under Roman occupation. This was the greatest “Epiphany of [our] Lord,” although it was not the first and certainly will not be the last.

And, again, just who were these “wise men” anyway? Tradition says that there were three because they brought three gifts. Do we not picture them dressed in fine and colourful clothing, as kings? But no one really knows who these “wise men” were, how many there were, or how they dressed, or whether they were kings or astronomers, looking to the movement of the stars for signs, or what exactly they did for a living. We do know from Matthew’s Gospel that the wise men have some idea of whom they are searching for when they enter Jerusalem. They ask, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews”?

We also know by the gifts the wise men bring that they know something of the significance of this child born in Bethlehem. The wise men bring gold, the gift for a king. They bring frankincense, the gift for somebody divine; for a god (in the same way that, when we use incense today, it reminds us of our prayers rising up to God in heaven). The wise men bring myrrh, a bitter burial spice. Myrrh hints that the story of this child, Jesus, will include bitter tragedy, indeed death on a cross... But death will not be the end of this story, for Jesus or for us.

But along with gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, the wise men bring another gift to the manger scene in Bethlehem of the Epiphany of our Lord. What is this gift? Might some of us be thinking, “Father, you aren’t going to tell us that there were actually four gifts brought by the wise men to Jesus, are you? Look: The Gospel clearly says that there were only three gifts”!

Fair enough, but then our Gospel reading says this: When the wise men “saw [where] the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.” This, too, is a strange detail from Matthew’s Gospel: The wise men arrive at Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem: a stinky stable in a small town in a land under Roman occupation, and are still “overwhelmed,” not with sadness or a sense of fear (although they had visited Herod and may have known his evil intentions, and they did bring myrrh as a gift); not “overwhelmed” with fatigue for having traveled a great distance, but “overwhelmed with joy.”

This joy is the hidden gift of the wise men to our Lord Jesus at his Epiphany. Would this joy not also be a great gift for us to give to God and to one another: Joy that is itself God’s gift to us, a significant way in which God is shown forth to us?

Now, I understand if this is almost too much to ask of us to bring and to give another gift to one another or to God. Many of us have traveled long distances to be with our families and loved ones at this time of year. Those of us who have traveled have had to be mindful of weight limits on luggage, especially if we have traveled by air. With gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the wise men would have been charged unreasonable excess baggage fees. And the frankincense may well have been considered dangerous goods; would they even have gotten it on an airplane? So it is good that the wise men traveled by camel!

But I assure all of us, if we do not know this deep down already: Joy; the joy the wise men brought to the Lord Jesus in Bethlehem; the joy we are all invited to bring to our Lord today and always actually takes weight off, so there is no chance of excess baggage fees. And joy is completely duty-free for those of us who wish to carry it even across international borders; to any place in the world!

Joy is the gift that the prophet Isaiah once invited the people of Israel to give to one another and back to God. “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you,” we hear in our first reading, from Isaiah. “Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice.”

How would the people of Israel of Isaiah’s time; a people who had been in exile in Babylon for about seventy years at this point, have heard this message? I imagine this as their response: “Rejoice?! Isaiah, are you joking? Here we are; we have spent two generations in exile. Jerusalem and its Temple are in ruins, so there is no point in going back there, and you want us to be joyful?”

And yet Isaiah holds fast to his invitation: “Arise, shine, for your light has come… See and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice.” It is an invitation that holds true for us today: Our “light has come. The glory of the Lord has risen upon” us. Christ has been born for us; has shown himself to the wise men, the face of God in the face of a newborn child, for us. Christ lived, served, and loved as one of us. Christ died for us; rose again for us; will return at the end of time for us. May our hearts, like those of the wise men; like those of the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time; like those of Christian disciples and saints through the ages, “thrill and rejoice.” Our “light has come”; our Lord’s Epiphany is here and now. Our Lord shows himself through God’s own gift of joy, our gift of joy to our world.

Many of us, I admit, may find it difficult, even (perhaps especially) during this Christmas season, to show forth this gift of joy to the world. Our world gives us many reasons to be anything but joyful: Wars, terrorism, and other forms of violence. Just days ago, an unprecedented nine people were killed in one day in this city in an extreme and horrific act of domestic violence. We experience broken families, broken friendships; estrangement within families; estrangement from the Church. Many of us feel every bit the strangers that the people of Israel in Isaiah’s time or the wise men in Jesus’ time must have felt when they lay their gifts before our Lord Jesus in Bethlehem.

And yet the wise men are an example to all of us: “When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy.” In a stinky stable in a small town in a land under Roman occupation, the wise men lay their gifts: Gold to our newborn king; Frankincense to God; Myrrh to our Savior who would raise us to new life through his cross and resurrection; Joy to the world!