“They saw...they came...they worshipped”
It may be, as
someone recently remarked to me, that had the wise men been women, they
would have gotten there on time and presented more practical gifts! Yet the
gifts of the Magi have another purpose. They are profoundly symbolic:
“sacred gifts of mystic meaning”. In short, they are gifts that teach.
Both the gifts of the Magi and the journey of the Magi wonderfully
illustrate something of the nature of the Epiphany.
Epiphany marks
at once the beginning and the end of Christmas. We meet this evening within
the Octave of the Feast of the Epiphany. With the story of the coming of the
wise men from the east who brought gifts to the child Christ, it seems,
thereby breaking-in to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo,
for all people - and so there is the beginning of Christmas for the whole
world. But with the break-out from Bethlehem which Epiphany also
signifies, there is a new and different focus. There is a journey, both a
journeying to Bethlehem and a journeying from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. And
yet, the deeper meaning and significance of God with us is the critical
lesson in the journeying from Bethlehem. Something of Bethlehem continues
with us.
The mystery of
God with us is the mystery revealed, the mystery made manifest. Epiphany is
more than a day and a season. It signals a doctrine - a teaching. Indeed,
the teaching that it signals is the teaching of God - God making himself
known to us through the conditions of our humanity; God teaching us
something about what he wants and seeks for us. We are opened out to the
mystery of God with us. We are taught something about what belongs to the
truth of our humanity from within the conditions of our brokenness. We
learn, it seems, even from the little ones.
Christ is God’s
“great little one” to whom the great of the earth - kings in their
power and the wise in their wisdom – “come and worship”. The mystery
of Christmas cannot stay hidden in some remote corner of the world; it must
needs break out from the confines of little Bethlehem. In the coming of the
Magi from afar (they are the prototypical come-from-away’s!) the whole world
in its desiring to know is understood to have its place and its fulfilment
in this story.
The wise men
followed a star. As Lancelot Andrews observes, “Viderant, Venerunt,
Adoraverunt”, they saw, they came, they worshipped. They acted upon what
they saw. If Advent invites us to “come and see”, the emphasis of
Epiphany is upon vision, upon what is seen and then followed. They entered
into the understanding of what they saw and sought. There is a break through
of the understanding for them and for us. And it changes everything. Like
the Magi, we do not return in the same way. We are changed by the encounter
with what we have been given to see.
Alistair
MacLeod in his short story ‘The Closing Down of Summer’ tells the
story of a group of hard-rock miners from Cape Breton who go all over the
world digging mine-shafts. The story is told in the awareness of the passing
away of traditional Maritime ways of life but with the strong desire, on the
part of the narrator, to convey something of the meaning of his life to his
family. The struggle lies in his awareness at once of the necessity and the
difficulty of communicating an understanding of his life and his experience.
How does one convey the substance of the tradition that defines you? He
finds a quote from his daughter’s university text-book on literature,
“the private experience, if articulated with skill, may communicate an
appeal that is universal beyond the limitations of time or landscape”,
and wonders how it applies to him. Mining as a metaphor for life would be
trite and trivial if the images of “the breaking down of walls and
barriers” in the hope of “breaking through” were only about the
overcoming of various obstacles in the pursuit of our individual goals. No.
What he seeks is a break through of the understanding which conveys the
substance of the tradition of his highland identity.
MacLeod’s novel
‘No Great Mischief’ reworks many of the themes of his short-stories.
And like them there is always the awareness, on the one hand, of the passing
away of certain traditions and, on the other hand, the endeavour to convey
the substance of those traditions. Something universal is understood and
communicated through the articulation of traditions even in their passing
away. And there is an interplay of traditions through the patterns of
understanding that break through them and which connect to other traditions.
The short story ends with a mediaeval English lyrical poem which, however
fictional, nonetheless conveys something of the traditions of chivalry and
romantic love. “I wend to death, a king iwis;/... I wende to be clad in
clay”.
The title of
his novel, too, is wonderfully ironic and instructive. It is a taken from
General Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham writing that it would
be “no great mischief if they fell”, referring to the Highlanders.
There is no great mischief in the passing away of a tradition, it seems, if
its substance has been understood and passed down. For then it lives on. It
suggests that there is something more than just the continuum of narrative
traditions; there is something understood in and through them.
Far from
threnodies of regret, MacLeod presents us with eloquent elegies of
remembering, a remembering of the interplay of traditions through the
understanding. They are like little epiphanies which ultimately belong and
have their meaning in the greater epiphany which we continue to celebrate
tonight. In other words, something universal is made known through the
conditions of our humanity, in and through the passing down and even the
passing away of the traditions which shape and define us.
The light which
brought the Magi is the light of God in Christ. The light which has come
into the world is the light which speaks to our desiring to know in the face
of the awareness of our unknowing and uncertainty; in short, our darkness.
Epiphany
signals the light of God as having engaged all the conditions of our
humanity. It means no longer a judgment from above but from within. It
signals illumination and restoration - the healing of soul, mind and body.
Its lessons are the lessons of human redemption; the redemption of desire,
the redemption of our knowing and the redemption of our being. There is
light and healing from within the conditions of our humanity. The conditions
of our brokenness and our darkness are addressed, not ignored. The miracles
of the Gospel most especially belong to the doctrine of the Epiphany.
In John’s
Gospel, Jesus tells us that he is “the light of the world”, not once
but twice. In both cases, there is a direct relation to the ground, to the
dust of our humanity, as it were. In both cases, there is animosity and
division - a resistance and a refusal of the good that is wanted to be
communicated. In both cases, too, that resistance is ultimately centred on
Christ. The teaching that is Epiphany happens in the face of the deep
darkness of human sin and folly; after all, “he came unto his own and his
own received him not”.
The teaching is
at once written in the dust of our humanity - as in the story of the woman
taken in adultery to whom Jesus, writing we know not what in the dust with
his finger, speaks words of forgiveness and grace and bids her “go and
sin no more”, which we do know because of what has been written in the
witness of the Scriptures. And the teaching uses the dust of the ground with
the spittle of Christ to make a salve to heal the man born blind. Healing
and illumination are just so closely united.
Something of
the significance of Epiphany is captured in the window above the high altar
here in the Chapel. It is the story of Child Christ teaching in the Temple
at Jerusalem. There is a journey - a breaking out from Bethlehem and a going
to Jerusalem. But God goes with us on that journey. It is the journey of
illumination and healing, the pilgrimage of salvation. And the lessons are
for all of us at every stage of our lives.
Jesus at the
age of twelve makes the journey to Jerusalem. He goes with Mary and Joseph
and he goes with us in the journey of the soul to God. He teaches us from
within the conditions of our humanity that we are to journey in the humility
of children under the tutelage of the wise, the learned doctors of the law
in the temple. But Christ is something more, or better, something other. He
is God with us. The wise and the learned sit at his feet in that wonderful
reversal of roles where the Child becomes the Teacher. Such is the wisdom of
God. Such is the break through of the understanding.
We are set upon
a new foundation, the foundation of grace perfecting nature from the
youngest to the eldest. The journey is the journey of the soul seeking
understanding, like those wise men long ago. The journey is not by ourselves
alone. It is the journey of God with us. And always, it begins and ends with
worship, a kind of wonder at something understood.
“They
saw...they came...they worshipped”
