Epiphany
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 6th January, 2008
You have to work very hard today to actually listen to the story of the magi without distant memories of childhood nativity plays taking over your imagination. Here is one description written a few years ago by a writer called Rex Knowles whose children dragged him out of the sitting room one Christmas to see their play they had created at home:
“The stage “set� consisted of a baby Jesus made out of a torch – switched on – wrapped in a tea towel and lying in a shoe box. Next there was Rex Junior, aged 6, wearing daddy´s dressing gown and carrying a broom handle. He was followed by Nancy, aged 10, announcing “I am Mary and Joseph�. Then came Trudy, aged 4, with flapping pillowcases over her arms, lisping “I am an angel�. Finally came Anne, riding a camel, or at least doing an impersonation of riding a camel, hobbling along on mother´s high heeled shoes. She bowed three times before the holy family and announced “I am all three Wise Men. I have precious gifts. Gold, circumstance and mud�. ( What a lovely description of the Church of England!)
If we were in Italy at this time of year however we would be looking out for an old woman, wearing tattered clothes, called La Befana. Italian children believe that if they have been good she will leave them presents but if bad, a lump of coal or dust. The legend is that she was sweeping her house when the wise men went on their way to find the infant Jesus but she was too busy to pay any attention but said she would see them on their way back. But they went home another way so she never saw them and ever since she has been trying to make up for this by giving presents away herself.
In London this morning, at the Chapel Royal, the Queen will present gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Bishop of London: the gold is changed to money and given to charity, the incense is given to a church (us last year!) and the myrrh to a hospital. This has been happening a long time now and in the first Queen Elizabeth´s time it was followed by a banquet and entertainment for which Shakespeare´s Twelfth Night was originally conceived.
I could go on and on about historical traditions for Epiphany: the chalking of houses, the kings of Cologne protecting you from dog bites, the Lords of misrule, the bean king, the marzipan cakes and so on. It is clear: the Feast of the Epiphany has excited the human imagination for centuries: artists, poets, musicians, sculptors, theologians, village rituals – all finding their stream of thought affected by the enigmatic magi. We only find the magi in one of the gospels, that of St Matthew. Now although we place crowns on their head these magoi were outsiders, they were foreigners, fortune-tellers, suspicious non-Jewish believing folk – probably from Mesopotamia or what we now know as Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. To the religiously pure of the day this story is already ludicrous: the very idea that God is relating and touching the most unlikely of people – the non elite and mobile Joseph and Mary, and these non-Jewish Gentile magoi (Cf root of “magic�)– who were star gazers, horoscope fanatics, a practice condemned by Jewish law.
Through the centuries though the Christian imagination has been at work. At first the magi were indeed thought of as astrologers (hence their concern with the stars) and were said to have come in droves, not just three (30 -50); they became three presumably because there were three gifts – one each. No one before Tertullian in the 2nd century ever thought of the wise men as kings. In the wall paintings of the catacombs and in some Byzantine mosaics the magoi wore Mithraic robes. No one actually named them until the 9th century – Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar. In Syria, though, they are known as Larvandad, Harmisdas and Gushnasaph. The Venerable Bede suggested they represented the entire world, one came from Asia, one from Africa and one from Europe – and so one, from the fifteenth century onwards, is often depicted as being black.
It was Prudentius in the 4th century who began the business of giving different mystic meanings to the gifts, and you find these in our carols: Incense doth their God disclose, Gold the Kings of Kings proclaimeth, Myrrh his sepulchre foreshows. Of course, if they were astrologers and showmen, glittering gold and smoke were probably part of their show: to lay them aside in front of Christ is then more than posh presents, it is laying down one´s life and even livelihood built on falsity for the sake of another better way. This transformation brought about by encountering Jesus is at the heart of the story. TS Eliot in his Journey of the Magi imagines the men “leaving their summer palaces on slopes, with silken girls bringing sherbet� and after a rough journey they come to Christ and so go home a different way, treading a new road, “no longer at ease in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods�.
But the pulse of the story that Matthew was trying to make us feel and get our hearts beating to the same rhythm, is that God is not, is never, will never be, for the select, for the like-minded, for the religious, for the excluding. God is the God of all. From Joseph and Mary on the move, from Magi wandering from exotic lands, we see the wideness and unexpectedness of God´s embrace. God´s prejudice is towards everyone. Now, how we try and translate this truth day to day in our lives will probably be as amateur, haphazard, comic but hopefully as sincere as a children´s nativity play. We bumble our way through our Christianity mostly. But if we lose the pulse of this story we lose the life that our faith has to offer, we lose the opportunity for re-focused living.
As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said: “what difference would it make if I believed I am held in a wholly loving gaze which saw all my surface accidents and arrangements, all my inner habits and inheritances, all my anxieties and arrogances, all my history, and yet loved me wholly with an utterly free, selfless love? And what difference would it make if I let myself believe that each person around me is loved and held in the same overwhelming, loving gaze, and that this love made no distinctions of race, religion, age, innocence, strength or beauty?
The difference of course is what your faith has done, or hasn´t yet done, to your life. When we are plagued with self-doubts, concerns about our own status or well-being, we become competitive with others and enter into a “win/lose� way of living, desperate for self- recognition, and taking secret satisfaction in the failings of others. When you project that way out into the inter-racial or international arena, it becomes a recipe for hatred and violence as we are seeing across the world. We can only win if they lose – Herod becomes your patron saint. But to be transformed by Christ, to leave with him both the treasures and the baggage you carry, and to accept the love he has for you and for every unique created person, is to have life restored so that you can return home a different way.
