So it’s the 9th day of the Christmas season, the second Sunday of that season and the day we may also commemorate as Epiphany, the celebration of the revealing of Christ, the “unfolding vision of wholeness that God has made manifest for all people in Jesus the Christ” (Seasons of the Spirit). Epiphany means “revelation” or “manifestation” or “display”. The day of Epiphany, 6 January, is the day after the Christmas season. It marks the unleashing of the impact of the incarnation upon the world.
At Epiphany, we hear and tell the story of the wise visitors to the infant Jesus, not in a manger, but in a house. And as we do, we disentangle a piece of Matthew’s story about Jesus from the trappings of the stable and the shepherds at the birth of Jesus.
We hear the story of the visit of the Magi, the wise ones, to the infant Jesus, not as part of the prettiness and wonder of the Christmas story, but as part of the ongoing storying in which the early Christian communities were involved in about the life of Jesus. This story is not a lovely story about some strange visitors. It is a strange story about knife-edge politics—a story about the challenging and confronting of traditions, about the way in which the emerging Christian story was being read back into the life of the infant Jesus.
We hear about the interplay of the light and the depth of the Jesus experience on the unfolding understanding of the early Christian community, and the way that that interplay was being enfolded into their own story.
Have you ever sat somewhere and watched the play of light on water? Perhaps you were at the ocean, or by a waterfall, or near a river. Maybe the sun was high and the glare was intense, so that you almost had to turn away. Perhaps the light was diffused by some rainforest trees so that the light jumped like the water constantly changing pattern and form. Perhaps there were clouds in the sky that cast intricate shadows of varying shades. Light illuminates and light obfuscates; light makes it impossible to see. We don’t see the light. We see that which the light shines upon.
Water is a symbol of the Christian community—the baptised ones; those immersed in the depths of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And light is a sign of the revelation of God in Christ. And in this interplay of the light of Christ on the depths of the Christian community, the story of the sages who recognise what is right before the eyes of Israel, the light to the nations, emerges.
It is through our stories that we make sense of our world. It is by our stories that we describe who we are. And it is in the re-telling of those stories, the re-storying of our traditions, our histories, our identities that we learn to cope with our ever-changing world and ourselves within it.
The communities out of which the Gospel of Matthew arose were discovering who they were—as a reformist Jewish movement, as Jewish Christians, and then as Christians distinct from their Jewish counterparts. They valued the depths of Judaisim, the insights of their faith, the Jewish faith, and they understood that that faith had sustained the people for a long, long time. Within their tradition, there were various elements that were particularly important: respect for the law of God; interest in the idea of God’s wisdom and how that wisdom interacted with the wisdom of other peoples around the Jewish faith community; the challenging story of the people’s descent into Egypt, their liberation by God and the journey to the promised land. But they were also experiencing something new—something that stemmed from their faith, and extended it.
Now on top of the deep traditions of the Jewish faith, the people of the communities which Matthew addresses have the depth of the Jesus experience. The light is playing on their water and producing new understandings of who God is and who they are before God. The depth of the traditions which they embody are being illuminated anew to produce different patterns and different ways of seeing; and their storytelling reflects those new experiences and understandings. So they tell a new old story about a visit of some wise folk from the East who recognise the light when they see it.
In the telling of this tale, they confront the depths of their traditions with the light of the new, and in that process some of the old has to go, some of the new has to be re-interpreted and some of the old definitely has to stay. Because you cannot watch light play on water if there is no water, and none of us begin our stories from nothing. We all build from what we have storied before.
So a story is told which involves confronting a dubious part of the tradition. A bad king, Herod, takes the role of that which must be defied. The story includes a newer part of the tradition: an emphasis on wisdom in the persons of the visitors from the East. The wisdom tradition was barely centuries old at the time of Jesus. And the new light—the infant Jesus—more than a baby, not still in the manger, but residing with parents to protect and care for him—takes centre stage.
The old story is quoted to back up the plot. Bethlehem is cited as the place most likely to sporn a new ruler to defy the might of kings like Herod, no longer loyal to the tradition, but operated like puppets behind the scenes by Roman rulers. Last week you heard more of that story. The fear of Herod, the attempt to kill the infant, the journey to Egypt and out again: an upside down version of the earlier tale of the Exodus. This week we heard that story’s beginning: the alerting of Herod to a possible rival by the Magi from the East.
And when the old traditions have been subsumed into the new, the wise visitors and Herod the king depart the story, and the light falls fully on the new light and the teaching of Jesus, but that’s where our story continues next week.
The story is alarming, more like a crime novel, or a movie thriller than a cute fairy story for children. Because in this story there is confrontation and intrigue, violence and elusive escape. And it’s not just in the plot. It’s in the very story itself. For as the story unfolds, we are drawn into a re-storying of tradition; a playing of the light on the water that can at first dazzle, sometimes transfix and maybe even confuse. When we confront a new story, when we are confronted by a light that startles and overwhelms us, it is our traditions that we fall back upon, the things with which we are familiar. And it is from these old stories that we draw the stuff of the explanation for the new. In a way, that is a kind of violence too, because as we make the new story, we destroy the old. And while we always hope that our continuing story will help us to understand our living better and better we can never be sure. We trust in the play of water on light. Like the infant Jesus, we journey to Egypt in vulnerability uncertain whether the traditioning process will help us to re-make our stories again.
Re-making our stories is something we do every day of our lives, but it is particularly something that we do in times of immense change and challenge. The ability to re-make our stories is part of being resilient, part of being able to cope with life’s highs and lows.
The emerging Christian communities whose stories only Matthew records find comfort and resilience in the story of infant Jesus, visited by the wise, foretold by the prophets, bringer of light and keeper of the depths of old traditions. And in that delicate balance, they re-make their story and the story of the world.
So where does that leave this Christian community today. We continue that re-storing process. The light of Christ continues to play in our lives and to produce new patterns and experiences. And we are called to proclaim them.
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