Today, Saturday, is the calendar day for the Epiphany of Our Lord to the three kings who came from the East; however, the liturgical festival has been transferred by the bishops to the Sunday for your ease, possibly so that you wouldn’t have to come to Church on two consecutive days.
An epiphany is a manifestation of God, so you could perhaps see that although this feast is the Epiphany, our Lord was manifested to the people in various ways, at different events. So today, the Church remembers a series of epiphanies, that will be marked successively in January. There is (i) this epiphany to the kings of the East, (ii) the epiphany to John the Baptist at the Baptism of our Lord (when heaven opened and the Holy Spirit was seen descending upon Christ), and (iii) the epiphany to the Apostles at the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee (when Christ for the first time openly declared that He was not only the Messiah, but the ancient God of Israel, come in the flesh). Of all these manifestations, the one we look at in particular today is specifically made to a non-Jewish audience, for the evangelists are insistent that these kings from the East were not Hebrews, that they were stargazers rather than regular worshippers of the Holy One in Jerusalem, yet were sufficiently acquainted with the ancient expectations of deliverance from heaven to follow a light in the sky for months – that they may discover this new, Jewish King. And so the first reading from Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem now delivering its light not only to the Jewish people, but to all the tribes of the earth.
“Rise up, Jerusalem, and shine forth; thy dawn has come, breaks the glory of the Lord upon thee! What though darkness envelop the earth, though all the nations lie in gloom? Upon thee the Lord shall dawn, over thee His splendour shall be revealed. Those rays of thine shall light the Gentiles on their path; kings shall walk in the splendour of thy sunrise. Lift up thy eyes and look about thee; who are these that come flocking to thee? Sons of thine, daughters of thine, come from far away, or rising up close at hand. Heart of thee shall overflow with wonder and gratitude, to see all the riches of ocean, all the treasure of the Gentiles pouring into thee!”
Prophecy of Isaiah, 60: 1-5 [link]
If none of us reading this are Jewish, at this point – when the three kings arrived in the Holy Land – the light of Jerusalem first shone out to enlighten the darkness of our own people, cultures and traditions. The prophet speaks of Christ endlessly as Light, just as, much later, at the beginning of his gospel the Apostle John would. In the second reading this weekend, S. Paul, who had styled himself as the Apostle to the Gentiles (the ‘special grace’ he rejoices in below), hammers the point in: that what was evident to the prophets and later to the Apostles – the ancient mystery of God – the mystery of humanity renewed and redeemed from within by God taking human form Himself – is now given to non-Jews (‘gentiles,’ it says) as an inheritance.
“I, Paul, of whom Jesus Christ has made a prisoner for the love of you Gentiles. You will have been told how God planned to give me a special grace for preaching to you; how a revelation taught me the secret I have been setting out briefly here; briefly, yet so as to let you see how well I have mastered this secret of Christ’s. It was never made known to any human being in past ages, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets, and it is this: that through the gospel preaching the Gentiles are to win the same inheritance, to be made part of the same body, to share the same divine promise, in Christ Jesus.“
Letter of S. Paul to the Ephesians, 3: 1-6 [link]
So, our families have the same inheritance, we are made one body with the Apostles and the early Church, whose families were Jewish. The gospel message this weekend is a narrative of the visit of the kings of the East. We hear of their unwitting error of the kings in approaching Jerusalem itself, where the puppet king of the Romans – the wretched Herod – was shocked to discover that there might be an unknown, young challenger to his reign as ‘king of the Jews.’ He was perturbed, says the evangelist, and called up the Temple priests and other knowledgeable people, so he could find out where the Child was. Then, pretending piety, he asked the kings to smoke the Child out for him, so he could deal with what could be a potential threat to himself and his dynasty.
But why should he fear so much, this despotic friend of the Roman Empire, who had so cleverly taken to himself a kingdom larger in area even than that of King David, a thousand years before? Because of the prophecies probably, and particularly that of Daniel, which had said that the Shepherd-King to come would be a conqueror of hearts, and so would not only rock but destroy the hold of all the ancient empires. And as the great Martyrs of the Church have shown us, not the worse tortures, not even death itself, has been able to separate the men and women of twenty centuries from the love of Christ. Our reaction in every age of the Church has been that of the three kings of the East – to give our best to the Holy One. But the King of Hearts has the greatest demand of all. As in that last, rather touching verse of the popular Christmas carol:
“What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.”
[link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 