Mass readings for the Feast of the Epiphany:
Isaiah 60.1-6 Psalm 72.1-2, 7-8, 10-13 Ephesians 3.2-3a, 5-6 Matthew 2.1-12
The visit of the wise men raises the question of just who were they. They are often pictured as representatives of the world, of the three geographic regions known by the gospel writers, that is Asia, Africa and Europe. However, the text of the gospel describes them as being “from the East”; and that usually meant Mesopotamia which the modern state of Iraq encompasses. So, if not from “the world” in the sense of continents and the races who inhabit them, then who are they and what do they really represent? And is it at all relevant for us today?
Well, we can know this: they came from the world of science; yes, ancient science, but science nonetheless. They were scholars and they studied the stars. This implies a particular perspective on the world; one of methodical investigation and rational analysis. And we know them to be men concerned with the future. After all, they had used their science to predict a future event, the birth of a king.
So, with a scientific point of view, and an eye on the future, they’ve come in search of a king newly born. And I’d say for many people today, this is where they are at – believing themselves to be investigating the world according to scientific principles. Now, psychological studies tell us that while we assume ourselves to be people of reason, we are better described as “rationalizing” – we reach our conclusions about the world based on emotion, bias, etc. and then look to justify them. Today, there are a great many looking for answers, or more precisely someone to give them answers, provide reliable guidance, lead them into safety and security; they want someone to rule them, to be in a sense a king and so, take them safely through an uncertain future.
We live in anxious times, and very few of us look out at what is going on with calm equanimity. But does the future need to be a terrible mystery to us? Or can it, like the mysteries of our faith, be something we can enter into in faith? Can we trust in God’s providence, and insofar as science can aid us in understanding this world, be appreciated and put to its proper purpose? Not as a fortune teller, but as a source of information that must be carefully scrutinized.
The Magi we hear about today are really engaged in a bit of experimentation; they are testing their technology. These men have come from the land of Ziggurats, from places like Babylon, and the city of Ur (which was Abraham’s home town). They were likely employed by the rulers of those lands for the very specific purpose of preparing calendars and accurately predicting the coming of the spring, and the rising of the rivers that fed the irrigation systems that watered the crops. They don’t get a lot of rainfall, the life-giving water flowed down from the mountains well off to the north, in what is today Turkey and northern Iran. The prosperity of the kingdoms and empires of those lands depended on good agricultural management, a healthy harvest that would pay for the army, the temples, the courts of the kings and emperors and so on. These were important men because of their powers of prediction.
But here was something interesting to them: if they could predict the rising and falling of river waters, could they not also predict the rise and fall of nations and dynasties? Are we all not a part of this world and subject to its mysterious processes? Could the science they employed to agriculture be applied to human political affairs?
Well, we know that answer is ‘no’ – their basic assumptions about the relationship between the visible heavens and events on earth were wrong; yet by divine providence these men will be led to an encounter with God in Christ, and see the future, and by it, we trust, be assured by what they saw.
Our current culture has an obsession with the future. You see this in the popularity of the science fiction genre in books, television and movies; it’s also subtly present in our predilection for all things new: new fashions, but especially new technology, particularly the devices we carry around and rely ever increasingly upon to manage our lives. We place a tremendous value on those who can help us anticipate the future, and so, guide us into making the right choices in terms of these things – we buy magazines and frequent websites that tell us what the “in” thing will be this fall, next year, next summer. But even more so do we value those whose prognostications help us in our investments. Not only what the hot stock will be so we can make a killing in the market, but also with respect to our time and energy with regard to what our careers should be and so, secure reliable employment.
Today, anxiety is widespread as youth wonder where the jobs will be, and those finishing up with the life of fulltime employment worry whether their mutual funds are generating enough wealth to see them to the end.
Of course, beyond the reasonable expectation that the Sun will come up tomorrow, and that spring will arrive in a few months’ time, we can’t know the future. For all the well-reasoned predictions made concerning upcoming elections, commodity prices, the outcome of armed conflicts, the variables are too many to say with absolute accuracy what actually will happen even as we can make a fair guess at what will likely happen. Indeed, with respect to most of the crises, there seems more and more a consensus that we don’t know what the future will look like because the resolutions and results of all these things are not likely to leave us with a more settled world but rather one even more roiled and so, chaotic.
What is rather curious about our day is the drive to cut us off from the one resource we have in anticipating, and planning for the future; that is, the past.
Indeed, to we are growing ever more amnesiac in our lives as we forget so much, so quickly; and as I observed in last week’s homily, there is a whole faction within our society that sees history as little more than a chronicle of the deplorable and best forgotten.
But I would refine that a bit. G.K. Chesterton in his own observations on this phenomenon of eschewing the past as a strategy for a brilliant future notes that they don’t like history because it is filled with so many unrealized ideals, so many failed utopias and unfulfilled paradises, that it is apt to discourage anyone in their fresh aspirations.
Yes, human beings dream big, and fall short, and that should sober us up to the real potential of our fallible leaders to bring us to whatever promised land they’re proposing to reach, or for that matter, create.
But as Chesterton points out, that we’ve failed in the past, and discarded projects, doesn’t mean that the past is no guide, and that really, what we all are after in this world isn’t a bright new future, but the recovery of the best of the past. In a sense we all long for the garden.
The failure of the past ideas alone does not condemn them; the disappearance of old ways does not mean they were wrong.
Now, I’m not talking about such odious practices as witch-dunking, or social upheavals like the Chinese cultural revolution. Proving someone a witch by a form of water-boarding was evil, and based on a misapprehension of reality; the failure of Mao’s murderous purge of the middle class deserves to remain forever in ignominy, but we need to recognize that it was carried out under the illusion that we can re-engineer human beings.
Yet we all enjoy a renaissance; indeed, we have the example of the Renaissance – that is, rebirths of something precious thought lost, a recovery of beauty believed to have faded into nonexistence.
The thing about the Magi is that they thought themselves discoverers of the future, but really, they had uncovered some of the persistent patterns of life, those things that recur, and are the stuff of life, and death, and renewal.
When they saw in their nightly observations that a king was to be born to the Jews, their limited thinking led them to the man then upon the throne, Herod the Great. But we know Herod was no king, just a political opportunist who had spent the nation’s treasury trying to shape the future of Israel with himself as the hero of its story. He built the 2nd temple, a harbour at Caesarea, palaces and other infrastructure to be a lasting testament of his glory. What the Magi really found, however, was the return of a true king for Judea and Israel, a reasserting of the proper and true pattern of life. In this instance, that could only mean a son of the House of David – not this new thing Herod was trying to do, but a recovery of what was old, and indeed, busted. But through the power of God, through the Holy Spirit, this old thing was to be made new, refreshed, and reinvigorated. It would be both old and new, both familiar and strange, a revival of the past and a revolution in the present. The king to be born would restore Israel, but not the old Israel, something also new yet profoundly connected to what had come before.
When the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, “the glory of the Lord has risen” upon Jerusalem, he wasn’t announcing a mere restoration, but rather that “nations shall come to your light” – and that light is not some local tyrant sitting upon his tawdry throne in imitation of the pharaohs or the emperors of Akkad, but the glory of the Lord. And Israel then is no longer that gathering of twelve tribes but an assembly of the world’s nations and peoples. What was modest and parochial, having its virtues but also its vices, and now is past, is reborn as something universal, “catholic” even as it remains local and close to believers.
When we see someone fighting to preserve an unjust and unnatural situation of disparity in power, resources, and privileges, arguing that this must be so for the sake of the future, we’re looking at a latter-day Herod. The natural patterns will always re-assert themselves, the family cannot be destroyed, the human community extinguished all in favour of some new mode of human existence. But it’s never a return to the past, or a mere revival that we anticipate; but something more, something greater, something that is a true progression to an ideal.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was murdered by the Nazis toward the end of the Second World War wrote of this indefatigable aspect of human life. He was addressing the worry about how the National Socialist regime had so thoroughly corrupted the German family, had effectively stolen almost a whole generation of children from their parents, and turned the natural hierarchy of the home on its head. He wrote that God’s divine plan might be subverted for a time, but the energy and effort of tyrants could not last, that the truth of life would inevitably reassert itself, but it would take time. And so, as in Bonhoeffer’s day, as in the days of the Magi, we see the truth will be reborn, but it must grow and mature, and then with power reassert itself, and that takes time. Yet, we bask today in the light of Christ, knowing that he is always being born wherever there is darkness, and that the light will not be overcome, but prevail. That is hope for the future, indeed.
Amen.