Epiphany - 06 Jan 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL – Epiphany – Thursday 06 January 2011

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12


What a strange feast today… not straightforward… a mixture of events and images almost designed not to fit together. The stable, the Jordan, the wedding… all linked and all revealing God in distinctive ways.

The account from Matthew of the coming of the Wise really doesn’t have to be expounded. The picture is on so many Christmas cards – even the cheap ones! The Magi are probably Zoroastrian astrologers; their gifts symbolize royalty, divinity and death. But Matthew knew how to write a good story. And so, in the middle, the suspense builds – the warning by an angel comes to the Magi and in their obedience, they go home by another way.
All of that is dramatic and tantalizing. Exotic and mysterious. Inspiring poets and musicians, artists and pageant directors all trying to get their imaginations around it.

But add in the Baptism and the wedding at Cana and things get more complex. I love the antiphons on the gospel canticles today – especially our Matins which knits all the pieces together in a wonderful way. Where do we see God’s power in these epiphanies? I think it’s in the paradoxes.

We’ve romanticized the predicament of the Holy Family that often slips by in this story. The Magi come to this uprooted couple who are about to be refugees. Joseph has a nightmare – breaking out in sweat in the realization that he must take Mary and the Child to safety. Throwing things in a sack and plodding off to only God knew where.

No more angels; no more shepherds. No comfort of a warm stable. No more mysterious strangers with strange gifts.
Here Mary and Joseph face terror – alone, unsupported, moving into an unknown world where they don’t speak the language. Where they will be undocumented; no relatives, nothing familiar. Only the strangeness of a foreign land and the suspicions of the locals.

They’ve become people to turn your back on. Welfare folk. You can hear the voices because they are still repeating the same things: Are they even properly married? Why didn’t they stay in their own place? Just coming here to be a drain on our already struggling economy. Do they expect us to get their brat into school? Maybe he can get odd jobs – she could clean houses.
King of the Jews? God enfleshed in a dirt poor mewling kid?

And the Baptism – what do we have here? The crowd of seeking desperate people looking for any comfort… and a solitary working man of no great note from a disreputable village comes forward. The desert dweller John and the Carpenter have a word and the Word is spoken – This is my Son, the Beloved! But what about the scholars, the Torah Jews, the people who have kept the law. The ones you could expect to produce the Awaited One, Messiah. Not chosen!

And finally, the wedding scene. This wedding of poverty with cheap Manischewitz that runs out doesn’t seem like a disaster worthy of a miracle to us but I got some insight into that in South Africa. The fear of the shame of running out puts families in panic. We saw if most at funerals. Two deaths back to back can put a family under never to get out from under again. The shame is profound – it marks the family forever. These people weren’t careless – they wouldn’t have been. They were just were poor. And Jesus shows compassion and in that compassion we see God’s glory.

So where has God appeared? Not with Herod. Not with the religious leaders. Not with the people of plenty. But at the bottom of the heap.
Where do we look for God today? Surely not in the smirking of politicians; not in the boardrooms where greedy hands are gleefully rubbed over tax cuts for the rich; not with the intelligentsia. Maybe in the street outside an unfinished building in Newburgh where not so long ago we shared the Body and Blood? Maybe in the wake of our sisters Heidi and Monica in one of the townships among the very poor? Maybe here where so many broken hearts come for healing? Who knows? But not usually where we’d expect. God is fleshed out in the most unlikely surprising places and in the heart.
So we keep our eyes open and our hearts ready. Perhaps, who knows, we might be epiphanies.