Epiphany 2020
Twenty one years ago, I was looking after Carnforth parish while the then parish priest was in Jerusalem. Come the Feast of the Epiphany, came Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School to morning Mass.
I read the Gospel, and everybody settled down. “Right,” I said, “can anybody tell me anything about today’s Feast?” A forest of hands shot up, with one boy fractionally in the lead.
“Yes” I said encouragingly. “It’s the Feast of the Epiphany,” came the reply, “which means ‘showing forth’, and it’s important because it shows that Jesus came not only for the Jews but for the Gentiles as well, which is us, because the Wise Men were Gentiles.”
BINGO! Got it in one. The children of Our Lady of Lourdes knew their onions, and knew their history, and their theology as well. St. Paul himself couldn’t have put it better.
In fact, St. Paul put it in a very similar way, as we have just heard: “It means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body....”
Epiphany is the feast of the Gentiles, of the pagans, of you and me. Christmas was a thoroughly Jewish affair: Mary and Joseph were Jews, Jesus was a Jew, the shepherds were Jews, and so, I daresay, was the innkeeper. The Gentiles were conspicuous by their absence. It is only with Epiphany that the net is spread wider, that the news is given, by the arrival of the Wise Men, that Jesus is the Universal Saviour, that membership of the Chosen People has been extended to the whole human race.
That is why, in the early Church, Epiphany was a more important feast than Christmas—or rather, Epiphany encompassed Christmas. Today’s feast, in fact, comprised three parts: the showing forth of the Saviour first to Jews and then to Gentiles; the Baptism of the Lord, showing Him forth as the Beloved Son of the Father; and the marriage feast at Cana, showing forth His glory, as God.
Round about the fourth century, Christmas became established as a feast in its own right, and gradually overshadowed Epiphany, which lost the elements of the Baptism, formerly the most important part, and the marriage feast, though these are now gradually creeping back.
Is there anything else which is of significance about today’s feast? Of the gifts, gold is generally interpreted as being offered to Jesus as a King, frankincense to Him as God, and myrrh to prepare for His burial, but I am indebted to a priest friend who informed me that St. Bernard interpreted them in more mundane terms: gold to meet the family’s material needs, incense to ward off smells, and myrrh as an antidote to nappy rash. You pays your money and you takes your choice!
What though of the First Reading and Psalm? It is to the prophecies of Isaiah and to the psalm that we owe the idea of the visitors being kings, rather than Wise Men (Magi) as Matthew describes them. “Before Him, all kings shall fall prostrate, all nations shall serve Him.”
Perhaps, though, the nations are more significant than the kings. Do all nations serve the Lord? “Far from it” we would have to say. There are demagogic politicians in central Europe, in Italy, and in the United States who invoke the name of Jesus to justify their own policies, but this is effectively a form of blasphemy, as was the case when Franco in Spain and the Latin American dictators did the same. Ireland attempted to build a nation on Christ-like lines, but this has unravelled spectacularly in recent years, not least because of the revelations of clerical child abuse.
Perhaps Isaiah’s vision, and that of the Psalmist, will have to wait until the fullness of the Kingdom before they are realised: meanwhile, we must accept that the Redeemer will continue to reside, as He was born, among the poor; that the importance of the Epiphany visitors lay in their status as Gentiles rather than in their rank; that it is in our inclusion among the people of God and in the hiddenness of the Kingdom that we must rejoice.
