Today’s readings: Isaiah 60, 1-6; Ephesians 3, 2-3.5-6; Matt. 2, 1-12.
The Gospel account of wise men coming to Jerusalem from the east in search of Jesus was written after the fall of Jerusalem and at a time when communities of believers were being joined by Gentile, non-Jewish converts. It is a rewriting of the Christmas story, this time from the standpoint not of the inhabitants of Bethlehem, but of foreigners.
It is this standpoint that we need to revisit and re-evaluate even in our times. We’ve been repeating the story of Jesus’s birth again and again from our viewpoint and according to our particular culture and understanding. We need to listen to different, foreign perspectives of this story that may not necessarily lead us astray from the truth.
There are so many searching for God whom we need to stop and listen to. It may help us deepen our very understanding of Jesus himself, given that he came for all and that he incessantly continues to reveal himself through the Spirit and indiscriminately across borders of religion, language, race, and faith.
To the surprise of many, God today continues to be faithful but, as Pope Benedict recently said in his Christmas message broadcasted on BBC, “he often surprises us in the way he fulfills his promises”.
It is quite comfortable and easy for us to speak about Jesus in our churches and in our circles in the way we’ve always spoken about him. But the challenge of re-evangelisation is to start addressing people who may seem to be outsiders but with whom we share the most fundamental questions about happiness and suffering, love and its failures, justice and peace, and all that concerns not the truths of faith but the truth about humanity.
Probably only we will discover that things are not exactly the way we perceive them. St Augustine, as quoted by Pope Benedict in the book Light of the World, even in his day said: “There are many outside who seem to be inside, and many inside who seem to be outside”.
God’s Word on the feast of Epiphany dismantles our preconceptions of God and His workings. It comes as a confirmation of what John’s gospel says: “The wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going”.
To hear the sound of God is our challenge. To discern from where it can come and where it may be leading to is yet a bigger challenge. Many speak of God but not in the same language as we do; yet it may be the true God whom they are hearing and discerning in their inner hearts.
These people may be ‘His star’, which we are called to follow; in the Gospel they are represented by the wisdom of the wise men who, in spite of their coming from the east, meaning they were not from God’s people, yet they were in search of the truth. That was enough to put them on the right track, to lead them eventually to worship the true God, even to make of them enlightened people capable of discerning truth from the falsity of Herod.
This is God’s project of salvation that knows no limits, that is never stereotyped, that expresses itself in languages hitherto unknown. Wisdom is never possessed. No religion, no culture has a monopoly of it. This has always been the manner God revealed Himself in time. This is how it will always be. So when it’s a question of God revealing Himself, we cannot just look to the past as if His mystery is subject to archaeology.
Our faith is surely rooted in the past, in the historical birth of the Messiah in time and space. But it never remains bound to the past as if unaffected by the present. There is an unfolding which we are asked to discern and listen to.
The Messiah’s birth could not be circumscribed to the surroundings of Bethlehem. Were the first Christians to do that, it would have been the end of the story. Opening up to the wisdom of those in search of the truth placed God’s entering time and history not as localised geographically, but first and foremost in the hearts of people.