Today’s readings: Isaiah 60, 1-6; Ephesians 3, 2-3.5-6; Matt. 2, 1-12.

St Mathew’s narrative today of wise men coming to Jerusalem from the east is mainly catechetical and is meant to complete the narrative of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. God made man in the fullness of time after centuries of prophetic proclamation and waiting can only have one meaning: new openings and new possibilities of salvation that go beyond the boundaries of one religion.

Yet time and time again, we give in to the temptation of appropriating ourselves of God and of His salvation, subjecting God to our frame of mind instead of letting go and opening up to His Spirit, which blows wherever He wills.

It’s the same as in our times, revisiting so many Councils throughout the history of the Church convened to correct heresies and consolidate doctrine, and finally coming to the Second Vatican Council letting loose of old forms of Christianity to open up to God’s Spirit in the world.

The wise men depicted in the gospel read a different book from that which the chief priests and the scribes knew by heart. Yet, they came the same road and, most significant of all, they found what they were genuinely seeking.

Whoever we are, wherever we are, we’re all basically seekers. If we seek genuinely, we will find. If on the contrary, we presume to have already found and to know, we stop seeking.

Not seeking, lacking the right attitude of genuine faith in life, is tragic to faith itself. These words may easily disturb the peace of mind of all those who have found their comfort zone and are happy with that. But letting God be God means that we let God’s Word disturb our peace every time we think we are at the end of the road in our faith journey.

There is no end of the road for genuine seekers of God. There is no orthodoxy, no dogma that can make us stop seeking God. God is always beyond what our minds and hearts can grasp. If we stop at Christmas without the depth of meaning of today’s feast of the Epiphany, that would be half the story, half the truth.

Epiphany means the radical challenging of our dogmatic certainties which make God more man and less God. God’s manifestation is free, open, without any boundaries of religion, race, faith, colour or orientation. Undoubtedly, the dark sides of the history of Christianity lay in the long season when mission and outreach were reduced to spiritual imperialism. That was a reduction of faith to mere ideology.

God’s future can never be framed geographically or culturally, not even in a fixed tradition that easily risks becoming traditionalism. Epiphany is God’s universality, and this is the backbone of the prophecy of Scripture. We are at the end of the day realising now that the continent which mostly celebrates Christmas for what it is, represents precisely the culture where Christ is most alien.

The mystery of Jesus is the revelation of an event in the history of humanity with which we all need to measure ourselves, our religions, our searches. The pilgrims who came from a far country and culture, returned home by a different way. They did not come to Jerusalem to stay. We have the tendency to stay, settle down, construct identities by making others adjust to our creeds.

God is different. After 2,000 years of history of Christianity, God’s future is still unfolding in spite of the many moments in time when we wanted to fix it. That is why we seem to have serious problems in our time whenever we speak of outreach, of decoding God’s presence to believers and non-believers alike.

In many of his canticles, Isaiah seeks to elevate the spirit of the people in exile and to strengthen their morale. But today in the first reading he sings the praises of Jerusalem in a different manner. For him, Jerusalem now is no longer the homecoming of the Jews on their return from exile, but a home for many others.

This is the mandate for the Church today. It is called to be not the institution that has a message to bring to the world, but to be the message itself. It is called to be the open space where people can experience the all-embracing God. That is the challenge ahead.