Today’s readings: Isaiah 60, 1-6; Ephesians 3, 2-3.5-6; Matthew 2, 1-12.
The event whereby God was made man and entered history, which we celebrated on Christmas, would have probably been a fable were it restricted to Bethlehem, to one people and to one culture. Its significance had to rebound and transcend time and space to be reached and grasped by many.
Yet the idea of diversity, of pluralism, of God’s revelation as a prism, has always been perceived with suspicion within Christianity. King Herod in today’s gospel account represents very well indeed this universal fear of the other that has been a hallmark for Christianity as an institutionalised religion.
On this feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, the challenge for Christianity is precisely to find out where Jesus really is; because with the passing of time, Jesus was robbed of his universality and was nationalised and clothed with a mono culture.
The fact that it is only Matthew’s gospel that tells this story of the wise men coming from the east is very significant, given that this gospel was mainly addressed to the Jewish communities. Matthew is practically saying in narrative form what St Paul writes in Ephesians in the second reading, namely, that the Gentiles share the same inheritance as the Jews.
Nobody can claim a monopoly on the truth of God or on Christ. The truth we acknowledge today is that many are those in search of Jesus beyond the boundaries of the institution that has always claimed full possession of the truth of the gospel. Besides, we can also so easily form part of the institution without actually belonging to him.
By nature we are all seekers. And it is through those who are authentic believers that God continues to manifest His face. In The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis speaks of the need for the Church to again be the home of many. For that to happen, we need to change route, we need new strategies, we need to find other ways, perhaps even forgotten ways of speaking about God and religious experience.
We need to explore afresh the nature of the human being and the urge to seek that which fills the depths of the hearts of people. The Church cannot, like Herod, feel threatened by innovation. The new ways God’s spirit inspires and prompts go far beyond the institutional boundaries we have built and struggled to maintain for so long.
As the Pope writes: “Grace supposes culture, and God’s gift becomes flesh in the culture of those who receive it.” Christianity does not have simply one cultural expression but rather, it will also reflect the different faces of the cultures and peoples in which it is received and takes root.
Now the walls are falling and the Church is called to be more and more transparent so that God’s mercy, which we have transformed into a possession of ours that is distributed mechanically, can truly be ‘epiphanic’, manifested by God’s own power.
What St Matthew says of the wise men, that they “returned to their own country by a different way”, means that now, in the aftermath of the crisis of religion and of faith in particular, we need to radically rethink the ways whereby the Church can be the home of many.
From the Matthew narrative it is evident that from the very beginning there had to be a power struggle. Herod was uncomfortable with the idea of a new-born king, just as Pilate, much later, could not grasp exactly what Jesus was saying when he spoke to him of a kingdom that was not of this world.
This is the new Epiphany we are celebrating in this year of grace with the Jubilee of Mercy: we need to let God’s human face be manifest to all those whom the Spirit guides and who may be so distant from our common places. God has His own ways and means to make people authentically acknowledge the void within and search till they discover, as the wise men, the saviour in Jesus.