January 4, 2015

Revd Carolin Telford

The Epiphany

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Now that your annual emotional audit of New Year’s resolutions is out of the way, do you fancy living a Second Life? A new life… is this one not quite cutting it? Not a second life in some far – off pie-in-the sky religious kind of way, but one you can begin right now. A life that will involve your creativity, energy, fantasy, some but not too much of your money-more an investment in yourself, you could say – and a helpful amount of your spare time? Well, help is at hand... All you have to do is invest in the hardware and software and sit yourself down in front of the console! You can play out your fantasies, design a more interesting, physically alluring, successful version of yourself, and live a Second Life through him/her. Maybe you’d like a new career as well: you might want to sell real estate to other players of the game, or hire yourself out as a designer of apartments. Such earning opportunities do exist – all is possible in the parallel world of Second Life.

It is hard being a human being, isn’t it? And now that we are at the end of the festive season, has Christmas really helped? Maybe you have concluded once again that all the presents and baked hams in the world are not offering any real comfort, or the possibility of life changing for the better. Maybe you have actually started playing Second Life, because the particular constellation of circumstances which define this one make living every day a tough call. As we journey through Christmas and into Epiphany, we are offered the gift of many gestures toward what life lived fully and well might be like. The familiar stories all involve risky journeys and change – Mary accepting the risk of an unplanned and unconventional pregnancy, Joseph and Mary on the move for the census, the shepherds leaving their fields and following the advice of the angels to go and see why that star is shining so brightly over Bethlehem. Lots of dreams, and lots of attending to them. And then we come to the story particularly for us, here, on this day, at this turn in our lectionary wheel of retelling and re-imagining. The story of those who journeyed the farthest – the Story of the Magi.

The magi were perhaps members of an ancient priestly caste, astrologers, astronomers, practitioners of arcane arts, skilled in magic. Maybe they came from Persia-modern-day Iran. These wise men appear only in the Gospel of Matthew, and he proclaims in their coming the fulfilment of prophecy. Precise biographical details are few. Their number has been extrapolated from the number of gifts they brought: there could have been two of them, or many more than three. They laid down enigmatically significant offerings – gold fit for the king they had discerned they would be welcoming, incense-burnt as a religious offering, in honour of a life to be offered up in service, and myrrh, a herb used in the anointing of bodies of the dead.

Many artists have found their story an engaging one to envisage, and the Homage of the Magi, or the Adoration of the Kings, as it is also known, the Flight to Egypt of Jesus, Mary and Joseph , and what became called the Slaughter of the Innocents of Bethlehem, ordered by Herod, are common themes in Western artistic tradition. Images of the three magi even appear painted on walls of the catacombs in Rome. Over many centuries through, or at least in parallel with, the elaboration of their visual identities, the sparse biblical account became garlanded in the popular imagination with significant new details. It seems a bit like a medieval game of Second Life played out by artists – or maybe more accurately by artists acting on the instruction of the patrons and commissioners of the art works. The paucity of biblical detail gave them and gives us licence to tease out the story. ‘Epiphany’ derives from Epiphaneia – a Greek verb meaning ‘to appear’ – used to refer to the manifestation – the appearance – of dawn, or an enemy in war, and especially of a deity to a worshipper. I read once that over thirty different sites in our brain are engaged when we look at something – when we see something. So central is our sense of vision to our comprehension of reality that we say ‘I see’ when really we mean ‘I understand.’ What did the magi see and understand? What did all those artists see in this story, and what does their vision offer us on this day of our Epiphany?

The wise men evolved into recognisably kingly figures themselves, first wearing special pointed caps (interestingly later adopted as symbols of authority by the Doges of Venice), and later on wearing crowns. They were given names and habitually shown with differing skin colours, and can be identified as having begun their journeys in different places: Caspar-from Arabia, the Oriental Melchior and dark Balthazar from Africa. One is a youth, one a mature man, and one is much older. They gradually came to represent every seeker, Everyman willing to go on a quest and follow a star and look and risk radical change. They were usefully pressed into service as a convenient but non-confrontational motif of temporal power bowing low before religious authority at various times in history when Church/State tensions ran high. Their presence perhaps came to endorse wisdom seeking truth, obedience to a call, willingness to follow the light and having the courage to journey on from one place, one way of seeing, to another. Evelyn Waugh wrote of them (quoted in ‘Approaching Christmas’ – Jane Williams) ‘You are patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.’

We do not know what Herod the Great looked like. Almost uniquely among ancient rulers of his time, he commissioned no busts of himself, his likeness appears on no coin. Whether out of personal conviction or in calculated political deference to his Jewish subjects, Herod took seriously the Commandment prohibiting graven images. There is no incontrovertible evidence that he ordered the massacre of the children two and under in Bethlehem, but he certainly did arrange for the murder of several close relatives, including three of his sons. There is a historical basis for believing that in the last decade or so of his long reign, Herod suffered from a medical condition which caused increasing paranoia. Perhaps paranoia over which he had no control clouded his vision so that he couldn’t respond with anything other than denial to the evidence standing in front of his eyes that the locus of power was shifting. In his informative book ‘The Life and Times of Herod the Great’, Stewart Perowne offers his judgement that Herod suffered from the defect the Greeks knew as anaesthesia, a lack of perception. The story we retell today is an invitation to us to avoid that same defect. The wise men devoted themselves to following what light they saw in the passionate hope of that light brightening to illuminate their understanding of who they were and how they were to live. They had the courage to journey on from one way of looking and understanding, to another. Jesus, just a baby in a stable, was a life-changing revelation to them. After their journey to the crib, informed in a dream not to retrace their steps and return to Herod, the wise men changed their plans. Their dogged persistence had re-formed them and made them wiser.

The gift they lay at our feet is their Epiphany, their willingness to perceive this world with eyes wide open to new, different, risky ways of being and understanding and living. It is the gift of every day, this day, living fully this life that is ours.