Homily for Solemnity of Epiphany

Homily
for the Solemnity of the Epiphany Jan. 3, 2010
Matt 2: 1-12
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle

“‘Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage?’ Assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, King Herod inquired of them where the Christ was to be born” (Matt 2: 2,4).

Deacon Greg Kandra, who maintains a fine blog, The Deacon’s Bench, in his homily for today quips that this is the last time in recorded history that a group of men stopped to ask for directions.

A “Motley’s Crew” cartoon in the Daily News on Christmas Day in 1999—I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this cartoon—showed a wise man (who looked like Motley) leaving the house at Bethlehem in dejection. The caption read: “Not many people know this, but there were actually four magi—one was turned away because his gift was a fruitcake.” And we haven’t seen Motley lately, have we?

In the old days, Epiphany would have been the 12th day after Christmas. In our revised liturgical calendar, where the feast isn’t a day of obligation it’s been moved to Sunday so that its solemnity might be fully celebrated, and this year, in case you’re counting, it’s the 9th day after Christmas. If you had a true love, I don’t know what he’d tell you about the 3 days of gifts you’ve been gypped out of. (Someone calculated that this year the full 12 days would set your true love back about $87,400, which, recession or no, is up $800 over last year.)[1]

In some cultures Epiphany has become 3 Kings Day. You’ve heard the gospel reading enuf times to know that they were magi—astrologers, sorcerers, Persian priests—not kings; and you heard no reference to their number. They’re usually numbered at 3 because of their 3 gifts. Henry Van Dyke, an American writer of a century ago, in 1896 gave us a beautiful short story called “The Other Wise Man” well worth reading and even meditating upon if you can find a copy of it. Van Dyke’s fictional 4th wise man wasn’t carrying fruitcake but loving concern for people, which caused repeated delays on his journey so that he kept just missing the Christ Child, until he finally caught up with Christ on Calvary.

However many of these wise men, astrologers, sorcerers there may have been, for Luke they represent the pagan nations coming to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Messiah, which is one of Luke’s major themes. 1st, Jesus has come for all peoples, and not only for Israel. 2d, altho the leaders of Israel will reject Jesus—foreshadowed by King Herod and all Jerusalem with him being greatly troubled by the magi’s announcement (cf. Matt 2:3)—Jesus will be widely accepted by those pagan nations, who will become the new people of God.

There’s another, more subtle message as well. It may not have been on Luke’s mind in the 1st century, but it’s relevant to our rational, scientific mindset. As we all know, there’s a large body of the elite of society who’ll have nothing to do with God or religion, with anything that can’t be identified, measured, and quantified by scientific observation or economic calculation. There’s also a large body of people around the world who reject science and human reasoning when it comes to matters of faith—think not only of the fundamentalist reception of geology, paleontology, and the theory of evolution, but also recall the hullabaloo over Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address on the necessity of reason in matters social and religious.

In the story of the magi, what is it that draws them toward Christ? They’ve been studying the stars. They’re using science, which even at the dawn of the Christian era could be fairly sophisticated. They’re using human reason to draw conclusions, to reach deeper truth, from what they observe. They find practical use for what they observe and deduce, and act upon the truth they believe they’ve discovered.

But scientific observation and the use of human reason takes them only so far—only to Jerusalem, in Luke’s narration, not to the Truth whom they seek. Yesterday I chanced upon a quotation from Cardinal Newman that’s apropos:

I have no intention at all of denying, that truth is the real object of our reason, and that, if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; but I am not speaking here of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man. I know that even the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads to a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retribution; but I am considering the faculty of reason actually and historically; and in this point of view, I do not think I am wrong in saying that its tendency is towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion.[2]

And, in the words of the author whose discussion of Newman I was reading, “he concluded that reason alone, in this anarchic state of affairs, was rapidly moving the world toward atheism.”[3] That conclusion on the future cardinal’s part doesn’t seem to be far off the mark, unless one were to argue that it’s the lack of reasoning, and appeals to emotion and passion, that tend more to lead one toward atheism.

One would also like to add to those conclusions which Newman said human reason could reach—belief in God, the soul’s immortality, justice in a future life—also rational conclusions about social order and morality, about right and wrong, about ethics—the sorts of rationalistic conclusions, e.g., to which our Founding Fathers appealed in the Declaration of Independence.

Still, Newman’s point—in the context of defending the authoritative magisterium of the Catholic Church and explaining his conversion to that Church from the Church of England (the quotation is from his Apologia pro Vita Sua—was that human reason and all forms of human knowledge are entirely too fallible and have no guarantee of guiding us to ultimate Truth.

Which was the experience of the magi. When they arrived at Jerusalem, perhaps expecting that their journey was over, they learned otherwise. The chief priests and the scribes turned to a more certain knowledge, to a greater authority, to go where learning and reasoning could not. They went to the Sacred Scriptures, to the realm of faith, and thru that means they directed the wise men on the right road. The journey that began with science and reason ended successfully when enlightened by faith.

That journey, of course, wouldn’t even have begun without the questing minds of the magi, without a search for knowledge, for experience, for truth. St. Anselm famously described theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Theology, the search for the knowledge of God, works hand in hand with human intelligence. That’s why the Catholic Church was the mother of the European universities, why the Church continues to support all forms of human learning, and of course to seek to integrate all those forms of learning with the light of revelation. Like the wise men of old, we learn best where we’re going ultimately, and how to get there, from faith, from the teaching authority of the Scriptures and, as John Henry Newman discovered, the inerrant authority of Christ’s Church.

[1] Daily News, 11-30-09. [2] Apologia for Vita Sua (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 218. [3] C. Colt Anderson, The Great Catholic Reformers: From Gregory the Great to Dorothy Day (NY: Paulist, 2007), p. 191.