cracker

 

Monday 6th January will be for many the day they go back to school or work after the Christmas break. Even if you are retired, and have nothing in particular to go back to, it may still feel like a gearshift. The Christmas decorations are back in the loft, and we turn our faces into the cold wind of a calendar month that seems to last a full three-hundred-and sixty-five days. But the 6th of January is also the Feast of the Epiphany. How might we keep the feast, wherever we find ourselves?

An epiphany is a revelation, and like a Christmas cracker, a revelation has two ends: at one end, the one who is revealing something, and at the other end, the one who therefore sees or hears something they did not know until now. At the Feast of the Epiphany, God is holding one end of the cracker, and we are holding the other. Here are three ways God might hold out an epiphany for us to grasp, taken from Matthew 2.1-12.

Firstly, God might speak to us through the wonder of the world around us, including the night sky, and the stunning dawns we often get at this time of year. Perhaps you might choose to get up early and get outside and look up. To take a deep breath and feel the cold air wake your lungs to life. Perhaps there will be a hard frost, that, during the night, spread fractals of ice across the windscreen of your car. The beauty of creation, as vast as stars and as tiny as ice crystals, can take our breath away. And open our eyes to the truth that we are not the centre of the universe, we are very small, and yet we are held by the love that holds everything there is together, which is a very secure place to be. And when we respond in overflowing gratitude for the sheer gift of life, we take hold of our end of the cracker and pull.

Secondly, God might speak to us through the wisdom and – crucially – the hope of others. The beauty of the Christian tradition and the resources of our scriptures, history and practices, is that they spring from many different generations and cultures. None of us has the full picture. God can speak to the young among us through the elderly and speak to those who are older through the children. In particular, I think that the older we get the more we need children to speak life to the hope within us. My observation is that many of us lose our sense of hope as we get older, and I think that is because the Baby Boomers became the most affluent generation the world had seen, and affluence is a hope-killer. My advice to those who are older is, stop consuming news, because human love and faithfulness is not newsworthy, and the news will bombard you with exceptional sorrow and despair. You do not need to be abreast of situations you can do nothing about to pray that the world might know peace. My advice to those who are younger is, restrict your consumption of social media, for it too holds out a distorted reflection of the world that makes everything appear closer than it is, such that we can think we are sitting in the same room as other people when in fact we are miles away. But when we are present to one another – to whoever is right in front of us – we take hold of our end of the cracker and pull.

Thirdly, God might speak to us through our dreams. We take in a lot of information, more than we need, so much that it becomes overwhelming. It is as if your wardrobe is full of clothes on hangers, but you have many more clothes, piled on a chair and strewn all over the floor. And you can’t find the thing you need. You are sure you saw it somewhere, but where? And when we sleep, our subconscious acts like a responsible adult, picking the clothes up, sniffing them, neatly folding those that might be worn another day and dropping the ones that are a bit whiffy in the laundry basket. Seeking to draw harmony out of chaos, which is how we most deeply participate in the divine nature. At times, our subconscious is so hand-in-hand with God, it is hard – and perhaps unnecessary – to tell them apart. But when we quieten our souls enough to sleep deeply enough to dream, we take hold of our end of the cracker and pull.

So here are three ways God might hold out an epiphany for us to grasp: through the wonder of the world around us; through the wisdom and – crucially – the hope of others; and through our dreams. But any Christmas cracker worth its salt contains a paper crown, a gift, and a riddle.

The paper crown reminds us that we, like the three kings, are drawn into God’s epiphany.

The gift is that when we gaze upon the face of Jesus, we see God – whom we could not see – made visible. Jesus is the revelation of God, of what God is like. What we see in Jesus, we can say of God – and what we do not see in Jesus is not of God. There is no violence in Jesus – no harm or oppression – and so any violence attributed to God (by admirers and critics alike) is misattribution. Jesus walks away from a fight, literally – evading those who sought to kill him – and metaphorically – keeping silent under hostile questioning. Jesus attends to the person directly in front of him, with compassion – even when he himself is crucified. He absorbs suffering and returns love. He is the emptying of power to be an infant dependent on others to show him the way he should go, and the adult who hangs from the gallows. He is foolishness in the eyes of the world. He sleeps soundly in the madness of a storm at sea. He thirsts. He is love.

The riddle is that we become God’s epiphany to the world: the bearers of the greatest gift, from which every other gift flows and to whom every gift returns: Jesus. This bleak midwinter Monday, may you be a star in the darkness, a treasure-chest on the journey, a child who sparks joy. May you be whatever God might choose to make his Son known in the world. Amen.

 

to grow in wisdom

The Great Feast of Christmas (24 December to 5 January) is followed by the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January) when the Church remembers the visit of the magi recorded by the biographer Matthew (Matthew 2.1-12).

I will assume that Matthew is as reliable a record as any other ancient text, which is not to claim that the text is without bias or agenda, but to accept it as a primary source for historical claims.

Matthew records that a caravan of strangers arrived in Judea.

They are there because they have observed something in the night sky that, according to a significant body of learning with which they are well-versed, they have interpreted to announce the birth of a great leader of the Jews.

They present themselves at the court of Herod the Great in Jerusalem, where their arrival is taken seriously as potentially giving rise to a messianic uprising that could threaten Herodian dynastic ambition.

Consulting their own library of knowledge, the royal courtiers identify Bethlehem as the potential epicentre of any such possible revolt, and the strangers are sent there to establish the lie of the land and report back.

On finding the family of Joseph, they present gifts summarised as gold, frankincense and myrrh, gifts that are reminiscent of the idealised wedding procession of King Solomon the Son of David through the wilderness towards Jerusalem in the erotic poetry of The Song of Solomon, and also of a prophecy attributed to Isaiah of the wealth of the surrounding nations flowing to the royal court in Jerusalem.

One or more of the strangers has a dream which they interpret as being a divine warning not to return to Herod, and so they disappear into their own country by another road, or another way of being.

How might we reflect on this account?

Firstly, we note that the travellers at the heart of this account are strangers. They are the other, and the other is always a source of fear for humans. God is the ultimate other, and as such the other is often an envoy of God. We do not know the size of the caravan, but, extrapolating from three named gifts, tradition has given us three kings, and this is reminiscent of the three divine visitors received by Abraham. We do not know where these strangers come from or return to. But in seeking to deceive the stranger, we seek to deceive God, and in welcoming the stranger, we welcome God.

Secondly, we note that humans are meaning-making animals, even when the world cannot beat the weight of the meaning we construct (for example, the arbitrary value we have given gold, or land). The ancients sought to navigate world events according to the map of the night sky. We, too, endlessly, find patterns, and attribute significance. The age of scientific enquiry is no different from those ages that came before.

Thirdly, and entirely related to the above, we note that the ancient world was highly connected, through the exchange of ideas and philosophies as well as trade. We strive not only to make sense of the world but to do so, at least in part, by overcoming the fear of the other. Only together will we overcome our fear of the unknown. The stranger and the familiar each have a piece of the code we are trying to interpret.

Fourthly, we note that our present is understood in the light of the past, and the actions of the other, in as much as they have a bearing on us, are understood through the lens of our own history. We do not so much judge a book by its cover, as judge the cover of the other by the content of our book. This is less than fair, but there we are. Those of us whose shared history has trod heavily on others should tread with extreme caution.

Fifthly, we note that dreams are a way in which our subconscious attempts to bring order to the chaos of information our conscious mind observes in the world. This is another level of meaning-making. At some level, something about Herod registers as false, and yet it is in the time of sleep that God is able to bring clarity, to bring us from a place of harm to a place of harmony.

Sixthly, we note that the way ahead is a way that leads us to disappear from the view of the watching world, and that it can never be the same way by which we have appeared in the world. Our lives begin with the struggle to come together, to construct not only meaning but also allies, partnerships, purpose. There comes a point when the mission changes, when the goal is to give our lives away. When maturity is marked by giving away our lives to others. The gifts given by the magi are, within the frame of reference of the account Matthew gives us, the first gift offered, the first unburdening of the self. This is followed by the gift of not trying to retrace their earlier steps but embracing a new and unknown way forward. An event not told by lights in the night sky, but conducted entirely in the dark, so to speak. There comes a further point where the mission changes again, and we are called to give our death away to others, to model dying well, which in fact begins long before we die. The magi disappear entirely from the story, but not from our imaginations.

In 2025, how might we welcome the stranger, lighten the load of the meaning we construct, embrace the limitations of our understanding, redeem the past through gratitude for what was and is in all its imperfection, meet chaos with empathy as the birthing of harmony, and give more of ourselves away to others becoming less than they may become more?