Reading – Matthew 2:1-12

The Christian festival of Epiphany which is the twelfth day of the season of Christmas will be observed in two days – the 6^th of January. In the Orthodox traditions Epiphany is much more important than Christmas. The Greek word means ‘to appear’ or ‘to shine on’ and was traditionally used in the Orthodox, or Eastern, churches to represent the shining of the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the Gentiles symbolised by the Magi.

The Christmas season is so impossibly burdened with myth and legend and fairy stories that a little demythologising is not a bad idea to cure the depression that is the sediment of our overindulgence in rich food and drink, our pre-Christmas shopping in hyperactive shopping cathedrals, the piped Christmas carols which are about the only remotely Christian symbolism remaining in public spaces, and our manic Boxing Day sales. Christmas is a sometimes desperate escape from mundane reality into a fantasy of peace and joy and happy families, but like the after effect of too much chocolate, it can leave us feeling a little bilious and even a little guilty. Epiphany is time for a reality check, but hopefully a reality check that does not totally eliminate the ‘magic’ of Christmas, for the Epiphany story centres around the ‘Magi’ or magicians, or astrologers, whom we sometimes refer to as the wise men.

So, some demythologising to start with:

1. we don’t know how many magi there were, only that they brought three kinds of gifts; gold, frankincense and myrrh.

2. the magi met Mary and Joseph and Jesus in a house not a stable (vs 11) – remember Nathan’s Christmas Day slide? – so you’d better go home and toss the three of them out of your carved wooden nativity set with its shepherds, cows and sheep and donkeys.

Epiphany is about seeing something that until now you haven’t been able to see. It is about people who walk in darkness and see a great light as Isaiah prophesied seven centuries before Jesus; it is about the struggle between light and darkness present in the Creation story in Genesis, and it is about the good news that St John proclaims in his Gospel, that the darkness has not been able to extinguish the light.

Light and dark in the World

2008 has been a year in which the world in general, and many of us in particular, experienced light and dark in almost equal proportions. The light of Kevin Rudd’s apology to the indigenous people of Australia at the beginning of the year and the election of Barack Obama at the end of the year were political stars in the sky pointing the way to new possibilities, and hope for a new way of being together as a global human community. The June cyclone in Burma and the military junta’s refusal to allow in foreign aid was a dark, dark day that caused huge anxiety for many in this community.

The renewed hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza reminds us of the seeming impossibility of bringing genuine peace to the cradle of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. And yet in the recent Israeli movie, The Lemon Tree based on a real incident, there was a genuine desire on the part of the movie makers to understand both sides. A Palestinian widow, Salma, lives on the border of the West Bank and all she has left to support her in the world is a grove of lemon trees. On the other side of the fence lives the Israeli Defence Minister, Navon and his wife Mira. The security people think the lemon grove might provide cover for assassins to attack Navon so they order it destroyed. The two women, separated by the violence of war and racial hatred, are the centre piece of the movie and the ones who provide hope of a resolution. Clearly the women haven’t won, and yet the struggle to overcome the big lie that peace can be won through violence continues with many women and men on both sides of the wall.

Sometimes we can dismiss such expressions of goodness because they are naïve, or because they are not “Christian”, but that is precisely the message of Epiphany – the magi were not Christian, they were astrologers, or magicians, who studied the stars and quite possibly the occult arts, and followed the guidance that came from their own tradition and religion to discover a more profound manifestation of God in the world - Jesus. Epiphany is a call, not to abandon the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Jesus, but to recognise that God reveals God-self to human beings in many ways and through many faith traditions, even ones that appear weird and incomprehensible to us. Light shines in the darkness.

Darkness is all around us but if we have the eyes to see, as did the magi, there are guiding stars, some of them supernovas like Mother Theresa or Archbishop Desmond Tutu, some of them tiny little stars that most people will never notice, like the person sitting beside us in church, or the neighbour who brings us a casserole when we are ill. The darkness has never been able to put the light out.

Darkness in Ourselves

But of course darkness is not only around us, it is also within us. Carl Jung was the foremost 20^th century philosopher of the human psyche to speak about the darkness within:

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

Interesting that Jung connects the darkness within with our sense of inferiority, or more particularly with the bits of ourselves that we don’t like:

The Shadow in general has to do with those parts of ourselves that we dislike and are reluctant to acknowledge. We like to think of ourselves as honest, straightforward, generous, etc. - 'only too willing', when, in fact we are not really, or at least not always these things. What happens is that we project the Shadow upon others. For example we get angry at others when they display OUR FAULTS. In coming to grips with our Shadow, the individual must discover the relativity of good and evil and come to accept the Shadow as part of him/herself and as having some value...

Jung’s ideas were something of a star which many people in the 20^th century followed and, in following, found freedom from their own demons. The light that it cast on their troubled souls eliminated the darkness of self doubt and fear. God knows, many more people need to see this star and be released from the deep darkness of depression before the darkness does extinguish the light for them forever.

Christ the light of the world

There are many stars that shine in the world around us and the world within us, and they are a wonder. But the star that guided the magi was not an end in itself, it pointed to another light, another truth; it pointed to a small town in Israel where they found and paid homage to a child with its mother, opened their treasure chests and presented gifts worthy of royalty.

For the magi, the arrival in Bethlehem signalled the end of one journey and the beginning of another. Like Simeon in the temple, their eyes looked upon something that for them was a wonder. Like Simeon they could depart in peace for they had found what they were looking for. But unlike Simeon, they had to return to their own country to pick up where they left off before their great pilgrimage began. But as with so many other pilgrims, life would never be the same again for them. Without ever hearing a word of Jesus’ teaching, without ever hearing the stories of his death and resurrection, this simple encounter with the Christ child would become the defining moment of their lives.

The story of the magi is the classic portrayal of what happens when human beings are encountered by God, when mortals are confronted by the eternal. Whether it be Moses before the burning bush, or the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, or a bunch of astrologers falling down on their faces before a baby, when the mystery of God opens up before us, we cannot walk away unchanged.