Epiphany: Homily: 2015
We have seen his star
A
hard time we had of it.
. . .
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.
. . .
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.
So T.S. Eliot says in his Epiphany poem The Journey of the Magi. But the wise
men have had almost as much of a hard time recently from modern de-mythologizers as they had on that first
pilgrimage: ‘this was all folly.’ We are told confidently that the wise men
were not necessarily men, they were not necessarily three of them, we do not know their names and anyway
they probably never existed. So what we end up with is non-existent persons of
indeterminate name and gender which is much more relevant supposedly to modern folks. But you have to wonder if this says more about
modern folks than it does about the biblical text.
Does anyone really think that there is such a
thing as wisdom anymore? It seems to me to me that we believe in information,
statistics, the accumulation of what we take to be facts. We have more
information then we know what to do with. But wisdom is not how much you know but rather
what you do with what you know. In
politics and even in natural science information is what we hurl at our
opponents, not something we use to convince other people of the truth. Would we even recognize someone, never mind
the gender, who was wise? If you ask me, it is not so much that the three wise
men never existed but that wise men no longer to exist.
In any case the Gospel for the Epiphany gives us
a pretty good description of what a wise man is.
We have
seen his star in the East: there has been much speculation about what in terms of
astronomy the Star of Bethlehem might have been: a meteor, a comet, the
conjunction of planets, a nova or a supernova? Most of these speculations are
simply wrong or at best problematic. But the wise men were not natural
scientists in the modern sense. They were more akin to philosophers, men like
Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. These guys did not just
want to know what was the immediate material cause of the things in the world
but what was their ultimate cause. Why is the star there at all? Like St.
Thomas they were led to the conclusion that the cause had to be a cause which
itself was uncaused, ‘which is what everybody calls God’.
The wise men stand at the beginning of a great
tradition not only Christian but Jewish and Islamic as well of ‘faith seeking
understanding’. The world, the skies, the earth, the whole created order
constitute a Book wherein may be read the reality of God. As Augustine said the
heavens and earth cry out, “We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who
abides for eternity.”
You know the problem with almost every
evangelism program I have ever heard about? It ignores this great patrimony. The
assumption is that bringing people to Christian Faith only involves our emotions
and not our brains. We simply surrender to the religion of science and to
atheism and hope that we will run into some folks who are emotional basket
cases and whom we can rescue. It does not work and will never work in the world
in which we live because for every hour we spend converting people the secular
culture spends twenty-three hours converting them to scientism and agnosticism.
What kind of evangelism program would I want?
Well, of course, one taught by St. Thomas.That is what I intend to do for the
next few months in the Christian Education Class. Since I know that I probably
cannot convince all of you to attend, I will make the materials available to
the whole parish.
But back to the wise men.
And having been
warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by
another way: One of the ancient ways
of describing those who are followers of Jesus is to call them the followers of
the Way. That other way which home is not just the one that avoids Herod; it is
the way of life which follows from knowing him, not just saying “Lord, Lord’
but, as Jesus will say, if you love me
keep my commandments.
Faith, which springs from hearing and obeying
the Divine Word presupposes the God revealed in nature. It is the Star which
leads the wise men to Jesus; it is conversion which makes them obey Him. Faith is not just believing something; it is
what St. Paul calls ‘the obedience of faith’. Faith is living out the
consequences of belief.
So faith is not the end of the story; the end of
the story is worship: on entering
the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves
and did him homage. Worship. The Greek
word is προσεκύνησαν (prosekunēsan) which means more literally “to fall down in
worship” or “give adoration.” The verb is used 12 times in the New Testament
and it is clear each time that religious worship is the purpose of the
prostration. We are familiar with the notion that you get saved once and then
you are done. But salvation is not just being
saved from something but saved for something . We are saved from sin and death
but we are made to worship.
That ultimately is the characteristic of the wise man. He not only
knows the ultimate cause of things and the capital- case Good which must guide
all his thoughts, words and actions – in itself that might be the cause of
overbearing pride -- but also he is capable
of falling down to worship the Source of the True, the Good and the
Beautiful. This is so because worship is
the love without which St. Paul tells us we are only a ‘noisy gong or clashing
cymbal’ ‘If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all
faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
‘Wise men still seek Him’ the hymn says.
We have seen his star
.
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