Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, God’s supreme Self-manifestation to us in the Christ Child. As we recall the story of the visit of the magi to the Christ Child, we are invited to reflect on our quest for God and God’s search for us.
The magi, popularly called kings, were, in Matthew’s Gospel, wise men from the East, Persia perhaps, who studied the heavens and were led by a star to Bethlehem where the King of Kings, God in human form, lay.
In Matthew’s theology, the magi represent the gentiles or non-Jews, the educated and the influential, who stood in contrast to King Herod. While the Jewish King, threatened by the birth of Jesus, plotted to kill him, the wise men from the east sought him, adored him and ultimately protected him from Herod’s wrath.
The magi also represent our universal longing for God. We have a penchant for studying patterns in the heavens, hoping to decode the meaning of our earthly lives. We study the movement of the stars, wanting to properly navigate the course of our lives. We tend to journey to far-off lands to find answers to the troubling questions of mind and heart. We gaze at the stars hoping to uncover the secrets to the mysteries of life.
The magi, who studied the heavens and travelled far, thus represent our search for meaning, for truth, for the absolute — in other words, for God. Only to discover a God who has been seeking us, a God who is already in our midst.
For epiphany means manifestation. God reveals Himself to us in the Christ Child. Prior to our quest for God, the Lord has taken the initiative to make Himself known to us. Prior to our outreach for the Absolute, God already has reached out for us.
And the infancy narrative of Matthew poignantly presents God going out of His way to seek us out, to be with us and to journey with us as one of us, as we search for Him. In Matthew’s Infancy narrative, unlike Luke’s, there are no shepherds led by a choir of angels to a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes by its virgin-mother. Instead, we read about the blood-thirsty King and the gruesome story of the massacre of innocent children. We hear the wailing of mothers whose infants have been brutally dismembered. We share the fright of Mary and Joseph as they seek refuge in Egypt under the cover of the foreboding darkness.
There is nothing cute or idyllic in Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth. Instead, we are thrust into a disturbing story of hatred, envy and murderous plots, the brutal killing of the innocent, the heart-wrenching wailing of the poor and powerless, the forced displacement and exile of the Holy Family, like fugitives escaping in the middle of the night. This is the story that God chooses for Himself, a narrative which echoes the story of the millions who are threatened and persecuted, who live through fear and uncertainty, who are displaced and dispossessed, either exiled or exterminated. The Lord has appropriated the history of the wretched of the earth, making it God’s personal story in Jesus Christ.
We who fear seek a God who will comfort us. Paradoxically, God consoles us by undergoing our fear in the threatened Christ Child. We who are displaced and dispossessed by civil strife or calamities yearn for God’s protection. Ironically, God emboldens us by sharing our lot as a deportee, a migrant in a foreign land. We who are threatened and persecuted seek an Almighty God to defend us. Mysteriously, God has come down to us in the form of a helpless, vulnerable child.
Like the magi from the east, we constantly seek God. On this Feast of the Epiphany, we fall on bended knees before the Christ Child, God who has sought and found us by sharing our human condition, by embracing our plight of poverty and persecution, our fears and tribulations. From eternity God has sought us and in the Incarnation has found us by wondrously becoming one of us.
(Fr. Manoling Francisco, SJ is a prolific composer of liturgical music and serves on the faculty of the Loyola School of Theology. For feedback on this column, email tinigloyola@yahoo.com.)