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Epiphany 2021 FATHER AARON M. WILLIAMS Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord 3 January 2021 A few days before Christmas, I’m sure you saw in the news about the sighting of the ‘Christmas Star’—the result of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the night’s sky. I know a lot of people went out to look at it that night, but even in Greenville, you can’t really get a good look at the stars unless you drive out of town where the city lights fade into darkness. That’s the odd thing about the night sky. Each of those stars are massive, in reality. Some of them are larger than our sun, but because they are so far away their light can be overcome by a street lamp, and they entirely disappear. The Magi, we are told, followed a star. Saint Matthew calls them μάγοι1, which really is the root of our English word ‘magician’. These men were astrologers, though we like to think of them like kings. The reality is that they most likely were not the sort of people we imagine them to be, they aren’t really even scientists who would have studied the stars. The magi were astrologists—they were the sort of people that the Scripture tells us not to associate with, those who are attempting to divine the future by looking at the stars. Which makes their appearance in Saint Matthew’s gospel all the more interesting, especially since they are portrayed in a good light. That is not the same situation for the character of ‘Simon Magus’— Simon the Magician who Saint Peter rebukes in the Acts of the Apostles for his astrology and witchcraft. Either way, to paint picture in our head correctly, we are considering three pagan astrologers who are staring every night at the stars in order to attempt to determine the future, to prophecy, to predict things. They, surely, would have had to go out to a very dark place to stare into the Milky Way. So we can speak of them as having entered physically and even spiritually into darkness—they were not seeking to find God, at least not in the sense as we understand God. But, God, in a way, meets them out there in the darkness and gives them a sign they would recognize—a star. This star fascinates them, and they decide that they should follow it wherever it will lead. But, as their journey progresses, they realize they are drawing closer and closer to Jewish lands, lands they probably had never visited as the Jews were culturally and religiously very different than these Eastern astrologers. But, being learned in all the myths of their time, we can assume they knew about all the Old Testament prophecies. And, one by one, the gear begin to turn in their heads, as they cross the desert, and then the Jordan River, and then 1 magoi. 1 reach Jerusalem. Eventually they figured it out, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage.”2 It is often the case that when God reveals himself to us, it comes piece by piece, gear by gear. And God, who is light itself, knows how to find all of us in our darkest moments. It’s curious the methods he uses, often ways we least expect: people, moments, places, experiences —whatever is needed to jolt us to our senses, to help us slowly putting the pieces together, so that we can step into the light. We all know the story of the shepherds we hear each Christmas. Most people don’t know how fascinating a part of the narrative these shepherds are. When Rachel, the wife of Jacob, gives birth to her final son, Benjamin, she dies as a result of her labor. Rachel is buried in a field called ‘Ephrathah’. When the Israelites later returned to conquer the Holy Land, the field of Ephrathah was given to the Levites as a place of them to raise sheep—sheep for sacrifice. These shepherds in Bethlehem are no mere shepherds, they are priests who are given the task of raising sheep particularly for temple worship. They are doing their work when the angels to come to them, and then slowly, piece by piece, everything they had learned about the Messiah in the scriptures was being put together, until they reached the crib. God met them in the field while they were awake in the darkness. As the Psalmist says, “‘I will not enter my house or get into bed; I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find the Lord’s place, the dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob.’ Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah, we found it in the fields, ‘Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool!”3 Words written generations before the angels ever came to the Shepherds. Preaching on the Epiphany in 2018, Pope Francis commented about how the Magi were awake in the dead of night, in the darkness. Nothing would prevent them from finding the news of this star. “An entirely different attitude reigned in the palace of Herod, a short distance from Bethlehem, where no one realized what was taking place. As the Magi made their way, Jerusalem slept. It slept in collusion with a Herod who, rather than seeking, also slept. He slept, anesthetized by a cauterized conscience.”4 Herod slept while the Magi worshipped. He and all Jerusalem slept because in their complacent faith they had predetermined what the Christ would look like, from where he would come, what he would do. They have predetermined how God would act. And so they slept. In his autobiography, He Leadeth Me, the American Jesuit, Fr. Walter Ciszek, recounts the moving tale of his difficult mission to Soviet Russia in 1941. Fr. Ciszek, and another priest, were sent into Soviet Russia under the guise of refugee laborers in order to establish a 2 St. Matthew 2:2. 3 Psalm 321:3-7. 4 Pope Francis’ homily for the Epiphany, January 6, 2018. 2 Catholic apostolate and spread the faith. Shortly after their arrival, however, the priests were falsely arrested as German Spies and placed in a Soviet containment camp. Their Jesuit collogues back in the United States thought them dead. In the early sections of his memoir, Fr. Ciszek discusses the seeming failure of their mission to Russia and how it didn’t seem as if any of their expectations could be realized in that political climate. Then the realization comes to him that what had failed were precisely his expectations. But, the will of God is not to be understood according to our personal expectations. He writes, Our sole purpose…was to do the will of God. Not the will of God as we might wish it, or as we might have envisioned it, or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. But rather the will of God as God envisioned it and revealed it to us each day in the created situations with which he presented us.5 In the words of the poet, Edgar Allen Guest, The test of a man is how much he will bear For a cause which he knows to be right, How long will he stand in the depths of despair, How much will he suffer and fight? For Fr. Ciszek, the Shepherds, the Magi—God came to meet them in the darkness, and brought them to Himself. And, what happened after they met the Christ-child? “They departed for their country by another way,” writes Saint Matthew.6 Of course they did, for no one who truly comes to experience Christ can return by the same way they came. The Magi stepped out of the presence of Christ and into darkness, but not without leaving the light. The Shepherds returned to their fields, but not without leaving the light. They returned to their sheep, knowing that the days for animal sacrifice were coming to an end. This new child would change all of that. They, too, returned to their fields with a different mind. You see, we are meant, as Christians, as Catholics, to depart this Christmas season with a different mind. We are stepping back into darkness. This past year has been a dark year, and we all know that a new year won’t be the quick end of it all. We still have much more darkness to go. And, the light of the Christmas joy is now fading. We are meant to go back into the darkness, having allowed the Christ-child, He who is Light itself, to enter us, to live with us. As Pope Leo the Great preached 1500 years ago on Christmas night, “Our Savior, dearly-beloved, was born: let us be glad. For there is no proper place for sadness, when we keep the birthday of Life.”7 “The birthday of Life”. Jesus told us we was the ‘way, the truth, and the life’. He wants to be that for us. He wants to be our life, our joy. But, have we like Herod, anesthetized ourselves to the joy Christ wishes to bring by remaining asleep in our spiritual 5 He Leadeth Me, 39. 6 St. Matthew 2:12. 7 Pope St. Leo the Great, Sermon 21. 3 lives? Certainly the people of Jerusalem were not dreading the coming of their Savior. They all liked the idea of the Messiah coming to rescue them.
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