The Adoration of the Magi. Pietro Perugino, 1442-1523. Italy.
St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, just 30 years or so after Matthew’s gospel was
written, that the magi’s star was the sign that with the coming of the Christ all
magic was at an end.
In the end, maybe the story of the jettisoning their bag of magic tricks in the
manger is really our story.
When we finally get to the bottom of our dread of God, our fear of Jesus, our
evasion of the Spirit, our ambivalence about grace, we all seem to arrive at a
moment of truth expressed in the simple words, “I’m afraid of letting go.” All the
scriptures seem to say to us then is, “That’s right.”
The Epiphany is a terrible scene, terrible to our need to be in control, because it
invites letting go.
Somehow the inmost meaning of it is bound up with the presence of the beasts, the
animals; the uncontrollable mystery on the floor of the stable.
The gospel mentions no beasts, but Christian art and poetry invariably include
them.
Look at your Christmas card — the big-eyed donkeys in Ethiopian miniatures, the
sheep and camels of the old masters, the lowing cattle of our old carols.
Remember the children carefully placing the creatures in the creche.
The baby lies among the beasts. Something deeply important is being signaled to
us here.
The One who has come among us is the Creator. This is the source of life
embracing creation by joining creatures as a fellow creature.
Poets grasp what embarrasses theologians. There is a wonderful poem, “On the
Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” by the 18th century Anglican poet
Christopher Smart. The poem sends language on holiday to learn from the birds:
Nature’s decorations glisten
Far above their usual trim;
Birds on box and laurel listen
As so near the cherubs hymn ….
Spinks and ouzels sing sublimely,
“We too have a saviour born”:
Whiter blossoms burst untimely
On the blest Mosaic thorn.
God all-bounteous, all creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
Is incarnate, and a native
Of the very world he made. 1
The Epiphany is a revelation of the sanctity of creaturehood. Being a creature in
the living world of birds and beasts and reptiles is so holy that God could enter into
creaturely life as a native of the very world he made and still be God. God could be
at home on the floor of the stable.
The terrible scene of the stable — the baby still glistening from the juices of birth,
surrounded by the cattle chewing their cud — wreaks havoc with our fearful need to
keep God safely away from the flesh. How could God sink so low, down to the
very bestial?
It is the cross alone that reveals what it means for the Son of God to sink so low.
Incarnate love sinks on the cross to the depths of suffering to which every victim
has been thrust down, to bring the possibility of new life to those who have been
nailed to all the thousand kind of crosses.
Incarnate love sinks even further into the state of the bestial and degraded, being
crucified as a criminal, and plunged into the godforsaken state of the guilty. “He
descended into hell.”
The uncontrollable mystery makes his way down through the grave to the
alienated, guilty dead to bring them the good news that God is holding out a hand
to raise them up into the light.
1 Hymn XXXII, Christopher Smart: Selected Peoms, ed. Marcus Walsh
No one and no thing is outside the range of the new life that is the passionate, re-
creative love of a suffering God.
The whole gospel is present in all its fullness in each of its parts.
The Epiphany opens the whole mystery to us.
We need another year of grace to take it in.
In fact, we will need all eternity.
Kevin+
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