Tag Archives: Epiphany

The Epiphany

06 Thursday Jan 2022

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Following yonder star

The feast of the Epiphany began as an Eastern Church celebration, designed to celebrate the baptism of Christ, bu attaching to it as it did the visit of the Magi, the Western Church celebrated something of supreme importance to us – the extension of God’s salvation to the Gentiles.

There are many signs that the Gospel writers initially thought that Christ’s mission was only to the Jews: Matthew 10:5; Matthew 15:26 and Mark 7:27, and some of the problems which Paul had with the Judaisers stemmed from this sense possessed by some of the earliest converts that Jesus’ mission was only to the Chosen People. Paul hammers away at this in his great Epistle to the Romans, and of course his whole mission was testimony to the fact that it was not ancestry and the law which saved, but faith in the Lord Jesus.

It is interesting that it should be Matthew alone amongst the Synoptic Gospels who mentions the Magi – as scholars are agreed that the community to which he wrote was a Jewish one.  The parallels between the story of Moses in Exodus and of this part of Christ’s life would have been very clear to the Jewish audience. But if parts of his Gospel look backwards to Jewish tradition, the story of the Magi looks forward to the final words of his Gospel:

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.

‘All the nations’ are to be evangelised, not just the Jews. The Magi, who sincerely wish to pay homage to the real ‘King of the Jews’ is contrasted with the behaviour of the actual ‘king of the Jews’; the message is plain – from the beginning Gentiles worshipped the Christ. Their acceptance prefigures the conversion of the Gentiles.  As Paul told the Galatians: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’

That was, as it remains, a truly radical message. We are all one in Christ. The things which divide us, indeed the things we use to define ourselves, are naught to Him or to those who are in Him.

It is hard  for us to recapture how radical it was to those first Jewish followers to be told that the Samaritans could be ‘saved’: the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan woman at the well both serve, as do the Magi and the Roman Centurion at the crucifixion, of the faith that would be found in the Gentiles. There have always been, and always will be, those who feel that the Gospel message is just for them and their kind, but the coming of the Magi reminds us that it is for all who will follow His star and heed the Epiphany that Jesus is Lord.

That message would get the early Christians thrown out of the Temple, it would make them outcasts in their own land – but it would pave the way for the conversion of the whole world. At this Epiphany-tide it is good to remember those Wise Men – because they prefigure us.

Like Eliot’s Magi, we cannot encounter Jesus without being changed. Our old signposts are no longer of use, and we need to follow the new ones in this new dispensation. As St Leo the Great wrote:

“the wise men do not go back the same way they had come. It was appropriate for them, now that they believed in Christ, not to walk along the paths of the former way of life, but to take a new path and refrain from the straying that had been left behind …”

Sermon 33, 6 January 443

Eliot captures perfectly that change – and the unease it brings. At that time he was, himself, a convert, and knew whereof he wrote.

Advent Book. Week 2, Day 4 The Bright Field

09 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Advent, Book Club, poetry

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The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Possibly the most famous of Thomas’ poems, capturing as it does those moments of epiphany when the numinous is ours, however fleetingly. Thomas often comments on how language, the only means we have to communicate, often fails us when it comes to capturing such moments; his language here does not fail.

He is simple. He is direct. Again he finds in nature the God who made it. The image of the sun at the start, the Light that lighteth the world, and that sense that having seen it, in its light you are transformed; the world cannot be seen in the same way again. Yet, our lives are what they are, and time presses, and being human, many, perhaps most of us, will press on. Yet, and yet, in some corner of our mind we do not quite forget, even if like the poet we think we have. At that moment of recollection, the hustle and bustle of the everyday recedes – and we turn aside.

The pearl of great price costs all we have. Can we pay that price? Are we willing to? Do we even know what it means? Nearly a decade ago I tested my vocation. It was a conscious reaction to local stimuli, but also to the sense Thomas captures here of something seen and intuited. The infidelity and the departure to pastures greener of my husband created a natural caesura in my life. The promptings that I had known from my girlhood of wanting to devote myself to God, no longer encountered the the currents of a busy life and the vocation of wife and mother. I was not a mother, and suddenly I had no chance of being one; nor was I a wife. As I withdrew into a welcome silence in a community of prayer, I felt that this was where I could be forever, and I would pay the price willingly. It was not to be. The Novice Mistress knew, and I knew, that despite the joys I encountered there, despite the prayer and the silences, this was not my “Bright Field”.

And yet that hiraeth, as my fellow Welsh people put it, that sense of longing for a home which was and may be again, remained with me. Which Bright Field contained the pearl? How would I find it? This is where Mthr. Carys’ commentary on the poem chimes powerfully with me. She writes:

Thomas suggests that more is required than a plaintive hope, a wistful back-glance, a passive awareness of a sunlit landscape, or a vague hope, if God is to be revealed. He suggested that we are called to accept that we are living lives caught between the past, with its ‘transitory’ brightness, and the ‘eternity that awaits [us]’

Frequencies of God, p. 54

Yesterday I was taken by my other half to an ancient forest near to where were live. In the mist and the steady rain I stood, and I listened to the trees and the sounds of the forest. I stepped out of everyday life and time – and there was that “Bright Field”. There was him who was, who is, and will be, and there was the Jess who was, and is and will be. And all was well, and all manner of things were – finally well.

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/, and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!