January 8, 2023 (Epiphany)

by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.

[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]

How quickly Christmas fades from public awareness. Our focus disappears with the speed of gift-wrapping papers, discarded Christmas trees on the streets, and New Year’s champagne. Even this church has no evidence of Epiphany.

Our celebration should be twelve days; was yours? … The twelve days of Christmastide or Twelvetide, was established by the Council of Tours in 567. Now it is little more than an afterthought found in an English carol devoid of religious meaning with its partridges, doves, and gold rings.

Yet consider the missing message. God jumped down to earth to make it like heaven. He takes our humanity to unite it to his divinity. … Have we become too busy to celebrate news of great joy?

Epiphany comes from the Greek verb, to reveal. It commemorates the revealing, the shining forth of God in a child to the Magi, to the Gentiles.

See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; but upon you the LORD shines, and over you appears his glory.

Do you see it? What is the Lord’s glory that I ignore, but divine love coming as a child for us?

Our dreams, desires, and decisions are shaped by our imagination. We imagine ourselves free and rational when all along our desires are mimetic. … Like a child in the playground, I want what other kids have. Copycats all, our desire is shaped by models of desire.

That is not bad if you understand the process, but if you are blind to it then who are you but a collection of others’ desires?

When I was a high school junior, I was a determinist. I notice how much I was influenced by others. … Where was freedom? … And then the thought came. I will reclaim the freedom I was beginning to doubt by intentionally choosing the models I wanted to be like. … I began to really notice the people around me, study their qualities, and ask. “Do I want to be like them?” … I did not want to blindly absorb others’ desires so that I would fit in and belong.

Might I suggest that the unlikely magi are great models for our journey of life?

Unlikely because while Middle Eastern hospitality would welcome them, Mary and Joseph would not be happy to receive these unexpected and suspicious visitors. They were magicians, sorcerers, and advisors to pagan rules. … They were dangerous. … The Hebrew Scriptures named them “idolatrous deceivers.” — A later rabbi was blunt: “He who learns from a magi is worthy of death.” — 8th century Christians renamed them “kings” because they were too embarrassed to call them, “magi,” magicians. Even as an infant, Jesus attracted the wrong sort! But God called and they answered. … Wasn’t this the Pharisees’ objection to Jesus? Didn’t the quiz his disciples: Why does you master eat with sinners and tax collectors? … Strange, God invites the very people most say he is angry with.

This story is more than a comforting tale; it was a hard reality and a continuing challenge to Matthew’s Jewish Christian community: Would they continue to welcome Gentiles? Can you imagine how uncomfortable it made them feel to receive their historical enemies? Greeks, Romans, pagans, sinners, and oppressors? It would be like a person of color inviting a white supremacist to a Sunday family meal.

The challenge of this old story is surprisingly modern. What kind of people and church are we to be? … We think of ourselves as welcoming but make people too different and welcome mats disappear.

But what is the surprising news? … God made himself vulnerable to human love and need; the Word become flesh. God asks you to become vulnerable too. Am I enough of a Christian to welcome the different?

That is only one side of the coin; consider the other side, the Magi’s side. Can you imagine the Magi’s surprise? All their books and study, their questions and debates, and their peering into the heavens led them on a perilous journey to a backward country, to a rag-tag village, to a family like countless other poor families, to a drooling baby. …

Their slaves must have thought them crazy. … They came this far for this! … Power and position, status, and education would have tempted lesser men to recoil at their poverty. … They had an extraordinary openness of mind and largeness of heart to see the wondrous in the ordinary yet “they prostrated themselves and did [the infant] homage.” Only grave gives such sight!

But what was true for the Magi was also true for the first Gentile Christians. It was not enough for Matthew’s Jewish Christians to welcome the Gentiles, the Gentiles had to see Jesus in these Jewish Christians. They had to see divine possibilities coming from a very strange and subjugated people. … Only grace gives such sight! … Those Magi and Gentiles were unlikely saints, but saints nonetheless!

They were truth-seekers and risk-takers! … Discovering is a choice and journey! … But I am timid; I need magi boldness!

They are truth-seekers! Am I passionate about truth? Or do I want to hear only what I want to hear? … Truth is the mind’s conformity to reality and its wonder, but in a world gone ideological, too many want to force their truth onto others. … That’s intellectual terrorism. … Truth-seekers are reverent before others’ journeys yet alive with questions and hungry to learn new insights.

The magi were risk-takers! Travel was perilous, yet they followed the lead of a God-inspired hunger. They left security behind. Yet I can be afraid of change and hold back from life’s spiritual journey because I ignore the Spirit walking with me. As one great German theologian said, “The free spirit finds only what it looks for. And God has promised in his word [of scripture] that he lets himself be found by those who seek him.” [Karl Rahner] … Am I enough of a magi?

One imagines the magi on their trek to Bethlehem and God training their hearts in quiet moments to see. The magi sought and they found; their gifts proclaimed their discovery, this infant was king, deity, and sacrifice.

The former Dominican Master General, Timothy Radcliffe wrote, “no gift [really] worth receiving leaves us as we are.” … “no gift [really] worth receiving leaves us as we are.” Too often we want Christ without being changed.

God made himself small and vulnerable as a pure gift of love so that we would be changed. In the Word-made-flesh in every Mass, Christmas happens again and again. He places himself into the manger of your hands, to be born anew in your flesh. God would give a gift that changes everything in us — Himself.

Don’t let the Christmas focus fade. It is as near as every Mass. Receive his gift; become his gift for someone else.