As the Christmas season draws to a close and the decorations are put away, we may feel that something special has ended and the world is returning to normal. However, the feast of Epiphany reminds us that the incarnation of God is not neatly wrapped up with a bow; rather, it is just beginning, with implications for our lives as citizens and followers of the incarnate God.
The way in which Christ is revealed to all the nations is a complicated story, with complicated characters. In a narrative found only in the Gospel of Matthew, wise men visit Jesus, following the Bethlehem star.
These Magi, who may have been Zoroastrian priests, are outsiders. They travel a long distance after seeing signs in the sky. When they arrive, they seek out the authorities for guidance, asking King Herod to give them directions. And yet they do not trust Herod’s intentions; they are warned, in a dream, not to lead him to the baby. And so they find themselves returning home “by another way.”
We may not know exactly what their decision means, but it gives us something to consider as we navigate in our own time. Their joy, their desire to share the news of the Messiah, is in tension with the ambitions of a jealous king. So too we often find our Christian values in tension with our contemporary world.
Epiphany marks the appearance of Christ to the world, recognized and made manifest by the Magi — strangers from the East who traveled through a landscape of political turmoil to pay homage to a vulnerable child, the very unlikely Messiah. Their revelation, making Christ known to all people, offers a powerful model and a radical change in direction.
The church celebrates Epiphany because it is a recognition of the dramatic upheaval that a newborn Savior stirred up, and it is best that we not forget just how dramatic that arrival truly was.
The world into which Jesus was born was defined by tension, mistrust and the threat of state-sanctioned violence — all distressingly familiar today. We live in an era of contentious politics, where rulers sow division to maintain power and the vulnerable remain subject to the capricious decisions of the state.
Today, the image of the Holy Family is reflected in the faces of families navigating the modern machinery of borders and belonging in our country. We see it in the story of Katie Paul, who was separated from her husband and 5-month-old son, asleep in her arms, when she was abruptly arrested and taken away in handcuffs and leg cuffs at her final green card interview. It’s reflected in the story of millions of families currently navigating the unnerving threat of separation or deportation.
As Christians, we worship an incarnate God whose own infancy was marked by displacement. Born away from home, Jesus was taken by his parents into exile for his own protection from Herod’s murderous decree. In a modern expression of the Roman Empire, the most powerful in our own country bear down on the most vulnerable, who are recast as a criminal threat.
The Magi’s role in this narrative is to demonstrate that the inbreaking of God changes things for everyone, everywhere. They were the first outsiders to recognize that this particular child in Bethlehem had universal significance. Their decision to return home by another way was not merely an act of simple evasion. We might understand it as a protective, transformative response to a new reality, a reorientation inspired by their joyful, unsettling encounter with the Christ child.
