THIS festival ends those Twelve Days of the traditional, humane Christmas feast, when the sun has begun its journey to warm over again the northern earth into the enjoyment of growth after which of harvest. In those Twelve Days, for a spell, profit was not every little thing. Then, in times long gone, the unremitting round of labor stopped; the skinny time of winter may very well be forgotten within the laden tables. At that point, master and servant might change places, and, temporarily, the world was turned the wrong way up. (This the gospel, inherently subversive, does.)
In the Eastern Churches, the Epiphany marks the baptism of the Lord, when he began his public ministry by which he calls all our earthly imperatives and values into query. In the West, we have a good time it because the honouring of the infant Lord — God in artificial manifest — by the three sages. Jerome, following the Greek, calls them Magi. They got here from the wisdom of the East, searching for a King. They made no secret of it, and went to the apparent place: the centre of established power. But it was the incorrect place, and the established power “was troubled and all Jerusalem with him”; and Herod took steps to preserve himself from threat. The travellers found not what they’d expected — a person of destiny, because the world understands that term — but a paradox: a toddler too young for speech, utterly vulnerable; yet they knelt before him, recognising in him a king and priest who must die to avoid wasting his people.
And, just as they then returned to their very own countries, with what thoughts we all know not, so, on the day after the Epiphany, the plough cut the cold soil and the workaday world resumed its sway. But one other way of seeing had been glimpsed, and, every year, this festival quietly offers us that challenge: to dare to see, and think, in another way, though it might cost not lower than every little thing.
WHAT were those men searching for within the king whom they didn’t find? What is the will of all nations? In times of trouble (and when are they not, somewhere?), so many individuals say, “We need a robust man” — and, too often, they get them: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin. . . the list could go on as, throughout us, a depressing and unthinking populism, its hour come round over again, slouches towards power.
Is that basically the will of all nations: to place all responsibility for checking out the mess we’re in upon shoulders like those? And people find, inevitably, that the strong man doesn’t end all their troubles, not by an extended chalk. Just just like the Magi, as they began their winter journey, time and again, people — we — are looking within the incorrect place: outside, and never inside.
As George Santayana observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And, alas, he was right; and the dreary pattern asserts itself: one generation suffers dreadfully, tells its children, who take its words to heart, and and who then tell their very own children, to whom it’s merely a story, “what we did in history”. (Just so: I even have seen a comfortable school party play hide-and-seek in and among the many oppressive, irrational, columns of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.)
In each generation, we want to make our own arduous journey, a chilly coming, to our own epiphany; and it would not be what we expect. Afterwards, we are able to return to our places, but will now not be relaxed within the little kingdoms that we’ve made for ourselves, now not relaxed within the old dispensation. Thoughts thought can’t be unthought; things seen can’t be unseen; a Child born can’t be unborn.
EVERY strong man, every smart man, begins as a speechless child, wearing nappies. (Nancy Astor once reminded a nervous young MP, preparing his maiden speech, that this was true of each member of the federal government front bench, and encouraged him to envisage them thus clad as he spoke. It is a very good tip for nervous speakers.) And this story of the smart, kneeling before him who was smart before all wisdom, before him at whose word all was created, although he cannot yet speak, points the seek for the strong man who will rescue us in a quite different direction.
Ezekiel 34 offers a metaphor of kingship which the Lord himself will use time and again: the shepherd who gives his life for the sheep, the protector, the healer; and the Gospels show us what revenge our sour world — we ourselves — tackle this kind of ruler: he’s enthroned, but on a Cross.
CRANMER’s collect for the First Sunday in Advent captures one paradox of the incarnation: “thy Son Jesus Christ came around us in great humility”, but “within the last day . . . he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to guage each the short and the dead.” The ruler of the celebs of all of the heavens, as we imagine, humbled himself to take flesh upon him; he who was omnipotent became utterly vulnerable, on the mercy of creatures who, in his fullness and completeness, he loved into being; for he who lacks nothing didn’t need to create them. Here is the true strong man, who humbled himself “to be obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross”.
He took flesh. And the best way of all flesh is dust, and to dust it shall return. The dust of the earth — soil, humus — is the basis of the word “humility”. Humility was no virtue in the traditional world, neither is it a virtue in our post-Enlightenment (what a misnomer!) age. In Classical culture, the humiliores — the people of the dust of the earth — didn’t matter; nor, despite lip service, are they amongst the nice and powerful today.
But smart Augustine saw that every one the wisdom of the pagan world (which he had studied so deeply) had been redefined by Jesus as humility; that real truth lay in realising the weakness of humanity, and the generous grace offered by God. And only an individual with humility — the counter to pride, the basis of all sins — could accept this. In Letter 118, to Dioscorus, he emphasises: “This way is first humility, second humility, third humility, and regardless of how often you retain asking me I’ll say the identical over and all over again.”
HUMILITY (not of the Uriah Heep kind) acknowledges an utter dependence on the Creator, as his creatures. That necessarily implies the worth, the dignity, of everyone, even those whom we much dislike. It implies an awareness not only of our need for God, but additionally of our need for others.
The Greek word for epiphany means a “showing forth”, a “revelation”, of something that has been hidden — or ignored. In the speechless weakness of the Child, the smart saw that which they’d ever sought, and will not but kneel in worship; within the humility of him who had no sin submitting to symbolic death by water (as later he’ll undergo the last enemy), we see the heavens open, and the Dove descend, and listen to the voice say, “Hear him.”
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. charlesmoseley.com
