On Sunday, we were presented with both good news and a challenge. The good news was the light — the divine, uncreated Light, the Wisdom, Word, and Power of God — has shone into our dark world (where the darkness will not overcome it). The challenge is to walk in that light when it’s so much easier to walk in the shadows. In today’s readings for the feast of Epiphany we get an interesting case study in this dynamic, in the form of different people’s very different responses to a prophecy they find suddenly fulfilled.
The story starts with Isaiah 60, an oracle about God’s presence shining so powerfully over Judea that the nations flock to Jerusalem to worship and to bless the land and its people, bringing gifts of gold and frankincense. It begins with those famous words:
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples;
but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.
Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. (Isaiah 60.1-2)
Fast-forward to Matthew’s Gospel, where we see this fulfilled in the story of the visitation of the Magi. These figures, likely Zoroastrian court astrologers, witness a celestial phenomenon which they associate with the birth of a great king in Judea. So they head there to pay their respects, bearing gifts of gold and frankincense, in a direct echo of Isaiah’s vision. (They of course also bring myrrh, which looks not back to Isaiah, but forward to the cross.)
Seeing this royal sign, they naturally first go to the palace, where their congratulations are not as expected — or welcome — as they’d expected. King Herod feigns gratitude but enacts a plan to destroy this perceived threat to his rule.
We’ve talked a lot in the past weeks about Christmas as an (the) apocalyptic event: a world-altering moment of God’s self-revelation in which God intervenes on the side of good to reveal evil to be a sham and defeat it once and for all. Here we have different characters experiencing this apocalyptic moment in very different ways. And, importantly, it’s the the one who should be ‘in the know’ who handles it the worst.
In the prophetic tradition, oracles about kingship always uphold its highest ideals — wisdom, justice, truth, and so on. The royal psalms likewise link God’s reign with these values, as we see in the Psalm appointed for today:
Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the king’s son;
That he may rule your people righteously and the poor with justice;
That the mountains may bring prosperity to the people, and the little hills bring righteousness.
He shall defend the needy among the people; he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor. (Psalm 72.1-4)
King Herod is the inheritor of both the Prophets and this royal wisdom tradition, and yet his response to this possible divine intervention is injustice and unrighteousness, the slaughter of children to destroy this child, whom he views not as a miracle but only as a threat to his own power.
What a contrast this is to the Magi, who at great effort and cost, go to pay homage to the child, born in, to, and for a distant land, foreign people (whom theirs once oppressed for centuries), and hostile religion. Where the quintessential insider gets it wrong, the outsiders get it right.
The characters in today’s story, then, are offered the same good news and challenge as we are in this season. The light is shining in the darkness, but will we choose to walk in the light? Herod chooses the darkness in the name of his own self-interest. The magi choose the light, even at great potential cost to their own livelihood and faith.
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
May we, like the magi before us, choose the path of costly grace, and walk in the light.x
Matthew Root 