Feast of the Epiphany

Part of the vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, which has guided us through Advent and Christmas, was that the day would come when the whole world would flock to Jerusalem. We heard it on the very first Sunday:

"All the nations will stream to it, peoples without number will come to it; and they will say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob”

And it’s there again today.

“Arise, shine out Jerusalem, for your light has come.. All are assembling and coming towards you...camels in throngs will cover you… everyone in Sheba will come."

It’s an idea that runs right through the Old Testament and, since Matthew’s Gospel was written for Jews steeped in this message, it’s hardly surprising that he alone among the evangelists should mention the Magi in his Gospel. His purpose is clear: Jesus is the fulfillment of all these texts and the wise men are the nations flocking to him.

And yet, having said that, no prophet ever fully understands his own prophecy. His words always mean more than anyone at the time realised, and so St Paul is able to say in the second reading: "It was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery..a mystery unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them in Christ Jesus through the Gospel." So what was it that Isaiah, despite all his insights, failed to understand? What is this mystery revealed to Paul? Well, it was the same thing that almost tore the early Church apart.

You see, although the prophets dreamt of the days when nations of the earth would come flocking to Jerusalem, the presumption was that this would mean their accepting the Jewish Law and all the requirements of the Jewish religion. And there were those in the early Church who continued to think this, insisting that pagans who converted to Christianity be circumcised. St Peter himself, as we read in Acts, had a hard time with this. Confronted by the Roman Centurion, Cornelius, it takes a vision from God, during which Peter initially refuses to do what God asks, to convince him that this narrow religious attitude is not acceptable. “You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race” he says to the people after his vision, “But God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean……I now really understand that God has no favourites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” And this is the fundamental message of the Epiphany. The era of nationalism is over. In the Magi God reveals himself as the God of every human being. There is no more distinction, Paul writes, between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free man. We are all one in Christ, a message we might give notional assent to, but which, two thousand years on, we are still struggling to come to terms with. And it’s not hard to know why. It’s because this most radical of ideas touches into humanity’s most ancient fears and prejudices. It confronts head on our tribalism, our nationalism, our fears about people whom we don’t know, people who come from far-away places, people whose skin is a different colour from ours, people who speak languages we don’t understand, people who don’t eat the same food or wear the same clothes as we do. All of these are primitive fears, a relic of humanity’s infancy. I will never forget the first time I saw a black man. I was three years of age, standing on my tip-toes with my chin on the window-sill when he went past, and I was utterly terrified, convinced he had come to take me away. And I have no doubt black children in Africa felt the same the first time they saw a white man. But primitive and infantile as they may be, they are real and powerful, and at the very centre of history Jesus stands like a beacon challenging us to move beyond them and recognize every human being, without exception, as our brother and sister. And at this particular moment in history, more so than at any other time in the past, we have the opportunity to make this great historic leap. And the reason is globalization.

Globalization is fundamentally the fruit of our ability to travel to and communicate at great speed with people in other parts of the world. Out of it have grown huge, global businesses for whom national barriers mean nothing. Many of them are more powerful than the countries they operate in, and, given this imbalance, the whole process has involved a lot of abuse and exploitation of the poor. But there is no fundamental reason why it has to be that way. Only in the last week we have seen a multi-national from India, a country we have traditionally thought of as poor, enter into talks with a view to buying Jaguar and Range Rover from Ford, having already bought, last year, what used to be British Steel.

But the other side of Globalization is the massive movement of peoples around the world in search of work and a higher standard of living for their families. We experience it as immigration, a word which, thanks to unscrupulous politicians and newspaper owners eager to make money, is being used to stir in us all those primitive fears about foreigners and those different from ourselves. When we go to their countries to exploit their resources and their cheap labour it’s fine. But when the flip side of that coin comes into play and they want to come here, they are portrayed as bogey-men, threatening our way of life. And the Feast of the Epiphany invites us to reflect on all of this. It invites us to recognize our deep-rooted fears and prejudices around what is foreign. It challenges us to face our completely groundless feelings of superiority over people who come from other countries and speak other languages. It calls the whole world at this time to see the huge potential for good in what we call globalization provided we can eliminate from it the injustices and inequalities currently built into it. But none of this is easy. Ancient, primitive fears and prejudices aren’t easily got rid of. But unless we at least want to be free of them we cannot claim to be followers of Jesus.

So how willing are you to move beyond your fears and prejudices about what is foreign and, like Jesus, reach out to the peoples of the world.



BIDDING PRAYERS



As a new millennium begins, we stand at a crossroads, facing choices which will shape the future of the world. Division and enmity between nations has been the way for centuries. But in a nuclear age a new way of resolving tensions and disagreements between peoples is vital if humanity is to have any kind of future. And so we pray that the prophetic words of Isaiah will be fulfilled as we hammer our swords into ploughshares and our spears into sickles………….……………………....Lord hear us

To embrace a new way of relating to people different from ourselves is not easy. It means confronting primitives fears which are deep-rooted and difficult to shift, a process which begins with a willingness to acknowledge our prejudices and move beyond them. And so we ask God, through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, to stir this willingness in is along with a desire to reach out to every human being as a brother or sister……………………………....Lord hear us

So many of our prejudices about people from other parts of the world are based on appearances. Whether it is the colour of peoples skin, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language they speak, we quickly turn them into reasons for not liking them. If he had lived in the world of today, Jesus, with his dark skin and eastern appearance, would have been seen as a potential terrorist wherever he went. And so we pray for the wisdom to see the stupidity of all this……………Lord hear us

Irrational divisions between people exist a very local level. It can be New Farm versus Onthank, Ayr versus Kilmarnock, Glasgow versus Edinburgh, Scotland versus England and so on. It can even be one school against another or one parish against another. In our immaturity we seem to need someone to be against in order to define who we are ourselves. And so we pray for the wisdom to see how pointless and infantile it all is…………Lord hear us

As followers of Jesus, we are called to be signs of the Kingdom in the world, signs of the new way of living and thinking introduced into our world by the coming of Jesus, symbolized today in the story of the Magi. And so we pray that at this time when there is so much movement of peoples around the world, Christians everywhere – and especially here in Scotland – will stand out for the way we welcome people from other countries and cultures who come among us………………………...Lord hear us

The potential for racism and xenophobia lies deep within us all and there are plenty around who, for their own political purposes, are prepared to stir these things up in us. Using the media to great effect, they peddle lies and half-truths about immigration, asylum seekers, migrant workers and so on in an attempt to turn us against them. And so we pray that the people of Britain will not be fooled by this propaganda but will see it for what it is…………………………………..Lord hear us