06 January, AD 2008
The Epiphany of our Lord
“The Feast of Unity”
INFSHG+
…Ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God…how that by revelation he made known unto
me the mystery… that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ
by the gospel.(Ephesians 3:3, 4b, 6)
St. Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesians from the point of view of a life-long Jew addressing life-long Gentiles. He wrote
as from one clannish, insular world to another, cosmopolitan and polygamous world and he spoke to the Ephesians not as fellows
who would know as he knows but as he would to strange and even dangerous people who do not understand the terrors the world
holds for Jews. When we read his letter, therefore, we also unconsciously come to share in that worldview. We stand alongside
Paul as he speaks and we look out at the world he addresses, seeing it as he sees it and understanding it from his point of
view. So we unconsciously become Jews when we read these passages.
That is actually odd because it is far more probable that our heritage stems from Gentile
than from Jewish stock. It is even more probable that we each grew up in families whose lives reflect Gentile folkways and
traditions, and not Jewish ones. Jewish life has always been something very unusual, an exceptional way of life. But even
so, when we listen to Paul, especially here in Ephesians, we tend to look out at the Gentile world as if it were something
different from anything we know. We look at the very world we live and breathe in as if we were Jews, not quite able to comprehend
the strange ways of the outsiders. But the truth is exactly the other way around. We are, in fact, most likely to be exactly
the kind of people Paul addressed as being the newcomers to the truth of God. That means that we embody the mystery about
which he speaks.
What is that mystery? For Paul,
it comes from the apparent conflict between how humanity’s relation to God was before the Incarnation of Jesus Christ
and the deep and abiding changes Jesus worked on that relation. Prior to Jesus’ Incarnation, humanity mostly had no
direct relation with God. Most humans worshipped some vague, misshapen or distorted variation on the true God. They broke
Him into pieces, or they split Him in two. They anthropomorphized Him or they spiritualized Him. They made Him female and
they made Him like the animals. They thought of Him as sometimes earthbound, sometimes lodged in the air and sometimes altogether
removed from our plane of existence. They made up any and every variation the fertile human imagination can conjure. They
mostly got Him wrong.
Only the Jews had anything like
a direct relationship with the true God. They at least understood that He is one, that He is sovereign, creative and that
He sustains all things. He is neither divided nor earthbound, neither locked away nor flying through the airs. They recognized
Him as supreme and different from anything they knew in this world. In awe of that difference, they worshipped Him as best
they could manage. What they never quite accomplished was anything more intimate than to live in holy fear of His wrath at
their repeated misbehavior. He forbade them to ever make any image and they obeyed this prime directive. It had the great
benefit that they never confused anything in this world with the Oneness that is God, but it had the great detriment that
they also never had any personal focus. It is very hard to love that which one cannot in any way visualize. We need to experience
the beloved in order to fully know our love and this was what tempted the ancient Jews into adopting the pagan practices.
The pagans routinely depicted their gods in any number of interesting and descriptive ways. They might be confecting convenient
fictional gods, but they also were generating images which could command the attention and focus the hearts the minds. This
proved fatally attractive for the Jews, over and over again.
But,
for those Jews who saw the fatal temptation pagan images posed, God gave them the power to refuse to bow down and gave them
the power to feel His love even without any picture to use. They came to understand, through the power of having believed
without having seen, that God does not need any image or representation to be real, to create and to rule. They came to see
that, if He really did have a finite body as the compass of His substance, His being would be inadequate to the task required
of Him. There could be no way He could be so limited. They came to recognize that He must be infinite, bounded only by His
own being, circumscribed by no other power.
It was with this
truth firmly implanted and exclusively proclaimed that the world was made ready for the change Jesus wrought. By taking upon
Himself a particular human body, the Word of God brought the substance of God into the image of humanity. By living out the
human life in that body, Jesus consecrated every experience and infused the divine grace into each one of them. By offering
that body, Jesus consecrated even death. By rising from the dead, Jesus then consecrated life after life. He triumphed over
all things in this life and by then triumphing over death, took possession of the consequences that death poses for us: each
of us now have our life and death held in Jesus’ hands.And so we arrive at Paul’s mystery. Jesus lived and died a faithful Jew, of purely Jewish stock,
raised in the Jewish faith. When He was crucified and killed, it was, in the eyes of His fellow Jews for the very Jewish sin
of blasphemy and not sedition as the Romans may have recorded. When we recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the only-begotten Son
of God and we see Him as dying a Jew, we can understand how He has redeemed any Jew who will believe on Him. What does not
look believable is how that death applies to anyone else. That is Paul’s mystery. Jesus Christ was indeed born a Jew,
but He did not take human nature on Himself solely for Jews. Despite what anyone said then or says today, a Jew is a Roman
is a Briton. So what He has done, He has done for everyone and His sacrifice on the cross expresses the ultimate epiphany.
Jesus Christ, by offering Himself on the cross, manifested to Jew and Gentile alike how completely God loves His human children.
The true
God will not shrink from whatever price needs to be paid for those He loves. He has allowed Himself to be subjected to ridicule,
torture and painful death for those whom He loves and by doing so He shows us what unconditional, unmitigated love really
is. What we
must remember, we who live in the world Jesus’ sacrifice has so fundamentally changed, is that many others taught the
essential unity of humankind. They did so before He came among us and many have come after. But none of them personally demonstrated
the cost of bringing that unity to pass. They spoke and advised, He submitted and sacrificed. They suggested that not being
tribal and clannish would be a good thing. He personified the truth that no man and no woman differs in any important way
from any other. This means that His sacrifice on the cross must apply to all people and cannot be restricted to any sect,
ethnicity or nation. Every human being is a child of the true God and we can all be one. There is only one through whom that
unity can be achieved. Jesus Christ is, in Himself, the unity of all mankind. That is His Epiphany in our world. May we all
be one as He is one.
+And now, unto God the Father,
God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all might and majesty, power, dominion and glory, both on this day and every
day, world without end. Amen.
