WORLD NEWS

            Christmas and Epiphany form a sort of twin festival, a festival of beginnings, the beginnings of the story of Jesus Christ.

When you go into the historical background of these twin festivals, you can see that their origins are actually rather confused. For us, Christmas is the big event, and the risk is that Epiphany ends up  being a bit of an after-thought.

Whereas, historically, things are quite the other way round. Originally the Church celebrated only Epiphany. Epiphany was the festival of the birth of Christ as well as the time when the Church remembered the visit of the Wise Men and also Jesus’s Baptism, the beginning of his public ministry.

It was only later on that the Festival of Christmas was added (one might almost say invented), and we ended up with the familiar distinction between Christmas when we celebrate Christ’s birth, and Epiphany when we celebrate the coming of the Wise Men (and, next week, Jesus’s Baptism).

On Christmas Day we reminded ourselves that the birth of Jesus was a quiet event, indeed an obscure event, in a remote corner of the then known world. At the time, it wasn’t of any interest to the media, it didn’t in any way hit the headlines. You could say that Christmas was a private event. An event, certainly, with earth-shattering significance, but practically no one (except Mary and Joseph, and maybe a group of shepherds) realised this at the time.

Epiphany changes all that. A little local event becomes world news.

The birth of Jesus has begun to cause a stir far beyond the confines of Bethlehem and Judea. So much so, that a group of eminent intellectuals make the long journey from somewhere far to the East (Mesopotamia, perhaps? Or was it Persia), and find their way to the Land of the Jews. They are convinced that what is happening there is going to have implications worldwide; things are going to change for everyone.

The story of the visit of the Wise Men is when the story of Jesus “goes public” for the first time.

Just before Christmas, we thought about how the birth of Jesus was the way God fulfilled all the promises he had made to the great figures of the Old Testament: in particular the promises to Abraham and the promises to David. We joined with Mary in her  Magnificat song, which is an overflowing of joy that God has come to the help of his servant Israel.

But the message of Epiphany is that God’s coming in Christ is good news not just for Israel but for all nations and all people. The fulfillment of the ancient promises to the People of Israel turns out to have implications that go far beyond them; God has come to the help of everyone throughout the world, and not only to his servant Israel.

And so the God of Israel, the God of the Old Testament, turns out to be not just a little local deity, the special friend and  protector of one people in particular, but the creator and redeemer of all humanity.

The choosing of Israel to be God’s special people turns out to be a choosing, through Israel, of all peoples. And the story of God’s dealings with Israel doesn’t only give meaning to Israel’s history; it turns out to be the key to world history as a whole.

The story of the Wise Men is a story of the interaction between Israel’s history and world history. Or to put it another way, it is a classic example of what these days we call intercultural dialogue, the fruitful meeting between different cultures.

The Wise Men represent the wisdom of the ancient world. They would have been highly respected in their home country, repositories of the knowledge of their time (medicine, mathematics, astronomy – including, of course, what we call astrology). They were the research institutes, the think tanks and the policy advisers of their time. Kings financed their researches and sought their advice.

The Old Testament tells us a lot about the intercultural dialogue between the faith of Israel and the wisdom of the ancient world.

Take the case of King Solomon in particular. King Solomon was celebrated above all for his wisdom. What this means is that he enabled Israel to draw on the intellectual resources of the wider world: he brought in the knowledge of Egypt and Mesopotamia; and of course the famous visit of the Queen of Sheba (from southern Arabia) is one of the Bible’s most striking stories of intercultural encounter.

Then there’s a whole series of Biblical books that are referred to as the “wisdom literature”: books like Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, some of the psalms, parts of Daniel, and so on. These represent Israel’s reflection on, and interaction with, the intellectual traditions of the ancient world.

We hear a great deal about intercultural dialogue these days. The year 2008 was even designated by the European Union as the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and the European organisations will certainly go on being heavily involved in intercultural dialogue during the years to come.

Why is this? It’s because in our globalised world, which is actually rather like the ancient Roman world of the time of Jesus, different peoples and different cultures are getting mixed up as never before, and all sorts of different cultures are having to learn how to live together.  Living in an international community as we do here in Strasbourg, we know that cultural mixing can be very enriching. But we also know that it often a source of conflict too.

And so we have ongoing political debates about multiculturalism and interculturalism. In the past, Western societies used to be quite clear that immigrants ought simply to adopt the culture of their new home and more or less give up their old culture. Now we’re not quite so sure about our own cultural superiority, so we look for some sort of compromise between the two cultures, which we may refer to as integration or multiculturalism. But working out the details of that in practice is very difficult and leads to some of out most acute political controversies.

Perhaps the story of the Wise Men can help us as we grapple with these controversial issues in our own time.

These eminent representatives of the intellectual traditions of the ancient East come into the presence of Mary and Joseph, who represent all that is best and most authentic in a different tradtion, the tradition of Jewish piety.

The Wise Men bring with them their own cultural tradition, with all its riches, but they recognise that in Jesus something new has come into the world. Just as Mary finds in Jesus the fulfillment of the Old Testament hopes and the Old Testament promises, so the Wise Men can see in him the fulfillment of their own stories from their own, different tradition. 

In the light of Christ, their own ancient tradition takes on new significance. In the light of Christ, their own, local story from Persia or Mesopotamia or wherever it was, is taken up into a greater story whose significance is universal.

And so, in our world, we all bring with us our own stories from our own countries and our own cultural traditions. And as we come into the presence of Christ we begin to see how everything that is good and authentic in our own limited, localised traditions finds its completion, its fulfillment, in the universal light brought by the Christchild.

Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church

Epiphany Sunday, 4 January 2009

Gospel: Matthew 2.1-12