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Epiphany: It's Not What You Think
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-14; Matthew 2
An “Epiphany” is a manifestation of a god. A god (or goddess) appears and is recognized – made manifest – among ordinary people. The word “Epiphany,” like a lot of other things, has been almost completely appropriated by the Christian meaning: the manifestation of the Christ to the Magi (the three kings), and the festival commemorating this event. The festival date is January 6 – which is the Orthodox Christmas day. That stretch of time between December 24 and January 6 began sometime in the Middle Ages to be celebrated as the Twelve Days of Christmas. Twelfth Night – January 6 – marks the end of the festivities.
In post-modern language usage, an “epiphany” has come to also mean a revelation of a truth about ones self. In an interview on NPR last week, Alan Greenspan, the former director of the federal reserve – said that when he was a young man he at first thought he would be a jazz musician. Then one time he was playing back-up for Lionel Hampton, and had an “epiphany.” He would never be a full-time, famous jazz musician because –as opposed to Mr. Hamption, – in Greenspan’s spare time, he was reading economics books.
Back in the day – in what might be called “pre-modern” times – before Galileo and Copernicus and the dawning of the Enlightenment – gods and goddesses visited earth fairly often, so we should not be surprised to discover that when the gospel of Matthew was created, that writer would do his best to associate Jesus with the god-like qualities the oppressed people of the land of Judah were longing for.
Now I’m going to give you a very brief lesson on what 20th Century scholarship has determined about the writing of the gospels in the Christian Bible.
First, the gospels were not written by the disciples of Jesus. They were not even written by people who knew Jesus. They were written down by people who knew the oral tradition about Jesus, and who also had access to the letters written by the Apostle Paul to the non-Jewish Christian communities he founded outside Jerusalem, around the Mediterranean Sea..
Second, all of the gospels were written after the Romans had sacked Jerusalem and had destroyed the Temple. The Jewish people were in diaspora – essentially exiled – seemingly forever – from any political organization called “Israel.” The first gospel – Mark – was written in about the year 65-70, a good 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, and 10 or so years after the death of Paul. The gospel of Matthew was written around the year 80 to 90; Luke was written around the year 90 to 95, and John, which is an entirely different kind of writing – was written after the first century had passed – maybe around 100 to 125 of our Common Era.
It is vitally important that we know some of the scholarship that is doing its best to lead Christianity out of the clutches of fundamentalism. Too much of Christian fundamentalism has become United States domestic and foreign policy. We can’t counter it if we don’t know what the facts are.
Because the stories we are considering at this time of year were written by whoever wrote the gospel of Matthew, that is what I will concentrate on. And for lack of knowledge about who he was, I’ll call him Matthew.
Matthew may well have been a liturgist – a worship leader in the Jewish community – who was writing for Jewish people who were accustomed to hearing readings from the Torah in Synagogue. So he followed a format that would be familiar to people honoring the Jewish Sabbath who also knew the stories about Jesus.
There are two great foundational myths in the Jewish tradition: the first is the exodus from Egypt, and the second is the exile to Babylon and the return to Judah during the 6th century before the Common Era. Matthew interpreted the birth of Jesus to be the new symbol for the Exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt, and he claimed that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah, who would liberate the people from exile.
The technical term for this kind of exercise is “midrash.” It means retelling a sacred story in a way that has special meaning for the current time, to fit a new occasion, and a different context, and from a different point of view.
Midrash is an argument that plays a serious game of one-upmanship –“top this.” So Matthew says, Moses led the Hebrew people out of bondage in Egypt? Well – get this: Jesus came from Egypt to lead the people out of bondage to Roman imperial injustice – and not just the Hebrew people, but everyone who follows Jesus’s way – gentile or not. And not only that, Jesus is the messiah prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those prophets proclaimed that if the people follow the way of justice-compassion, as written in the law of Moses, then Judah would rise again to reach the same greatness as it enjoyed during the reign of King Solomon.
In Isaiah 60:1-6, one of the traditional readings for this Epiphany Sunday, the camel caravans will bring riches: gold and frankincense, and the whole known world will recognize the power of Israel’s God. In Matthew’s midrash, three wizards, or holy men – sages, wise men from the East, bringing their symbolic royal gifts of gold and frankincense honor Jesus as the Messiah who would bring God’s justice-compassion to the entire world. Matthew says they also brought myrrh – an embalming herb – “A bitter perfume,” as the carol of the Three Kings says. Christians have associated that reference with the death of Jesus, and in Matthew’s midrash, a foreshadowing of the bitter injustice of Jesus’s death, and the mystery of the meaning of the resurrection story.
These are powerful metaphors that have unfortunately fed the triumphalist Christology that has collaborated with political empire since about the 4th Century. They must not be taken literally.
Nothing in the story is based on fact. This is not history remembered. It is a powerful foundational myth, created to bring hope to a hopeless situation in the First Century. Once again, the temple had been destroyed and the people dispersed – this time by the Romans.
The question is, does it have any meaning for 21st Century, sophisticated, post-modern, post-Christian people?
One of the challenges faced by post-modern folk such as ourselves is that we no longer accept such myths as foundational. We think that Myth means something that isn’t true. Most of us no longer take our dreams seriously. When was the last time an angel was actually documented appearing to anyone? These stories are fodder for jokes.
But under our sophisticated knowledge about the nature of the universe and our scientific understanding of how the brain functions, are ideas common to all of humankind – regardless of culture. Those ideas are called archetypes. They often make up the content of the dreams we remember. They are symbols that represent life experience that is shared by all human beings everywhere, from illiterate Afghan tribal leaders to physicists from MIT, hotel maids, and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories.
One of those archetypes is the Divine Child. This archetype gets associated with great leaders, whether spiritual or political. Anyone who has an extraordinary impact on human history or thought is at risk for being accused of having been born as a Divine Child. Even today, there are stories about extraordinary children who are somehow smarter, more spiritually aware than usual. They are called “Indigo Children.” One of them was the poet Mattie Stepanek, who died of cancer a few years at a very young age. Before he died, he published a book of poetry. He was on all the talk shows, and traveled from coast-to-coast, raising money for other children with terminal cancer. There is your manifestation of a god in the 21st Century. The archetype is alive and well, and living next door.
We project onto others the power we think we ourselves do not possess. Jeremy Taylor, who is an expert in Jungian archetypes that appear in our dreams, calls this projection of the best of our own hopes The bright shadow. It is the wondrous, positive, powerful aspect of ourselves that we do not recognize. Sometimes we elect those people to office. Sometimes we join their mega-churches. Sometimes we expect far more of those people than they could ever deliver. Sometimes we call them “Messiah.”
But there is more to the Divine Child than this kind of outward projection of specialness onto someone other than ourselves. The Divine Child also lives within. The Divine Child is the one who brings something new into the world. The Divine Child challenges the way things are. The Divine Child overturns the kind of injustice that results from the mindless indifference of social systems. The Divine Child overturns everything we think we know about what makes life safe and secure and predictable and under our control. The Divine Child puts us in touch with what we don’t want to be in touch with. The Divine Child is the wild part of ourselves that isn’t constrained by rules about what’s proper or possible or practical. That wildness is rooted in passionate, radical, inclusive, non-violent, self-denying justice.
That’s why the Divine Child is dangerous, and that is why Herod has to kill them all.
Who is Herod? Herod is the ego that likes things to be predictable and normal. Herod is the ego that wants things to be a certain way. Herod will do anything to assure that control is maintained. Herod kills creativity, suppresses change, prevents life.
At the personal level, Herod is the part of us that says, “Oh, I’m not creative. I could never paint, write, sing, design a sustainable urban community, start a non-profit . . . I could never divorce my husband, come out of the closet, move to Canada, adopt a child . . . I don’t make a difference.” At the collective level of human civilization, Herod is the imperial force of oppression and injustice, and we collaborate with that imperial, collective Herod whenever we prevent ourselves from taking a step that will personally liberate us.
The First Century followers of Jesus’s Way saw Jesus as an extraordinary example of how to live life so that the world can be reclaimed as God’s World. The psalmists and the prophets all taught that God’s realm – God’s Kingdom – is a realm of justice-compassion. Jesus taught that God is just, and the world belongs to God, not to the Emperor, and not to the social and religious establishment.
Some of those early followers knew Jesus personally, but the vast majority did not – especially as time wore on, and the story was shared outside the Jewish tradition, and outside Jerusalem. It made psychic sense to see the infant Jesus as the Divine Child, who resacralizes the world. If the world belongs to God, but humanity has appropriated it for imperial interests – or economic exploitation – The Divine Child reclaims the world for justice-compassion.
The liberal Christian message from the Christian readings for today is that if we allow our Divine Child to rule in our hearts, then our deepest and most meaningful creativity can shine forth like the moon and the stars, and those normal, conventional structures of our advanced civilization that result in injustice can be overturned at last.