Epiphany - death
I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.
The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.
The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were.
What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives? I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.
In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.
This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written nearly 80 years ago. The poem ends:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise Three Deaths.
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth
and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.
"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."
In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.
"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.
The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”
This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.
But we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. Let’s look at the second death.
2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith. The Queen's Christmas Speech reflected that again this year. While affirming her own Christian faith, she was careful to flag up respect for those of other faiths, and for atheists – or as Woody Allen prefers to call them, God's loyal opposition.
But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain. I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.
There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing, paralyse me from holding on to my own Christian faith; albeit with due humility.
"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.
3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.
CS Lewis puts it this way:
"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. "We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology." ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)
Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).
Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead. This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition - it is not simply its conclusion. Death is present with us throughout our life.
This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.
I spoke to an elderly lady who had just come out of hospital in my home town, Shoreham-by-Sea: Southlands Hospital, a dilapidated, run-down old 30’s building, that was due to be rebuilt after the war.
She had been close to death at one point, and a bright young doctor had asked her, if she lapsed into unconsciousness, whether she wanted to be revived?
“I ask you Father” Elsie told me, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”
This is the faith of the saints.
As we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.
