The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

Epiphany Sermon 2007

Some wise men came to Jerusalem from the East. Matthew 2 v1

These mysterious visitors to the infant Jesus have always had a particular fascination for Christians. You and I can make sense of the shepherds. Seemingly exotic Magi from the Orient are another matter. The very first recorded painting that we have, illustrating Jesus’ birth, tells us nothing about the shepherds of the Christmas story. Instead, in a Second Century wall painting, we are shown three men, wearing astrologers’ hats, purposefully walking towards the Virgin who sits nursing her child. Perhaps S Matthew’s Gospel wants us to understand these men as being astrologers. After all, seeking to understand the future from what had been shown in the stars, was just as popular in the time of Jesus as it is among some of the more credulous today. We know from ancient records that First Century astrologers even wrote some of their calculations in myrrh. It might just be that the gold, frankincense and myrrh were the working tools of people bound up in astrology. When they came to Christ and embraced His truth then their working tools were required no more. The change in their lives was symbolised by leaving the tools of their craft at the feet of Jesus.

Some wise men came to Jerusalem from the East.

The story you and I celebrate today is one of changed lives. As Christian people, through the ages, meditate on the coming of these Magi, so they hear the call to a new way of life. Our first reading, today, tells us how the Prophet Isaiah speaks of a time when kings riding camels will come from the most far away parts of the world to worship the true God. How natural for us, then, to hear in the Epiphany story Christ drawing towards Him even the most powerful people in the world. Even kings have to change their ways and, as the story tells us, to return by another route. TS Eliot puts it so well in his famous poem The Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

Once you and I have encountered the Christ Child we can never again comfortably revert to our old way of doing things. We have seen the true meaning of life. Our consciences are troubled. We can ignore those feelings; we can suppress them. The underlying truth remains all the same and cannot be changed because truth is exactly that.

Some wise men came to Jerusalem from the East.

As we see so frequently on our Christmas cards countless artists, since that first early wall painting was completed, have set out to paint the coming of those Magi to Bethlehem. Kings in rich robes, accompanied by expensively-dressed retainers and well-upholstered camels, kneel in front of the baby Jesus. For Jesus Christ nothing but the best will do. The most powerful people in the world bend their knees to Him and put everything they have at his disposal. For such great painters Epiphany is a call to refocus on our sense of values. Everything we human beings are and have is to be subject to Jesus. Indeed, some of the great Florentine painters even gave one of the Wise Men the face of a Medici nobleman while the faces of the retinue were those of the Medici household. You and I are to see ourselves in every such painting of the adoration. You and I are invited to bow the knee at Epiphanytide, just like those three Magi and to change our ways accordingly.

The danger is that you and I only pay lip service to such a notion. We go through the motions with little if any desire to change. King Herod pretended to want more information in order that he might come and worship the newly born king when all he really wanted was to do away with Jesus as quickly as possible.

Perhaps some in church this morning know the famous painting of the Magi by Peter Brueghel, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. It is almost a parody on the beautiful paintings of the Adoration of the Magi that hang near to it. All the traditional figures are therein the picture but now the kings look almost grotesque. It is as if they are going through the motions of worshipping Jesus but believing not a word of it. The onlookers in the picture seem to look on enviously at all the wealth the kings bring with them. One spectator even wears late medieval rounded spectacles so that he can see them better. The kings are accompanied by harsh and violent looking soldiers. The Infant Jesus seems to turn away in horror from those who are supposed to be gathered there in worship of Him.

The truth is that there is at least a little bit of King Herod in each of us who come to worship Jesus. Jesus displays His glory and you and I all too often see that His kingdom challenges the standards of our own. Peter Breughel painted his Adoration scene at a time when the Emperor of Spain was about to unleash the most terrible violence upon the people of the Netherlands. No wonder, then, that Breughel was cynical about powerful monarchs pretending to bow their knees before the reign of God.

Epiphany calls us to true and undiluted worship of our Saviour. Those early Magi travelled from afar in search of the truth. When they found that truth in Jesus, those Magi were bowled over by what they found. Their lives were changed. That very early wall painting shows three Magi walking towards Christ and His Mother. Perhaps the clue to understanding that picture is the fact that it is painted on the walls of a catacomb, the place where early Christians buried their dead. For now you and I are walking not towards Bethlehem but rather towards Jesus the Lord who will come one day to judge both the living and the dead. If that be so, and it is so, then you and I must walk both with eagerness and with integrity. You and I must offer lives that are shaped by our quest, by the grace of the Lord Jesus whom we serve and to whom we come. And nowhere do you and I express better both our journey and our destination as when in this Mass we are gathered up into the life of heaven itself.