“The Lord will arise upon
you, and his glory will be seen upon you.” Isaiah 60:2
In my
hometown, the Fireman’s Carnival is undoubtedly the biggest event of the year.
It’s been held on the first week in August as long as anyone can
remember. Thousands flock to the muddy
grounds outside town for the ferris wheel and the country ham sandwiches, some
low stakes games of chance and the goldfish booth that finances the
junior-senior prom.
Everyone knows that the biggest attractions
are conversations with old friends and the hand-cut french fries. But
there’s always entertainment as well--a show on the stage at 7 and 10. It’s usually country music, and in the old
days, when you had to become a star the hard way, many of the greats trod our
hometown boards: Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty, Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass
Boys, even once, Grandpap said, the great Hank Williams himself.
But
affordable talent is harder to find these days, so the series usually builds up
to a Saturday night performer who might just ring a bell. We called them
the “one hit wonders.” The last time I
was at the Carnival on the Saturday night, it was a band whose 15 seconds of
fame came with a tune called “She Never Cried When Old Yeller Died” back in
1993. I think they sang it three times that night, and when they did, the
crowd went wild. For a second you could
see past the grizzled beards and the beer bellies to what it must have been
like 25 years ago when they were on top of the world, and a life of fame and
fortune seemed to be spread before them.
There’s
something sad in figures like this: the one-hit band, the pitcher who broke all
the records in high school and then petered out in AA ball, the businessman who
made one amazing deal at 27 and never managed to replicate it again. Maybe
you felt a kind of ambiguity in your life’s early successes. This is wonderful, you thought, but is it a
badge of a glorious future or just a fluke?
Could it be that I only have one great idea, enough talent for this one
crucial moment? Is this as good as it’s ever going to be?
I would
not have been surprised if a thought like this passed through the minds of
those looking on at the scene recounted in today’s Gospel, the arrival of the
wise men who bowed low to worship the infant Jesus. “His glory will be
seen upon you,” Isaiah had prophesied long before. God would reveal Himself to the wise and
powerful of all nations, and they would come to His sacred people and land to
adore Him. Kings would bring gold and
incense, a testimony of belief and reverence. And here we have it, as
colorful and dramatic a story you will ever find, and all of it spread before a
baby, just weeks old.
Artists
have long delighted in depicting this moment. If the government wasn’t
shut down, you could spend a marvellous afternoon today wandering the
Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery, just looking at paintings of this
event. There are so many of them for two good reasons. The three kings were the saintly patrons of
Florence, so commissioning altarpieces of them earned donors some patriotic
stripes back in the fourteenth century. But for a Biblical scene, this
one also gave such a large scope for the artist: splendid costumes, rearing
camels, sometimes great crowds of locals join in the festivity, with pipes and
dances.
In my
favorite painting of the scene at the Gallery, a joint work of Fra Angelico and
Fra Filippo Lippi, a peacock fans out His tail on the roof of the holy house
where Mary and Joseph are holding the babe. And why not? Of all the scenes in the life of Jesus, this
is the one where a peacock would be perfectly at home, amid the astronomical
heralds, the stooping grandeur and the costly presents.
Jesus
appears here as the universal king, acclaimed with joy by those who have
travelled from the ends of the earth to seek the one for whom they have always
hoped. He is serene and confident, receiving the praises of His
subjects. Those who kneel before Him are
grateful, humble and reverent, for He is not merely a king but God Himself in
our flesh. The Psalms capture the moment exactly: “O magnify the Lord our God, and fall down
before His footstool, for He is holy.[1]”
“O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, bring presents, and come
into His courts.[2]”
This is
Epiphany, the showing forth of God’s glory. For one golden moment, the
Lord was seen clearly in human flesh. The Blessed Virgin and Joseph were
reassured, the wise men stared up with full hearts, the crowds were amazed.
God was here among us, and received from us that which is “meet, right
and our bounden duty.[3]”
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory,
as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.[4]”
But this
golden moment was not to last. That night the child and his family would be
shuffled off to Egypt, fleeing a murderous king. The wise men would slip
away, presumably back to their old lives uncertain about what it all would
mean. This is not the last Epiphany in Jesus’ earthly life. Indeed, most of the other great moments of
revelation will serve as our Gospel lessons over the next two months: His
Baptism and first miracle, the dramatic call of the first disciples, His
glorious transfiguration.
But most of Jesus’ life was in obscurity,
among people who ignored or misunderstood Him, or who felt threatened by Him
and responded with hostility and aggression. At least some of those who
met Jesus decades later and heard the old tale about the wise men must have wondered
if it wasn’t a mistake, or if that initial promise had never really been
fulfilled. Was Jesus a one-hit wonder?
they might have thought.
They
would be wrong, of course, for the wise men’s vision was, in fact, full of
grace and truth. He is now as He was then, seated on the throne of
majesty, in the new Jerusalem above.
John described it to us in this way in His Revelation: “The city has no
need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and
its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the
earth shall bring their glory into it.[5]”
This day we praise Him, with angels and archangels and all the
company of heaven,[6]” and we know that we will
see Him as He is, as they did who bore their gifts of gold, frankincense and
myrrh.
We too
have our moments of epiphany, when God’s glory is shown forth, and faith seems
easy, moments when we taste of that joy and peace to come. Ours is not a
religious tradition that insists on a decisive moment when we come to faith,
but most of the real Christians I have met can point to at least a few of them.
They usually come at the beginning--around a campfire at youth camp, or
at grandma’s funeral or peering over the Grand Canyon. Most of my own epiphanies involve Gothic
architecture, polyphony and lots of incense: to each his own, I guess.
Those moments make real for us what was only notional before. Because of them, we can commit ourselves to
God.
But after
those golden moments, the days of obscurity and struggle always come. And
we can be tempted to look back on our past experiences with doubt, to wonder if
it all was really as true and compelling as we remember it to have been.
Were we, too, just a one hit wonder?
If God was present to me so powerfully then, we think, why won’t He show
His face now?
There is
no answer for such questions, aside from a trust in the steadfast goodness of
God, whose mercy is strength enough for the struggles we now face. As
John Henry Newman wrote in an Epiphany sermon, “For all seasons we must thank
Him, for time of sorrow and time of joy, time of warfare and time of peace.
Each has its own proper fruit, and its own peculiar blessedness...When
Christ gives us what is pleasant, let us take it as refreshment by the way,
that we may, when God calls, go in the strength of that meat forty days and
forty nights unto Horeb, the mount of God.[7]”
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