Epiphany 2025
Leonard Cohen once wrote, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’
Today we are celebrating the feast of Epiphany. Epiphany being of course the time where we celebrate the gentile wisemen or magi visiting the Christ Child. A ray of light that entered into a broken world to bring hope and the promise of new life.
Every generation on earth has had its dark days. Most recently ours has had the covid pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and wars waging and destabilising international security. And because of these things it can feel as if the dark days do not end. But it is important to remember, that even the greatest darkness could overcome the light that came into the world, and that light still shines, in each of us. We now carry that light out to the darkness, to be the physical hands and feet of God, to bring hope and light to a world in need.
Something drew these men to Jesus. This star that appeared lead them to Him and along the way they came to know that he was born to be King of the Jews. We cannot know what they felt at seeing that star, what compelled them to chase after it, how they learnt on that journey that Jesus was to be born king of the Jews, all we know, is that they chose to pursue it.
It’s interesting to me that they know that this star is for Jesus. “For we observed his star at its rising.” The Jews had a great number of prophetic teaching and tradition that all pointed toward Jesus as Messiah. They had the Daniel prophecy in which during the fourth kingdom the Messiah would come, the Israelites saw Rome as that great fourth kingdom. We know from the other prophets that he would be born of women and in Bethlehem, that he would be born of David’s line and His kingdom would be an everlasting Kingdom. All of this pointed towards the fact that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent and yet as we see in John 1 verse 10 that “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept Him.” Worse than this lack of acceptance was a that they did not recognise Him as the Messiah. The ones looking most intently completely missed it.
His own people rejected Him and yet here we have this group of wise men choosing to seek Him out. The Church is going through something of an identity crisis at the moment. The Archbishop of Canterbury is stepping down with the Archbishop of York assuming temporary oversight. Dioceses across the country lack their own diocesan bishop. Parishes struggle to find clergy. General synod is at logger heads with itself. Theologians disagree over the minute detail. A leadership crisis is leading the Church into a place which does not represent what Christ is to the world.
Christ came to be a light shining in the darkness and right now it seems that we have some work to do to restore that work in our Church. The Church should be a representation of Christ and I think that like the early Israelites seeking the Messiah, we too have been found guilty of not recognising Christ. What makes this transgression worse is that we have no excuse. Christ has made himself known to us through the scriptures and through his on earth lived example and still we fail to truly represent him in our culture and our society.
If we are called to be light that means we have to go to some pretty dark places. Light for lights sake is redundant, but light in a place of darkness brings radical life changing change. Most of us if pushed could find ourselves around our homes in the dark, its familiar ground after all right? But how much easier is it at 3am to find the bathroom if we turn the light on.
The world is ticking over. Its familiar with life, it is finding its way to the bathroom so to speak through its familiarity with the landscape. But how much easier, how much better would life be if the Church shone a light brightly into the midst of it.
That’s the heart of Epiphany, the reminder that we too are called to be light in a dark world. That we now bare the light of Christ in us and are charged to take that out and to lead the way.
What’s really exciting here is that these wise men were gentiles, like you and I. At the very beginning Christ reaches out to all without exception. In the same way we too should reach out to all without exception.
Paul writes, “so that through the Church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.” It is a corporate effort not an individual one.
As we come together and pursue unity within the body of Christ we become a louder voice for good in culture and society. We the Church need to ensure our house is in order because we are the ones to whom it is charged to pass on the wisdom of God.
Because like Paul it is “given to (us) by grace to bring the (peoples) the news of boundless riches in Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who create all things.”
We have a God given mission and sometimes we need time to reevaluate, and course correct the path we are taking. Days like today, these great feast days, are times of great celebration but also opportunities to delve deeper and understand more.
Isaiah writes
“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.”
That bright star shone in the sky for the wise men to see, but it was more than just a marker of position, it literally pointed to the salvation of the world.
It is to that salvation we as the Church now point and if we do our job diligently and purposefully we too we see as Isaiah says, “nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”
This light we hold is truly life changing, lets go and take it out to the world.
Amen.