Following the Star for the Epiphany

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In the midst of our Church’s Christmas season is the Solemnity of the Epiphany, which we will celebrate on Jan. 6. The day is also known as the Feast of the Three Kings. Its origins are 12 verses in the Gospel of Matthew, which tell the story of magi from the east arriving in Jerusalem to pay homage to the newborn king of the Jews.

This story has given rise to much tradition not found in the Scripture verses. Today we call the magi kings, endow them with the names Caspar, Balthazar and Melchoir, and attribute their places of origin as Africa, Asia and Europe to represent that in Christ’s kingdom “there are no distinctions of race and origin. In him and through him, humanity is united, yet without losing any of the richness of variety,” Pope Benedict XVI writes in Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.

The three wise men also are “associated with the phases of human life – youth, maturity and old age,” Benedict adds. “This too makes good sense, highlighting the fact that each of the various states of human life finds its true meaning and its inner unity in companionship with Jesus.”

The first reading for the Epiphany of the Lord, Isaiah 60:1-6, calls us to be radiant at seeing the glory of the Lord that has come in the darkness that covers the earth.   

This passage “is an invitation addressed to the Church, the community of Christ, but also to each one of us, to acquire an ever livelier awareness of the mission and of the responsibility to the world in witnessing to and bringing the new light of the Gospel,” Benedict XVI said during his Jan. 4, 2012 general audience.

We are invited, like the magi, to allow the light to draw us to Christ, and to bring him gifts. Today he has no need of gold and frankincense and myrrh – symbolic respectively of his kingship and of his priestly role, and a prefigurement of his death – but for his Church to do his work, he does need us. As St. Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours ....”

On this feast day in 2017, Pope Francis said the magi were tired of the lives they were living and set out in longing to find something new. Arriving in Jerusalem, they came upon Herod in a palace that was only a sign of “power, outward appearances and superiority,” Francis said, whereas in Bethlehem they found a “small, poor and vulnerable infant, the unexpected and unknown child” and in him “they discovered the glory of God.”

Like the magi as Francis imagined them, I too find my life stale and unfulfilled at times, but unlike the three wise men I tend to set out not for the self-transcendence of worship and serving others but rather for worldly amusements. I do encounter Christ in the poor and the vulnerable, but I can’t say that I always see Him there. And so I think this will be my New Year’s resolution: to embark on a journey in hopes of finding the glory of God wherever it is revealed.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic.