The Epiphany of the Lord

Father Dan Juelfs
Homily from the Televised Mass, NewsCenter1
The Epiphany of the Lord, January 7, 2024

“We saw his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.” 

We’re all pretty familiar with the story about the event of what we call the Epiphany.  The story that we read, just read, in Matthew’s Gospel that we hear once a year. We hear every year on this feast proclaiming that these three people, whoever they were, came to pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews. 

We’re also pretty familiar with it in terms of the Christmas Carol that we’ve all learned from the time we were little, and that’s probably the one that gives us more of a visual image in lots of ways. Where our imagination goes when we think about this feast remembering the song that we all learned to sing. 

But what does this feast, what does this event signify? What’s its importance? Who are these people who came to pay homage and why? What was their place? What was their purpose? 

In reality, we really don’t know much about them. This account that I just read from Matthew’s Gospel is the only place it appears in scripture. We don’t have any other record at all of this event. And yet it’s become a very major part of what we’ve come to believe as Christians. What we’ve come to believe as people who practice the Catholic faith and recognize the place of Jesus. But the reality is, we don’t know, factually, much about it. 

What we do know is, we celebrate it in the Church as kind of the third major feast of Christmas: the birth of the Lord itself, Mary the Mother of God, and today, the Epiphany —that manifestation, that showing fourth of the power of God, because that’s what the word epiphany means. It means a showing forth, a manifestation of making something known. An awareness of something that we didn’t have before. 

The Church has always seen this event, and our celebration of its event, as a proclamation of showing forth the presence of God to people who are non-Jews. As I say, we don’t know who these magi were, but we do know that they weren’t Jews, and they didn’t have the same expectation of a Messiah that Jewish people had. They weren’t awaiting the birth of someone who was going to come and save their people from the powers that be that had them under control. That somehow these people came, and were recognized as having some sort of authority, some sort of special place, some sort of reason that they would come to pay an homage to a new king. 

Certainly, they went logically to Jerusalem. They logically went to Herod to find out where this king was. Who this was. Herod didn’t know anything about it. In reality, didn’t want to know anything about it, because he was very much threatened by it.

So what do we learn from this feast? What is it that we find in terms of our celebration of this. You know, I think what we see in the magi are people who are willing to let themselves be shown. Shown something that they really didn’t know anything about. Something that they were willing to go to an unknown place and pay homage to a very humble child. Probably not what they expected when they came to pay homage to a newborn king. They didn’t expect to go to a stable. They didn’t expect to find this child Jesus in that particular situation. 

But they obviously had an openness. They had a willingness to accept the unknown. To believe it. To allow themselves to be changed. They didn’t turn away from the person of Jesus, this child in a manger. They didn’t turn away from him because he didn’t fit their picture of the king or what they were expecting.

So what does that mean for us? How should we respond? When God’s actions in our lives don’t fit our expectations. When it doesn’t look like the things that we were expecting. 

Epiphanies, signs of God’s action in our lives, signs of God’s presence in our lives, go on all the time. They’re around all the time. Most of the time we don’t necessarily notice them. We’re not necessarily conscious of it and certainly the unexpected actions of Jesus — his crucifixion, his death, and ultimately his resurrection — were not what the Jewish people were expecting and many of them refused to accept it. And yet we know that’s what brought about our salvation — the unexpected actions of God. 

God continues to act in our lives but oftentimes in the most unexpected ways. Oftentimes in ways that unfortunately we don’t recognize and sometimes don’t take the effort or make the effort, to see, to figure out what those things meant. 

As we celebrate today, the Feast of the Epiphany, I think our prayer should be let everyday be an Epiphany. That everyday be an openness to God’s action in our lives. An openness to try and understand what it is that God’s trying to share with us just as the magi were open to going to a manger to visit this Newborn King. They were willing to believe. That’s our call. Willing to believe God continues to act and calls us to respond to that.