Holidays try too hard, so we’re often glad when they’re over. After the new year, the buses, banks, post offices and trash collectors get back on their regular schedules and we can finally get back to the semblance of normalcy craved by us, working people, who don’t get weeks off, who have to squeeze the holiday festivities into the rest of our lives which go on regardless in the quotidian cycles of work, debt, paycheck, crisis, crushed dreams, debt, work, paycheck, toothache, dentist, debt, car problems, short paycheck, hope, debt, miscellaneous crisis, a happy moment when we inexplicably transcend all the tiresome, useless, everyday crap and have a vision of the miracle it is to be alive on “this fortress built by Nature for herself, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this Earth, this realm (Shakespeare!),” this Emerald Isle of a planet.
There’s a word for that– one of the great Christian words in our vocabulary– Epiphany.
When you have not just a good idea, not just a great idea, but a life-clarifying insight, one hauls out that particular, unique, special word for a special experience– epiphany.
In my life, I’ve had white epiphanies, and black epiphanies. Plus the Feast Of The Epiphany every year, “We Three Kings,” one of the great Christmas songs. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh– the good ol’ days. Tenzing Momo in the Pike Place Market has a nice frankincense and myrrh incense stick, by the way.
But it tries too hard. It’s too deconstructionist and reengineered. The songbooks have songs about it in which the three maji, the three kings, the three wise men, went out in search of the Jesus we know and love in all His theological complexity.
The Gospel says these three saw the star that heralded the king of the Jews. So much is read into that phrase– “the king of the Jews.” Historically, it’s a tremendously sad phrase. It’s the sign above Jesus’ head on the cross. “What I have written, I have written,” Pilate said.
Is this a King for a people who suffered the Shoah in practically our own lifetime? I don’t know who else could be.
What do we have at the Epiphany? Three men who had the astrological kung fu to somehow figure out that a star had emerged in the night sky that proclaimed the birth of the King of the Jews. Kings are arbitrary figures, aren’t they? A family makes alliances, hires mercenaries, prevails over enemies, proclaim themselves royalty, and so they remain until they’re replaced by a more powerful family.
But when an impartial star appears in the heavens and anoints an infant born to powerless people of a powerless tribe in the hinterlands of an occupied people, something irresistibly powerful is afoot, and don’t we want to think that the universe is a good place, ruled by an omnipotent Deity Who desires not our destruction, but our salvation? Wouldn’t we then welcome this child-king, declared by the most profound mechanisms of the Universe, this crucial step forward in the reconciliation of God and His children?
The maji rejoiced at the birth of this King. They rushed to welcome Him, because they must have believed that this was a most excellent thing that was happening. Whether the Christ child never cried after He was born, never evinced any infantile distress, whether the maji were centuries ahead of their time in their theological instincts– no matter.
Their Epiphany was, perhaps, that they were witnesses to something special, something unique, not to be taken for granted.
Something to be admired by us who tend to take Christmas and the King of the Jews for granted!