Epiphany

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

‘Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.’ If you’ve ever wondered how we got three kings from the visit of the magi recounted in St Matthew’s Gospel, Isaiah will give you a hand. The light has come, the glory of the Lord has risen, and the wealth of nations will come to Israel, bringing gifts of gold and frankincense. And camels – Isaiah gives us the dromedaries too, without which our Epiphany scene would be incomplete.

We know little of their journey until they arrive in Jerusalem. Where are they from? When did they set out? And why? The Magi were from the east, Matthew tells us. Quite possibly they were members of the Persian priestly caste, philosophers seeking the path of wisdom. The word isn’t wholly positive in its use in the New Testament – in Acts we hear of Simon the Magus, who is described as a magician, and an enemy of all righteousness (13.8-10), but here Matthew seems to be using it as a way of showing that all true religious and philosophical enquiry will lead to Christ.

And they are definitely foreign, these wise men from the east. They are not Jews, but come seeking the one born king of the Jews. And even that very title marks them out as Gentiles: Jews would refer to the Messiah as the king of Israel. It’s Gentiles who describe him as king of the Jews – here, on the lips of the Magi, and later, hammered in three languages over the cross. In them, nations come to God’s light. The salvation that dawns in Jesus is universal.

And they come following a star and seeking a king. Their curiosity and desire prompt the long journey. Something in that star makes them pack up their astrological charts and equipment, saddle their camels, and set out on a long trek to an as yet unknown destination. That same something keeps them moving forward – through the difficult terrain, the bickering about which way to go, whether they’re nearly there yet, their wondering about what it means.

I don’t think that ‘something’ is unique to the wise men. It’s the gift that made humans come out from the cave and its shadows and into the light, that motivates the urge to explore the farthest galaxies and the tiniest particles. It’s the gift that inspires poets, philosophers, scientists, artists, lovers and mystics – and ordinary human beings – to wonder, to explore, to imagine and to yearn. It’s the gift that makes me pray, and that helps me love. It’s the gift of longing, the gifts that arises from deep within our hearts that seeks something more, something fuller. St Augustine described it as a sort of holy restlessness that will not be satisfied until it finds its true rest in God. There’s a sort of restlessness which results in boredom, dissatisfaction, distraction and the inability to see things through. That’s not the sort of restlessness Augustine is talking about. He’s describing the sort of restlessness that has to act in the face of injustice, that wants to explore and create and love and live. The sort of restlessness that makes you follow a star even when you don’t know where it’s leading. For Augustine, this sort of restlessness is a sign of God at work, drawing us to him.

It can be unsettling, this sort of longing or holy restlessness. It can lead us to make decisions that others consider strange or unpragmatic, because it may well take us off the trajectory of people’s expectations. It can surprise us, when we’ve spent years building the sort of life we thought we wanted, establishing ourselves, looking for some security in jobs or qualifications or houses but finding that there’s a voice inside that can’t quite be quieted that wonders ‘is this it?’ And it can make us feel vulnerable, because to give space to this sort of longing or restlessness makes us look at what it is we actually desire.

And perhaps we’re not familiar, or entirely comfortable, with doing this. Perhaps we’ve been taught that desire isn’t quite a proper thing to talk about in church, or that desire is selfish (it can be but isn’t always). Perhaps we’re afraid of what we might find if we start looking, or we’ve become so accustomed to the pattern of our life that we’ve lost touch with desire. Perhaps it feels like a dangerous area to poke around in, with all its potential for disruption or unwelcome revelation. But desire, rightly ordered, is what leads us to God: ‘as the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God’, says the Psalmist. ‘O God my soul is athirst for you… my flesh faints for you as in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water’. And the Psalms know other desires too – for peace and prosperity, for deliverance and justice, for your enemies to be smited. And the Psalmist isn’t afraid of offering these desires to God: ‘slay my enemies and destroy all the adversaries of my soul’, goes one Psalm. And we might think that that’s not the sort of thing we’re supposed to say to God; edit ourselves so that we pray for forgiveness or charity instead. But here’s the thing: the God to whom all hearts are open and all desires known isn’t going to be fooled by us pretending. If you discover when you look into your own desires that what you really want is for God to make your neighbour fall into a pit, or for him to turn back on your enemy the behaviour they’ve meted out to you, then be honest about it. It doesn’t mean God is going to throw your neighbour into a pit or smite your enemy, but it does mean he can work with the tangle of our desires to draw us more closely to him. Pray honestly, and you’ll find yourself opening up to God not just about your surface desires but about what lies beneath them: your hurt, or your fear, or your need for forgiveness, or security, or love.

I know that as much as I can talk about my desire for God, and for loving him and his people, there’s also a clutch of desires in me that are more to do with seeking others’ good opinion and wanting to be thought well of, and I don’t particularly like this fact. I’ve spent long enough looking at and praying with the desires of my heart to know that there are some desires that are good and lovely, and others that are decidedly murkier, but which can still open up a path to God, if they are rightly and truthfully oriented towards him. And over time, as I’ve let God into my desires, I’ve found him shaping them differently – the more I’ve trusted God’s love for me, the less I’ve cared about my reputation in others’ eyes. The insecurity that cared too much for what others think was how God got in to show me a love that is unconditional.

The physical gifts the magi bring are familiar to us from carols and art. Gold for a king, frankincense for a god, myrrh for burial. But it’s the gift of their longing that prompts their journey, which now comes to its end. The star has led them not to a royal palace, nor to the courts of the high priest, nor to the debating halls of philosophers and sages. It’s led them to a child.

And in that child they recognise the goal of all their longing, the answer to the restlessness that prompted and sustained the long, weary journey, the One in whom their desires are met. And they fell down and worshipped – the human response to God manifest in the star that had guided them, in the longing that had beckoned them, in the scriptures that led them to Bethlehem, and here, supremely, in the child who is their journey’s end, Jesus, the Desire of the nations, and the Saviour of the world.