EPIPHANY YEAR B – WHERE’S THE MAGIC?
January 4, 2009
Mt 2, 1-12
Christmas is over, almost. Today we hear from Matthew’s gospel the story of the Magi coming to see the child Jesus. They didn’t come at the same time as the shepherds, and – despite the impression given by many of our cribs - did not kneel with them. It is a couple of years later that they came, and Jesus, Mary and Joseph are living in a house. They are ‘wise men’ from far away….A light shone on them, and guided them, and changed their lives forever.
I don’t want to speculate on details about them. I would rather wonder what they experienced when they met Jesus. It was an experience of relationship.
The basic experience of human life is that of relationship. It is the real basis of all our knowing. It gives us the energy to act. Relationship means turning towards someone you love. It means lifting your eyes towards that person’s face and looking at it, because you want to know the person better. It’s him! It’s her! Beyond words! Beyond details!
This is the way a parent looks at a little baby asleep in its own peacefulness. This is the way a nurse looks at a sick person whom suffering has taken away from daily life. This is the way a lover looks, with a look that love has awakened. It is an astonished look that breaks the circle of habit. It looks on a face that has no cover-up, and that is not graspable. There is something beyond all definable characteristics. That something, that someone, is the aim of all desire, the object of all tenderness, the call of all life, and it is an invitation to recognition. In those moments of grace, appearances break down to let being come through in all its truth. Those moments let us get close to our humanity. Each is a moment of illumination.
The moment does not stay like that for long. It is a privileged instant. It sheds its light beyond itself. It is meant to do that. It lights up all life. The newborn infant that is loved like that, lives thanks to the regard of its parents. Parents work and suffer for their children as they grow up. Friends remain linked in the separate situations they work in.
We are alive because we have seen someone. That changes our life-track. We can’t retain, or stay fixated, on one moment, however beautiful. But that moment doesn’t have to be hung on to: it changes everything. In its light we re-read everything that has happened to us, all the education we have received, all our desires, all the big events, all the failures and all the achievements.
It is in this light that we can speak another person’s name. It is not just a cry, or a moment of deep feeling, not even a religious emotion. It is light, it is wisdom. There is content in it, and we are indeed contented as a result.
There is a difference between ‘looking at someone’ and feeling that someone is ‘gazing’ at you. [It is the opposite of looking in a mirror – your mirror image doesn’t ‘gaze’ at you.] You sense it sometimes when you look at a work of art. The painting gazes at us: we are looked at and into by it. When we see an object of art, we do not apprehend it: it confronts us, with our loss, with the lack that causes our desire. That is why, the moment the gaze appears, we try to avoid it by having recourse to, or falling back to, mere looking with the eye.
There are people who have discovered Jesus like that. They were looking for a savior, and Jesus gazed at them. Then they knew…
Today, on the feast of the epiphany, we listen to the story of three magicians who were caught up in the larger magic of this when they came to Bethlehem. They did not find a child. They found a master. They did not discover a child who was born in Bethlehem. They discovered that they were born in Bethlehem. They found out who they really were. That is why we are told so little about their background. It was their foreground that mattered now. Their real life started now. No wonder they went off by ‘another way’. They had seen something in Jesus that no language could say. It would never leave them. They told Herod nothing, because there was nothing they could tell anyone. They were in communion.
There is a sense of truth here. It lands on you out of the blue. You ‘know’ it is right: you can’t dispute it, and you don’t want or need to. You can’t grasp it, but it holds you and it makes you be.
It is ‘believing’. The word, in Latin, credo, comes from the Sanskrit, and it means giving your heart and your vital energy in expectation of a reciprocation. It is an act of trust implying that someone will trust you, or better, has already trusted you. You deposit all your desire, all your magic as a person, with this other person, and you count on getting it back with the other’s ‘interest’.
Deep down, I think we all need to believe like this. We want an edge-to-edge contact with the real like this. There is a feeling of connectedness. I’m satisfied, secure, jumping up and down in a jubilant excitement that doesn’t worry too much about boundaries or definitions. ‘I’ live – as I never did before – because I am ‘recognized’ in this. By someone we relate to.
There’s an instinct in us all to name this someone. But we haven’t got a name to use. That is why we tend to use the word ‘person’ and say we are ‘person to person’ there. I think this is present in every human being. I think it is a fundamental kind of faith in an ‘other’. Without it there can be no religious faith. We are all magi looking for magic. We have all had our epiphanies.
The Magi of the Epiphany Scene in Bethlehem can teach us something here. When they saw Jesus they knew something. They knew it was He. I don’t think we ought to put our clumsy words on that ‘He’. Not even our clumsy word ‘God’. We ought to be content with just the word ‘He’. That tradition has never ceased. In every age there have been people like the Magi, who knew, knew that Jesus was ‘He’. They have never been able to language that experience properly. In the end, it is not necessary.
The Magi were not orthodox Jews. They were not even Jews at all. Down the ages, those who have known that Jesus is ‘He’ have not all been orthodox Catholics. That doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is that ‘He’ knows all of us. ‘He’ does. Whenever you know that, it is the feast of the Epiphany for you.