Changing our hearts

The LORD bless you and keep you!  The LORD let his face shine upon you and be gracious to you!  The LORD look upon you kindly and give you peace!

Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 2:1-12) is unique as it presents Jesus as both the One Who is to come and the One who has come for all.  The Magi represent the “beyond” or distant lands and peoples to whom the Christ will offer His universal wisdom. 

These “Wise Men” also represent the former ways of thinking, wondering, and philosophizing.  They come in a sign of surrender to this new “epiphany” or display of this “One God” Who is for all and is now known as the God Who does the seeking and the finding.  The Magi are the figures of the world who did the seeking for and the finding of God.  The Light is initiated by God and this Light is meant for the whole world.

As with the shepherds, these wise men continue in a liturgical manner.  They arrive, having wandered in faith, have an offertory procession, a time of adoration and then a sending.  Were they totally satisfied by the whole experience of stars, warnings, findings?  They were somehow missioned by the encounter to go farther and further and deeper.  Like the shepherds they were changed and yet returned to the desert-usual of life.

The gifts which the Magi had presented represented what had been valuable to these seekers who left them at the “house” and leave by “another way”.  They have not so much found as they have been found and leave that place to begin the spreading the news of the Finder they found.  This is all a grand ending and beginning.  The Magi-story is the revelation that mere human wisdom searches for more than it can understand.  The Wanderers, who have come from afar in distance and time, arrive, not at an idea or principle, but at the mystery of a Person.  They are we as well.

We would like to think of God, arrive at our own logical, reasonable concept of God.   We would love to say that we have found God.  If we determine Who and What God is, then we would seem to control God.  God would have to act accordingly.  In prostrating themselves, the Magi admit their former human arrogance and surrender to the truth that until then, they had not been satisfied with the conclusions of their personal ponderings.

The Epiphany is a grand revelation that God will not be found to satisfy human thinking.  This seeking of us by God encourages us to live with the dissatisfactions of our hearts.  Jesus has come among us and within us to accompany our spirits and not merely slake the thirsts of thought.  We are invited to lay down our intellects, as precious gold, which they are.  We, like the Magi, pick up our lives which have been met, found and sent off, the better for the finding.

It can be assumed that, as with the shepherds before them, the Magi went back by “another way”, not merely geographically.  They return to a new and different way of relating with life.  Their hearts and spirits are comforted and their minds, still turning these things over in wonder, not a bad way to journey.  The seeking is God’s labor, the being found is ours.  When we hear that we should seek and we shall find (Matthew 7:7), what Jesus and the Magi teach us is that human finding will always lead to some kind of dissatisfaction and so the seeking begins anew.

The Magi did not stay at the place to which the star guided them.  Nobody who came to find Jesus, from the shepherds to those seeking Him within the tomb, were ever allowed just to stay nice and close to Him, the finder.  He moved them along in their human-heart search.  This too is not a bad, but rather a holy way to journey.

Think back to a time when you experienced some insight from God.  Maybe some confusing aspect of your faith started to make some sense.  Or you found clarity about a new phase of life you had entered into.  That one “light” didn’t necessarily answer all your questions.  It set you on a path, but it didn’t give you the entire road map.  So you had to do your best to follow it, and as you did, you sorted out the next step.  Each step forward, each choice to be flexible, each response of trust made subtle or not-so-subtle changes in you.  Light built on light, and slowly but surely, like the Magi in Matthew’s Gospel, you started doing things differently.  You started to see things as God does, in His light.

And that’s what Epiphany is all about.  It’s a revelation that changes our hearts.