A Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord
Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6 Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 Matthew 2:1-12
An ad campaign can garner no greater triumph than to create a cultural touchstone. Such was the case for Motel 6 in the 1980s. The warm and woodsy voice of NPR personality Tom Bodett played its part, but the campaign’s success came from its clever reemployment of a commonplace assurance, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
We say that to children who still fear the dark or to adults who will arrive after a home’s occupants have retired for the night. In both cases, the light serves an essential purpose. It leaves some portion of a navigable world in place.
We live with two, interconnected realities: the world and our place within it. You cannot have one without the other. This is what makes being lost or being in total darkness so truly terrifying.
Stop thinking of God as a person, hidden in some remote, celestial part of the world, and try to think of God as nothing more—or less!—than light itself.
For adults, a night light is a locator. You know where your bed lies in relation to it. So you never start from scratch, even when you awake at night.
For a child, a night light serves an even greater purpose. It keeps some fraction of the wee one’s world in view, thus holding at bay the fears that absolute darkness designs.
Both children and adults know that, at least on our level of existence, neither darkness nor light is a thing. One might say light fills the world with things and darkness takes them away.
Epiphany is a feast of light, “the shining forth” of the newborn Christ. It prompts a thought experiment, a mental realignment, if you will. Stop thinking of God as a person, hidden in some remote, celestial part of the world, and try to think of God as nothing more—or less!—than light itself.
If “God is light” (1 Jn 1:5), several insights become possible. First, we stop looking for the place where God is hiding. Light is not something we can separate out from the world, but we would never say that the light is hiding.
The Magi are not seeking the star as a physical object in space. They want to be illuminated by its meaning, not its glow.
Second, as the Book of Revelation says, the “Night will be no more, nor will they need light from lamp or sun, for the Lord God shall give them light, and they shall reign forever and ever (22:5). Whenever we gain new insight—of the sort that changes who we are—we have experienced something of God. We have been graced. It would be an odd, perhaps even uncomfortable, way of putting it, but we could say that God is insight, the mind’s light. God is the sudden “opening up” of your world.
Third, if, as Jesus said, he is “the light of the world” (Jn 9:5), then sin cannot comfortably be ignored by claiming, as a materialist might, that it has no location within the world. Rather, sin is the word we use to describe a world without adequate illumination. It is the world itself in need of its light.
See, darkness covers the earth,
and thick clouds cover the peoples;
but upon you the Lord shines,
and over you appears his glory (Is 60:2).
An unbeliever might suggest that in speaking of God as the light of the world or as the mind’s light we have redefined God. Surely the word “God” must mean more than the intelligibility that comes from illumination because no one can deny that this exists.
But believers have not changed the definition of God. God never said, “I am some object hidden in the world.” Yet God likens himself to light some 60 times in the sacred Scriptures.
Do we impose insight upon the world, or does it come looking for us? Is light a tool that we use, or were we created by the light, fashioned to come into its own fullness? Unbelievers think that insight is an act that we perform. It emerges from us and is entirely understandable on that level.
Because of what happened at Bethlehem and Jerusalem, believers insist that light itself interacts with us. People of faith believe that the intelligibility of the world, its light, is a person, one who essentially says to us, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
“Where is the newborn king of the Jews?
We saw his star at its rising
and have come to do him homage” (Mt 2:2).
The Magi are not seeking the star as a physical object in space. They want to be illuminated by its meaning, not its glow. With the mind’s eye, they do indeed follow the star but only because it is calling to them—and to us.
