Epiphany

Looking about the Mass this morning, I could not help but notice all the dour faces.  Though it was with good cause; only about half the regulars had made it to the 7am Mass at my parish at home, due in no small part to the cold.  The first thing that hit me was the saying attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila, "God save me from sour-faced saints!".  The second was, "Good grief Phil, try smiling yourself why don't you?"  Mass is always good to me in one secular regard, and that is in reminding me of what a hypocrite I can be!  Whether it's while praying a penitential prayer, or even just a recognition that I'm frowning too.  That, my friends, is known as an epiphany, and fitting that it happens on Epiphany.

Epiphany is the day when we celebrate the coming of the three wise men to worship at the feet of the Christ child.  Their gifts are highly symbolic even.  The gold representing Jesus's kingship.  The frankincense a gift fitting of God's own High Priest, and then the last gift...myrrh, a burial ointment, a sign of how this was all going to end in thirty-three years.  More than just bearing symbolic gifts, the magi themselves also represent something greater.  Us.

It is my guess that few, if any, who read this post will be of Jewish descent, yet we all worship Jesus Christ as the Lord.  The children of Abraham, in faith, are primarily gentiles.  The Epiphany shows us the first occurrence where gentiles come before the Christ and pay Him homage as a King.  They are the first, but they are not the last.  Paul and Peter will fight over issues related to gentile believers in the early Church and even by the end of the first century, a number of gentile followers could be found throughout the Roman Empire.  Eventually Christianity would become the Empire's state religion, with the gentile followers vastly outnumbering those of the people that the Christ was born into.  Missionaries would go forth across the world over the next centuries, sometimes at the point of the sword, other times with but their words to gird them.  Two millenia later, we enter the scene...two billion followers of the Christ, almost all of us gentiles who follow in the footsteps of those magi at the Epiphany. It's been a long road from three men who came to pay homage, but we continue it, and those after us will do the same.