Psalm 70: 1-4, 10-14
1 Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son.
2 May he judge your people with righteousness and your poor with justice.
3 May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.
4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
10 May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts.
11 May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.
12 For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
13 He has pity on the weak and the needy and saves the lives of the needy.
14 From oppression and violence he redeems their life, and precious is their blood in his sight.
Isaiah 60:1-6
1 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2 For darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples,but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.
3 Nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
4 Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together; they come to you;your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried in their nurses’ arms.
5 Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice,because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you; the wealth of the nations shall come to you.
6 A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come.They shall bring gold and frankincense and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.
Ephesians 3:1-12
This is the reason that I, Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you gentiles, 2 for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you 3 and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, 4 a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. 5 In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: 6 that is, the gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
7 Of this gospel I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power. 8 Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ 9 and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, 10 so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, 12 in whom we have access in boldness and confidence through faith in him.
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the east came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage.” 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet:
6 ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of
Judah, for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’ ”
7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” 9 When they had heard the king, they set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
Currently, all over Luxembourg, you can purchase a "king’s cake”, complete with a crown and a hidden treasure inside. At this point most people probably don’t know why we do this, aside from doing it because we’ve always done it, but it originates with the celebration of Epiphany, the commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Even if you are a Christian, you still may not be familiar with Epiphany. I’ll admit to having had to brush up on the particulars myself. It may seem strange, given all the other significant events in the Scriptures, that visit of the Magi gets its own special day. Why is this so significant?
Psalm 70, which we read together to start the service, speaks of a righteous son of the king and imagines a day when foreign kings will come offering gifts and bow down before him, when all the kings of the earth will worship him. Isaiah 60 as well prophecies a similar vision of foreign kings coming to the praise Lord, bringing their gifts of gold and frankincense. We are, of course, meant to understand the Magi’s visit to Jesus as a fulfillment of these passages, but more than that, as harbinger of the inclusion of the Gentiles in God’s promises.
This may not seem like such a big deal, because we in the Christian West have over the centuries grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as God’s people, but however many centuries pass, we will always still be Gentiles, the outsiders, the ones whom Paul told (in Ephesians 2:12) to, “remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” We should indeed continue to remember this, that, in a sense, our natural state is to be those people walking in darkness, and, indeed, as Christendom recedes the Gentiles are again those people who have become, "strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”
That the Gentiles got included in God’s promises was a startling event - One of the major preoccupations of The NT, Paul’s letters especially, is how to make sense of this and work out all the implications - and yet in retrospect this now seems obvious. We’ve learned to read Scripture in light of the way things turned out, which leads us to think that this is the natural reading of Scripture, that any person reading the OT properly would’ve clearly seen this coming. It is quite easy for us to regard Scripture as a data repository, a collection of facts and information, that just needs to be correctly comprehended and systematically organized.
But the consistent testimony of the NT is that OT can only be comprehended in light of subsequent revelation. In the passage from Ephesians which we read, Paul repeatedly speaks of a mystery which has now been revealed, that God has always been at work but only now, through the Spirit, can we understand what God’s been up to. It is only through Christ that the meaning of Scripture is revealed. Christ is our entry point into the story and the lens through which we read the story. The content of faith is something revealed, something surprising and unforeseen, not something we figured out on our own.
Christians tend to tell the story in such a way that, now that Christ has come, the mystery has been solved, and the truth is right there in the NT for any rational person to comprehend if only they would read or hear the Scriptures. Everything essential was made clear long ago and now it’s only a matter of disseminating accurate information about historical events so that a person might then “believe”. Revelation is in the past. Christians are those who manage to believe these things are true even as everyone else thinks them unbelievable.
Many of us have been told that the answer to pretty much anything is more Bible reading, but I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s entirely possible to read the NT without understanding, and that you can go to Bible study and come away only more confused. Protestants, especially, have insisted the Bible is perspicacious, that it’s meaning clear, but this is not something I have found to be true in my experience, and indeed it’s quite obvious that well-meaning people disagree about what it says. In fact, this understanding of Scripture urges us to take our own interpretation as authoritative since whatever it says to us must be what it really says.
We very much should continue reading the Bible and familiarizing ourselves with the Scriptures - if you’re not, perhaps that would be a good New Year’s resolution - but rather than assuming that the meaning of Scripture, the NT especially, is obvious and/or clear, I think we would be better off assuming the opposite, that Scripture is mysterious, and all the more so because of the intervening 2000 years. We are not the sort of people who can easily understand. But we should not despair, but instead assume that its meaning must be revealed.
This might sound like a copout, a kind of evasion of or fortification against rational scrutiny, a claim that, “I believe because God showed me”. I very much want this to be an intellectually serious church, but, contrary to the prevailing notion that intellectual seriousness means pure rationalism, I’m convinced that the only way to think properly about what it is to be human is to acknowledge that we are not purely rational, we are not just brains on a stick, but that much of who we are and what guides us is not reducible to rationality. I don’t think it’s too sweeping a statement to say that Protestantism has adopted overly rational conception of faith focusing on belief as mental ascent which both impoverishes what it means to be human and diminishes the ongoing importance of revelation. We very much want a closed system into which there are no additional inputs, no variables to account for, just a doctrine to believe or to reject. And yet revelation, by definition, comes to us from outside, breaking in, casting everything in a new light. If God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then presumably God is not just a God who has revealed in the past but who continues to reveal today.
We take the experience of the magi to be entirely exceptional, and while it is true that stars don't don't typically guide us, these wise men worship Jesus not because they figured out who he was because it was revealed to them even as they also went to see for themselves. And we should perhaps not be surprised if the paradigm of coming to faith looks something like this. We believe not through rational investigation so much as through experience, through the sense that the truth has been revealed to us even if we can’t give an account of how or why it’s true.
Which leads to a crucial question: How is God being revealed today? Well, we could just say, by the Holy Spirit, and leave it at that, but Paul ventures a more specific and, I expect, more surprising answer when he claims that, “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” Here Paul imagines the fulfillment of Psalm 70, Isaiah 60, and more being accomplished through the church, not just in the sense that the church and its members proclaim a message that people might decide is true, but in the much richer, fuller sense that the very existence of a community comprised of both Jews and Gentiles under the lordship of Christ is itself an embodiment of the Gospel, a manifestation of the power of God. And while the inclusion of Jews and Gentiles in a single body may no longer seem remarkable, it remains the case that, if people are going to come to understand and believe the Gospel, if the truth is going to be revealed, it’s going to happen (or not) through the church. Even through us.
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