The unreligious God

“And when they saw the star they were overjoyed”

Recently a social media site I follow posted a piece on the best and worst comments to make on a first date.  The tips were both informative and amusing. “Do comment,” goes one, “on how well your date is dressed, because everyone likes a compliment”. “Don’t comment on how much food they have ordered or alcohol they are consuming”.  “Do ask them about their interests and hobbies” and here’s the fourth one – “DON’T ask them what their star sign is”. That last one caught my attention.  The theory behind the tip is that if you ask someone their star sign you are likely to put off your companion, because they will frequently conclude you are both superstitious and a little silly to think that somehow the position of the stars for a few hours decades ago is doing to determine - more than anything else - whether you both are compatible or not now.  Believing in stars, putting your trust in astrology is suspicious, questionable even downright off-putting.

If you agree with that assessment, then you are in a good position to understand how odd today’s feast is.  Because Μαγοι, the Greek word we translate as ᾽Magi᾽, were exactly the type of people who on a first date would ask you what your star sign is.  Magoi were not kings, despite how much our traditions call them that.  In fact they were a caste of Persian astrologers of the Zoroastrian religion, non-Jews of course, who placed great faith in the movement of the stars, as to which they had an international reputation.  They also had an association, for Jews, with magic and the occult (indeed, our English word ‘magic’ derives from the word ‘Magi’). These were people the Jews considered extremely suspect. They were far from orthodox, their practices smacked of superstition and even dark arts. 

And hence the shock – in early Jewish Christian eyes – that of all people, these are the ones, and indeed the only ones, turning up to venerate the Christ Child.  That is, of course, apart from the shepherds – but they were questionable too, dirty, uneducated, ritually impure most of the time, and unlike the Magi, they only turned up because they were told to, unlike the Magi who came of their own volition and at some cost. 

Epiphánia (Epiphany) is Greek for “manifestation”.  That is because in this event, God manifests himself – makes himself accessible – to the whole Gentile world as personified by the Magi.  Isaiah had prophesied that there would come a time when God would bring all nations to himself.  And this we see actually happening here.  So for those of us who are ethnically Gentiles, this is our celebration – one being endorsed by Matthew, a foremost Jewish Christian – that God’s salvation extends to the whole world.

I suspect most of us here have heard that before, and so we are a little desensitised to it. But there is another context, one even more bold, which perhaps we haven’t heard so much and which is equally important in the secular society of today.  Epiphany is God’s revelation to the Gentile world.  But it is also his revelation to the non-religious world.  And indeed, not just his revelation to but his identification with the not-particularly-religious world.  One of the astounding facts of the Christmas narratives, if you read them carefully, is just how absent organised religion is. Jesus is not born the son of a synagogue or temple official, like John the Baptist was. He is born into a family of two simple peasants.  He is not born in any place religiously special – just in a barn next to an inn: not a hint of religion there. Nor at Bethlehem or Nazareth is he visited by any religious figures – no Jewish priest, rabbi or anyone of any note in the religion of his own people.  Just the very secular shepherds and the gentile astronomer Magi.  What we are seeing in this is an Epiphany, a manifestation much more mind-blowing than we thought: this is the revelation of a surpisingly unreligious God – a God who is more in love, from the very start, with the ordinary human world than with the world of organised religion.  The only human representatives of the Jewish establishment, both religious and secular, in the Christmas stories are portrayed negatively: King Herod is, obviously, the villain of the piece – and Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, and he is struck dumb for his complete disbelief that anything as marvellous as Christmas was about to happen. No, the people Jesus surrounds himself with at his birth are ordinary people of the world.  In short, in the Christmas and Epiphany stories we have a true reflection of a God of the secular, or as St John’s Gospel says, a “God who so loves the world”. Notice the world.  So in Epiphany we celebrate that further manifestation: God’s openness to the ordinary human world, not something he rejects but something he embraces, indeed loves.

In a few moments we are going to celebrate a Baptism.  Leo, today is a day of special manifestation to you and by you of God’s love for you in calling you to Baptism.  It is appropriate that we baptise today, because in some parts of the church, Epiphany is thought of as three events all of which reveal Jesus’ identity: the Magi (proclamation of the Messiah); the Baptism of Christ (identification of the Messiah); and the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine (implementation of the Messianic kingdom). All of these were seen combined as one single manifestation of God and were therefore celebrated together.  So today as you are baptised you are participating in that great act of witness by which Jesus himself was made manifest. And by which you now open yourself up fully and publicly to a relationship with God as a Christian.  Henceforth you are no longer an outsider to God’s family, you are one of the sons of God’s family. And just as the Magi came from the east, you have come from a country even further still east than theirs.  Perhaps they can be your patrons as people who journeyed from East to West to find the Saviour.