Christmastide is completed by the feast of the Epiphany, which is the manifestation of the Lord to the whole world. Following an ancient tradition that originated in the Eastern Church, in this feast we celebrate not only the adoration of the child Jesus by the three wise kings, but also the baptism of Christ in the Jordan and the first miracle of Christ, the transformation of water into wine at the wedding of Cana. In this feast we see Christ as the Light of World, the only light that can illuminate the way for those who are walking in darkness and in the shadow of death, as Saint Gregory Nazianzeno reminds us. For the Greek Fathers of the Church, the worse tragedy of man is the ignorance of Christ. This ancient and valuable insight, which is part of the traditional wisdom of the Church, is confirmed by the darkness that we experience in the contemporary world. Sadly, many in the world today do not really know about Christ and His saving power, or have only a sad caricature of who Christ really is.
At Christmas, the child Jesus was adored by a small group of shepherds, but at the Epiphany he is adored by the three wise kings who represent the whole of humanity. This is why we believe that with this feast we celebrate the manifestation of the saving grace of the Lord to the whole world. The three kings are depicted in Catholic tradition as being Caucasian, African and Asian, so in them we have represented the main ethnic groups of the world. Also, another tradition sees the kinds at varying ages, one being very young, another being a mature man and the third being a man of senior years. So in them the three ages of mankind are reflected.
In the gifts of the wise kings we have a very important insight into the nature of the Divine Child; an insight based on a message they received before they saw Christ, before they started their voyage, when they were guided by God to select their gifts. So before adoring the visible Lord, they started to adore Him in their minds and hearts with the hope of seeing him in person, and their three gifts have great significance for the faithful even today.
Incense proclaims the divinity of the child Jesus, as incense is traditionally offered primarily to God. Remember how many Christians in the early Roman persecutions suffered martyrdom because they refused to offer a pinch of incense to the infamous idols that St. Augustine describes so well in The City of God. This is also reminder to us that the increasingly tyrannical world in which we live is ready to persecute us because we refuse to pander to what is politically correct. Myrrh was offered to Him signifying His human nature: it is a prophetic reminder of the mix of herbs that would be prepared to preserve the body of Christ by the women who loved Him. Gold represents the regality of Christ, as it is clearly proclaimed in the liturgy of this feast and has been taught by many Popes. It comes from the tributes that are due to earthly kings or to other civil authorities. Also it makes a reference to the obligation that Christians have to support in a material way the Church and other Christian works of charity in proportion to their economics means and the duties they have towards their families.
These symbolic gifts lead us to meditate on the gifts that we Christians ought to offer to Christ, as Saint Leo the Great reminds us in his Second Homily on the Epiphany. The Lord wants our serious commitment and our work, because the Kingdom of God is not given to the ones who sleep, but instead to the persons that make a serious and constant effort to practice the Commandments. In our particular case, besides practicing the Commandments, the Lord has given us the particular vocation to proclaim the Gospel of Life, so in this Epiphany our gift to the newly born King is to strengthen our efforts to proclaim the integral truth of the Church, especially those teachings on life and family.
The Lord manifested Himself to the world, but after two thousand years this presence seems to have been muted. The Lord established His Church to carry on His manifestation until the end of the world, so the Church, and ourselves as members of the Church, have to find ways to continue to present Christ's saving message in all possible ways. We have to present this message in such a way that it will create the same admiration and marvel that it caused in its first listeners. At the same time, this message should be accompanied by the liturgical beauty that led the delegates of Kiev to convert after experiencing the Divine Liturgy at Santa Sofia in Constantinople. The grace of the Lord in the same way that converted the hearts of the wise men before they saw the child Jesus, also works in the hearts and minds of many men today. Still, in same way that those wise men were confirmed in their interior faith by seeing the Child, the men of our days need to see our convincing testimony so that the interior movement of the soul might be confirmed.
On behalf of everyone at HLI, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year. 2011 will be happy and prosperous, we can be sure, if we follow the ways of the Lord. So what I sincerely wish to all you is that you truly accept the Reign of our Lord in your hearts and minds, then all the rest that you need will be granted to you, because no one defeats the generosity of the Lord!
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