The epiphany of there being no Epiphany
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| Epiphany by Kevin Roddy (Source) |
In western traditions of Christianity, the season of epiphany, which has just begun, centres upon a short legendary tale told only by Matthew (2:1-12) concerning a group of Zoroastrian astrologer-priests out of the east who, guided by a star, take a long journey west to visit and make obeisance — that is to say, to pay deferential respect — to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Matthew tells us that whilst passing through Jerusalem they inform King Herod that they are looking for the newborn King of the Judaeans, and Herod, in reply, asks them to return to him once they have found the child so he, too, may go and make his own obeisance. Leaving Jerusalem they eventually find their way to Bethlehem and, having paid their respects and given gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh to the child, they depart for their own country by another path having been warned in a dream not to return to King Herod.
As many of you will know, the mainstream western Christian tradition has long interpreted this story as being the archetypal moment when Jesus — who, in the words of the Nicene Creed (325CE), most Christians believe to be very God of very God — first appeared, or was made manifest, to the Gentiles, i.e. to those who were not Jewish as was Jesus and his family. The word “epiphany”, remember, is simply the Koine Greek word meaning manifestation or appearance.
Now, there are many things I might say about this story, but one thing that has long struck me as particularly interesting, concerns something that is missing from the story, glaringly so when you think about it. It is the absence of any further information about what the Zoroastrian astrologer-priests, the Magi, make of their meeting with Jesus. In the story, they simply up and leave, and no more is ever heard about them.
I suppose that most Christians through the centuries have simply assumed that meeting Jesus caused them to cease to be Zoroastrian astrologer-priests and become Christians in some fashion. But really, there is no reason to assume this was the case and, in fact, we cannot be sure they experienced any epiphany at all, let alone the one the Christian tradition thinks they experienced.
Although I realise this story is a myth and not history, taking it at face value and assuming, without evidence, that some kind of epiphany did occur for them, it’s entirely conceivable to me that one possible epiphany they may have experienced was related to the fact that their journey ended in disappointment. I can easily imagine that on arriving in Bethlehem they did not find either the King of the Judeans or the Christ Child of later Christian legend, for whom it is suggested they were seeking. Perhaps what they actually found was simply a lovely, newborn child of the kind that can be found everywhere and always across the generations and geography; and, again perhaps, it was this that became for them an epiphany of the everyday mystery and miracle of life itself. Such an epiphany would, or course, not have required them to convert them from one religion to another, but it might have brought about a radical change of perspective that deepened their own understanding of their inherited Zoroastrian faith and made them different, and perhaps, more faithful and more rounded astrologer-priests than before.
It is also possible to imagine another scenario in which theirs was an epiphany of the everyday mystery and miracle of life, which ended for them their certainty in their old faith entirely and helped them to enter on to a new spiritual path. Perhaps that new path was a type of Christianity — there’s no need to deny that possibility — but it’s just as easy to imagine that their new spiritual path was something which, in Japan, my own tradition calls jijū shūkyō, namely, a creative, enquiring, free and liberative religion, that is radically open to seeing the mystery and miracle of life displayed in countless different ways everywhere, at all times, and in all cultures and religious traditions; that knows no specific religion either monopolises religious truth nor is it the ultimate embodiment of it.
I’m absolutely sure that only a little more thinking would suggest to us other kinds of epiphany that the Magi might have experienced. However, today, I don’t need to run through all the possibilities because the basic point I wish to make today — and make really quite strongly — is that the Magi’s epiphany, if epiphany there was, is one about which we know absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. And, today, I want to suggest that this insight of ignorance should be a kind of epiphany for us.
As many of you will know, the mainstream western Christian tradition has long interpreted this story as being the archetypal moment when Jesus — who, in the words of the Nicene Creed (325CE), most Christians believe to be very God of very God — first appeared, or was made manifest, to the Gentiles, i.e. to those who were not Jewish as was Jesus and his family. The word “epiphany”, remember, is simply the Koine Greek word meaning manifestation or appearance.
Now, there are many things I might say about this story, but one thing that has long struck me as particularly interesting, concerns something that is missing from the story, glaringly so when you think about it. It is the absence of any further information about what the Zoroastrian astrologer-priests, the Magi, make of their meeting with Jesus. In the story, they simply up and leave, and no more is ever heard about them.
I suppose that most Christians through the centuries have simply assumed that meeting Jesus caused them to cease to be Zoroastrian astrologer-priests and become Christians in some fashion. But really, there is no reason to assume this was the case and, in fact, we cannot be sure they experienced any epiphany at all, let alone the one the Christian tradition thinks they experienced.
Although I realise this story is a myth and not history, taking it at face value and assuming, without evidence, that some kind of epiphany did occur for them, it’s entirely conceivable to me that one possible epiphany they may have experienced was related to the fact that their journey ended in disappointment. I can easily imagine that on arriving in Bethlehem they did not find either the King of the Judeans or the Christ Child of later Christian legend, for whom it is suggested they were seeking. Perhaps what they actually found was simply a lovely, newborn child of the kind that can be found everywhere and always across the generations and geography; and, again perhaps, it was this that became for them an epiphany of the everyday mystery and miracle of life itself. Such an epiphany would, or course, not have required them to convert them from one religion to another, but it might have brought about a radical change of perspective that deepened their own understanding of their inherited Zoroastrian faith and made them different, and perhaps, more faithful and more rounded astrologer-priests than before.
It is also possible to imagine another scenario in which theirs was an epiphany of the everyday mystery and miracle of life, which ended for them their certainty in their old faith entirely and helped them to enter on to a new spiritual path. Perhaps that new path was a type of Christianity — there’s no need to deny that possibility — but it’s just as easy to imagine that their new spiritual path was something which, in Japan, my own tradition calls jijū shūkyō, namely, a creative, enquiring, free and liberative religion, that is radically open to seeing the mystery and miracle of life displayed in countless different ways everywhere, at all times, and in all cultures and religious traditions; that knows no specific religion either monopolises religious truth nor is it the ultimate embodiment of it.
I’m absolutely sure that only a little more thinking would suggest to us other kinds of epiphany that the Magi might have experienced. However, today, I don’t need to run through all the possibilities because the basic point I wish to make today — and make really quite strongly — is that the Magi’s epiphany, if epiphany there was, is one about which we know absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. And, today, I want to suggest that this insight of ignorance should be a kind of epiphany for us.
Because we know nothing about the epiphanies (if any) of the Magi, I want to begin to draw my words to a close by borrowing an insight from the twentieth-century American philosopher, Bruce W. Wilshire (1932–2013), which allows me to suggest that the answer to what epiphany was had — if any — by the Magi, or by any other person who met Jesus throughout his short life, is never something we can spin out of our heads as if we were gods. All we can ever do as pilgrims of faith is to “listen, resonate to affinities, send out questions, listen for answers, send out more questions. We can only continuously echo-locate and re-locate ourselves” (The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought, Penn State Press, 2000, p. 171).
I remain convinced — although I do not insist you must share this feeling with me — that only such an open attitude is able to gift us the possibility of experiencing ourselves ANY true epiphany about anything in the first place.
For me, the so-called “Epiphany story” has become an annual invitation to recall the need to remain ever open to the worlding-of-the-world which is always-already happening all around us, all the time. And, again for me, this has come to mean that for any individual epiphany to be taken seriously and felt to be real, it must include an epiphany that encodes the insight that, minute by minute, day by day, year by year, millennium by millennium, new epiphanies of all kinds will always be coming to humankind that may well radically change our individual and collective ways of being-in-the-world.
This insight has rarely been better and more simply expressed within the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant Christian tradition than by the Congregationalist lay-person, George Rawson’s (1807-1889) in the once well-known hymn lyric, the opening two verses of which, conclude my Epiphany thought for the day:
We limit not the truth of God
To our poor reach of mind,
By notions of our day and sect,
Crude, partial and confined.
Now let a new and better hope
Within our hearts be stirred:
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.
Who dares to bind by his dull sense
The oracles of heaven,
For all the nations, tongues and climes
And all the ages given!
The universe how much unknown!
That ocean unexplored!
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.
I remain convinced — although I do not insist you must share this feeling with me — that only such an open attitude is able to gift us the possibility of experiencing ourselves ANY true epiphany about anything in the first place.
For me, the so-called “Epiphany story” has become an annual invitation to recall the need to remain ever open to the worlding-of-the-world which is always-already happening all around us, all the time. And, again for me, this has come to mean that for any individual epiphany to be taken seriously and felt to be real, it must include an epiphany that encodes the insight that, minute by minute, day by day, year by year, millennium by millennium, new epiphanies of all kinds will always be coming to humankind that may well radically change our individual and collective ways of being-in-the-world.
This insight has rarely been better and more simply expressed within the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant Christian tradition than by the Congregationalist lay-person, George Rawson’s (1807-1889) in the once well-known hymn lyric, the opening two verses of which, conclude my Epiphany thought for the day:
We limit not the truth of God
To our poor reach of mind,
By notions of our day and sect,
Crude, partial and confined.
Now let a new and better hope
Within our hearts be stirred:
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.
Who dares to bind by his dull sense
The oracles of heaven,
For all the nations, tongues and climes
And all the ages given!
The universe how much unknown!
That ocean unexplored!
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.
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