The Epiphany, 2008

One of the trials and one of the joys of spending a few days at my parents’ home is the opportunity of becoming better acquainted with my former self.

I don’t just mean listening to the family stories, or walking around the garden I played in as a child, although I did both those things this week. I mean also the chance discovery, on an afternoon spent rooting around in the bedrooms, of unintended messages and accidental artefacts from what now seem like a very different person’s life. I found letters written whilst an undergraduate at the bottom of a drawer, and came across ticket stubs and newspaper cuttings from long-forgotten summer holidays in a disused and discarded wallet. And best of all, I also rediscovered presents given me at various rites of passage – Baptism, Confirmation, graduation – stored at home for safe-keeping and long since overlooked.

They’re overlooked for a reason: I’ve never had any use for most of them. There’s the engraved silver egg cup, for example, or the white leather-bound King James Bible with its impossibly dense typeface. Such presents reveal far more about their giver than they do about the three month old me to whom they were given. They reveal perhaps a determined adherence to tradition: silver egg cups are what one gave at a Christening in the mid-60s. Or they reveal the giver’s longed-for image: the present had better be something religious-looking, never mind its religious utility.

Epiphany begins as a feast of gift-giving. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh are pressed into the hands of Mary and Joseph in the smoky gloom of a borrowed house. They are strange gifts, gold gleaming in the carpenter’s work-worn hands, the sweetness of incense blending with the unmistakeable smell of the new-born, myrrh as out of place as a wicked fairy at a celebratory feast, pointing to an end that seems so far off. They are gifts as inappropriate to their tiny recipient as were the silver egg cup and illegible weight of Scripture to me, and they have spawned interpretation and speculation ever since.

What became of those gifts, I wonder? Perhaps they were exchanged for food and shelter in the months of exile that followed their bearers’ visit. Perhaps they survived the flight to Egypt and settlement in Nazareth, but became commonplace and unremarkable in the years of prosperity that followed, as Joseph’s business began to flourish. Or perhaps Mary stored them safely, safeguarding them as a memento of the foreigners who had called upon them that long-lost evening in Bethlehem, and treasuring them as she treasured her memories of her son.

And if she did, I wonder if Jesus ever discovered them. In the thirty years he spent in his parents’ home did he ever come across them in a hidden corner on a long afternoon, and unwrap and gaze upon them, as I did this week? Did he speculate, as have his disciples ever since, about their meaning? Perhaps he marvelled at the richness of the gold and thought of the kings and Caesars whom his people had been taught to fear and obey. Perhaps he caught the scent of the incense, remembered the visit made to Jerusalem when he was twelve years old, and was caught up immediately in the sights and sounds of the Temple precincts, the cries of the sacrificial animals and the chanting of the priests. And perhaps he saw the myrrh and heard the wailing of mourning women in his village, the despair and desolation of loss and bereavement.

Might not those thoughts and memories have then played upon his mind as he set out for the Judean wilderness, to find his cousin John and seek his baptism? Perhaps he then conceived his destiny as the proclamation of a royal kingdom. Perhaps he then understood that the offering of prayer and the offering of self would be the means by which it would be built. And perhaps he then perceived, however dimly, that its building would have suffering and death as its point of crisis and point of creation.

None of that would have come as a comfort to Mary, though, on a Friday night thirty-three years after the Magi’s visit. She might have glimpsed the ironies in the ultimate victory of those earthly authorities that had been trying to stifle and silence her son since the moment of his birth. The kingship to which the wise men’s gold had pointed had been revealed as the executioners’ title, hung above their victim’s twisted body. The priesthood to which the frankincense had pointed had been revealed as sacrificial, certainly, but there had been no ornamental role for her son. Instead the priest had become the sacrifice, offered up beyond the city wall. Only the myrrh seemed to have been an appropriate gift, myrrh for anointing his lifeless body.

And perhaps – just perhaps – it is the wise men’s myrrh that Mary clutches as together with her friends she makes her way to the garden at first light, when the bitter fragrance of myrrh is overwhelmed by the joy of heaven’s angels whose praises arise like the smoke of incense around the throne which shines with the glow of the brightest gold.

King, priest, and sacrifice: Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar could not have chosen better gifts. And although history tells us nothing more of them perhaps we might dare to imagine that, like us, they spent the remainder of their lives living out the truth of the gifts they had born him. For if he is a king then we are his royal family, called to responsibility for the kingdom, for its protection, nurture and growth. If he is a priest then we are his fellow priests, called to occupy the narrow space that exists between God and humankind, representing them one to another. And if he is a sacrifice then we are his fellow-travellers on the way of the cross, called to give everything in his service. Amen.