Epiphany, 1997

Showing Forth

I probably say this every year on the feast of the Epiphany just to remind myself and you that this is, by centuries, a much older feast on the Christian calendar than Christmas is. And the reason is contained in this famous little story that Matthew created because Matthew, in a sense the most Jewish of the Gospels, wanted to say that in Jesus the great destiny of the Jews was realized. That destiny being what? That the Jews were to be the agent of God's manifestation of God's concern for the entire world. So, through the particularity of these people and their historic destiny, God was to show to everybody that God was the God of everybody. And so, this Epiphany, which just means the "showing forth," is that final, definitive revelation of the destiny of the Jews. That's why, because this Jesus movement was essentially a Jewish movement, people saw in the birth of Jesus the completion of what Judaism was all about. There are acouple of interesting things to notice from that. One is to look at, I assume that everyone has been looking at, the news from Israel these days: the great battle over Hebron; the number of settlers that Netanyahu is putting in the midst of all these Palestinans; the battles with the millionaires from Saudi Arabia, or this guy from Florida trying to buy up every bit of real estate to see who can occupy more space before the other guys take over... I bring that up because I think it is illuminating for us Christians because the Jews did not have a homeland from the year seventy when the Roman army finally demolished Jerusalem until 1949 when the UN declared Israel a state and the homeland of the Jews, a lot of that was probably guilt-driven... So for a long time the Jews did not have a homeland but they saw themselves as God's elect with a view to doing what I just said, what the prophets and the whle Jewish tradition said: to be the agency of the manifestation of God to everybody. And yet, look what we have. We have a bunch of hyper-orthodox Jews, instead of opening and demonstrating the amplitude of God's mercy, precisely in the name of God, killing twelve year old kids... and putting on a "turf-war," much to the horror of a lot of other Jews both in the world and in Israel itself. What's going on? There is clearly a betrayal of that destiny. Instead of opening the world to God, they want to re-tribalize God. Okay. For those of us who grew up Roman Catholic there should be all manner of twinges. How much of our life as Roman Catholics has been precisely a process of turf-defending, of erecting barriers, of excluding, rather than saying that God excludes no one. So we can use the destiny of some of these ultra-orthodox Jews as an illuminating, cautionary tale for us, I think, about what we believe religion is.

The second thing, to the same point, is just to indicate what some scholars have called, in a really lovely phrase, "the bourgeoisification of the Christian movement." I just finished a course on the Letters of Paul and Pauline scholarship--that's a wonderful phrase: "the bourgeoisification of the Christian movement." What are we talking about? Within the body of the New Testament itself we see clearly an adaptation of this revolutionary movement from this Jew to the status quo. This is not novel to me, nor is it novel to the guy that came up with that phrase. Instances... Read the Letters to the Ephesians, which is probably not by Paul but written later than Paul--Paul died around sixty-four, or sixty-five, and then one of his disciples began writing this, and very likely writing the Letters to the Colossians, and writing the Letters to Timothy and Titus, and you see very clearly by comparing those letters with the ones that everybody acknowledges as truly Pauline that there are all kinds of little changes, the position of women perhaps being the most notable. It is in Ephesians that wives are told to be submissive to their husbands; it's in the so-called pastoral letters, the Letters of Timothy and Titus, where everyone is told to mind their manners. What is happening there? I mean, how do you put that together with the Paul, that is indubitably Paul, who wrote the Letters to the Galations and says in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free... It is very dangerous for women to be "uppity" in a patriarchal society. If you didn't want to draw attention to yourself you must be indistinguishable from all the Roman matrons and Roman slaves and all these other women because, please remember, until 313A.D. Christianity was illegal. In the Letters to Timothy and Titus we also have all this bureaucratization... Okay, all this may seem ambiguous... If the Jesus movement was to last, certainly it had to be organized. Very clearly you have descriptions of official officers: Bishops are to be married only once, and Priests are not supposed to be drunks and money-grubbers, and they're supposed to be able to take care of their kids, and all that other stuff. It was certainly taking on the colouration of the world of the world around it. And, of course this is the crucial thing, how, as it appears in the title of a great book by Langdon Guildy, does the church minister to the world without losing its soul? How does the church say to the world that God plays no favourites in a way that both is hearable by the world and does not betray the church's own nature?

It is possible, cynically, to read the whole history of the Christian movement from the time of Constantine when Christianity became not only legitimate but the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 313--a date which some scholars believe to be the death-knell of Christianity. As soon as we got respectability, something happened. The particular issue at play here during the Feast of the Epiphany is to what extent do we accomodate it. How do we address the world without losing our souls? How do we speak of a God that is the God of everybody, especially the marginalized, in a way that people can hear and be moved by and drawn to. So, the feast of the Epiphany is a great time to reflect on this problem because the problem is chronic: we've got the Jews today, we've got us today, we've even got it enshrined in our foundation of texts, this tendency to temper the wind to the shorn lamb. Granted, there is all kinds of room for people to disagree on strategy and all this other business. But, so often , these strategic arguments become a form of self-betrayal. Epiphany is a time for us to be grateful that it is the great Festival of Light when God is here for everybody; a time when we need a concomitant look at our own lives to see where we have circumscribed that same God.

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