Homily: In Safe Hands

Year B / Solemnity of the Epiphany

Readings: Isaiah 60.1-6 / Responsorial Psalm 71.2, 7-8, 20-11, 12-13 (R/v cf 11) / Ephesians 3.2-3a, 5-6 / Matthew 2.1-12

Comings and goings. We associate these words with movement. 

Our travels express well what comings and goings can mean. We come to a place to visit; we look and see; we taste and savour; we enjoy our encounters. Then, we go home, laden with memories and souvenirs for ourselves and good buys and gifts for family and friends. Don’t we come with little but go home with more, sometimes too much more with heavier bags or multiple ones?

Pilgrimages are no different. We come to a holy place with good intentions and perhaps, more significantly, with hopes in God. And we go home from Lourdes or Assisi or Jerusalem with the many medals, bottles of holy water, crucifixes and rosaries we feel we need to buy to say we had a holy time. But do we go home with God?

Comings and goings, whether for spiritual wellbeing or bodily rest, are always part of an adventure: we don’t really know what will happen. All we have is the journey; and we’re always being invited to be a part of it. The journey, more than our comings and goings,  is perhaps the most important experience in our life and faith.

Something of travelling, of pilgrimage, of adventure is woven into the narrative of the three wise men that we remember on this solemnity of the Epiphany.  These wise men of learning — or rich kings as they are sometimes depicted — journey to find the newborn king. They come to Bethlehem. They find Jesus. They do him homage and they offer him gifts. Then ‘they depart for their country by another way.’ The wise men come; the wise men go.

We know the details of their coming from Matthew’s Christmas narrative. We know about the star that leads them to Jesus. About their encounter with Herod who affirms from Scripture that Bethlehem is their destination. We know they find Jesus there, prostrate themselves before him, offer him gold fit for a king to reign, frankincense fit for God to be praise, and myrrh fit to anoint the human body in death. From folklore, we know them as Melchior, Casper and Balthazar. 

Our Scriptures, Catechism and Tradition teach us that their coming to Bethlehem involved an encounter: their human yearning for God met God’s eternal longing for humankind. This encounter revealed God’s love to save all peoples into eternal life. This is Epiphany, and this is what we remember, celebrate and believe in again today. We do so because it is good news. 

But it is radical good news because God’s love in Jesus is not just for the shepherds, the poor and the people in darkness in Israel.  It is also for the rich, the learned and the foreign in distant lands. It is truly good news because in Jesus God’s love is for more than those who know God in the faith; it is also and always for all, no matter if they are of different faiths and from myriad nations. Truly, all are entitled to God’s salvation.

This good news is so radical that it cannot be anything else but joyful. This must be why the angels on high sing ‘Gloria’ and ‘Peace to people of goodwill’ because this is who God is and what God does for all peoples in Jesus.  And so, shouldn’t ask ourselves: “Do I delight that God in the mystery of God’s saving love has come in Jesus to redeem not just me but also my Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist neighbor into eternal salvation, or am I disturbed by this reality of God's saving love?”

Today, I believe we also celebrate something else; something that can illuminate our own journeys of life and faith, with all the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties we have as a pilgrim people.

We will find this something in the ending to the story of the three wise men. Nothing is said about what happened to them after their encounter with Jesus. Only this: that they returned home by a different route. They seem to have slipped away quietly and disappeared into anonymity. You might say that their stories blended into the collective Christmas tale. 

Yet, their slipping away is integral to the plot line of the Christmas story. It teaches us of what is truly exchanged between God and humankind: not gifts but the gift of being held in safe hands. This is the something that can enlighten our journeys; it is a lesson for us.

The wise men followed the star. They found and adored Jesus. They completed their journey. In coming to Jesus and then going forth after encountering him, their movement did not end in a God they sought. Rather, it brought them to a beginning with a God who came to them. Yes, they placed their gifts, everything of worth they had, at the feet of the Infant King. But they also offered everything they were safely into God’s hands that allowed them to begin their life anew. 

As characters in the Christmas story, we see how the wise men have no need to fight for the central place in the plot. They happily cede everything to Jesus, the central protagonist in the this story. This is why they disappear in the plot: because they can. They are free enough to do so. Free because what they really gift Jesus with is not gold, frankincense and myrrh but their trust — a trust that God will hold them safe in Jesus’ hands.  

I believe this must have been the experience the wise men had of coming to Jesus and going forth from him: we only need to imagine how true this must be as they let the baby Jesus hold them as they cradled him, and how this embrace remained their comfort through their lives. Haven’t you experienced something of this in carrying your newborn child or nephew or niece, and remembering how you held each other lovingly? 

Indeed, what other expression of being securely loved is there but that of being held in safe hands? Isn’t this true when God has held us into eternal love in Jesus’ safe hands, no matter how often we have sinned?

Perhaps, this is why Simeon’s prayer must come alive in us: “Now, Lord, you can dismiss your servant!” To come to Jesus; to be held in Jesus’ safe hands; and to go forth from Jesus with this comfort for our lives — isn’t this enough reason to have Simeon’s ready disposition that we can die, whatever the state of our Christian life, because we are indeed already in Jesus’ safe hands? 

The Christmas story of the three wise men tells us that we are in safe hands. Are you and I ready to let go and to let God lead us on our life journeys, however dark and disconcerting they may be? 

If we are, we should refocus what our life journey is about. It cannot be about our comings and goings in our journey to God. Rather, we must let ourselves be found and held safe by our God who always journeys to us in Jesus. 

May be when you and I do do this, we will understand why T.S. Eliot closes his poem “The Journey of the Magi” with this truth: that with the Incarnation everything changes, and our journeys of life and faith, like the journeys of the wise men, will never be the same again.

(With insights from Dom Damien, monk)

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

artwork: “Adoration of the Magi” by Andrea Mantegna (c. 1500)