Epiphany is not a comfortable feast. It is disruptive. It is the moment in the continuing fragile political story when the story of the incarnation of God as Jesus refuses to remain a private affair for one people and one faith. Epiphany reveals the truth that God’s self-giving in the Incarnation cannot be contained within the boundaries drawn by religions, whether cultural, doctrinal, or emotional. The light appears where God wills, not to the elite or special, but to people who should not recognise it, and the whole story of salvation starts with an outward universal and even cosmic outlook given that the Magi are involved.
The word epiphany means an appearing, a disclosure of something hidden. In the Christian tradition it is not simply about the Magi finding the Christ child; it is about God being revealed to all peoples. This is not a footnote to Christmas but its necessary completion. The Incarnation is not only God becoming human in a particular body, in a particular place, at a particular time; it is God offering Godself to the whole world, not as an abstract principle but as vulnerable living flesh.
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The Magi stand at the heart of this disturbance. They were not Jews. They did not belong to the covenant making peoples. They were almost certainly astrologers, wise people formed within the religious cosmologies of Persia, likely shaped by Zoroastrian traditions that took the movements of the heavens seriously as a language of meaning. They come from the region of modern-day Iran, from a world far from Jerusalem’s temple theology and far from Galilee’s rural piety. They do not arrive quoting Torah or carrying psalms in their pockets. They arrive following a star - or rather the conjunction of several planets creating a new star-like object.
Just as an aside I do not think they were Kings as understood in some scripture to emphasise Jesus’ royality. Yes they must of been people of some importance, possible official religious figures from Persia, where Zoroastrianism was a key religious identity for this nation, but we know very little other than this.
So this text is deeply uncomfortable, if we let it be. But actually I find it very exciting. God does not wait for them to convert first, to have to repent of their sins to be abele to take part in this story (drawing on overly redemptive theology, see previous post). No, God does not require them to adopt the correct religious framework before revealing the Messiah. God meets them within the symbolic world they already inhabit. The heavens speak to them in the only language they know, and that language is honoured rather than dismissed. Incarnational theology insists that God always comes to us where we actually are, not where we think we ought to be. The Magi do not leave their culture behind in order to encounter this miraculous incarnation of God; they bring it with them, and somehow it is sufficient.
Yet their journey also weaves into the deep story of Israel. They stumble into Jerusalem and unsettle Herod and the religious elite. They do not know the scriptures, so they must ask for help, and in that asking ancient prophecies are stirred into life again. Micah’s words about Bethlehem are not discovered by devout insiders on their knees in prayer, but by frightened rulers responding to foreign ‘heretics’ who have seen something in the sky. Outsiders provoke insiders to remember what God has already promised. The Messiah is validated not by institutional certainty but by the convergence of the star and the scroll, of Persian cosmology and Jewish hope.
This is Epiphany’s paradox. God is revealed beyond the borders of the faith, and at the same time fulfils the deepest longings of that faith. The Incarnation does not erase Israel’s story; it widens it. Emmanuel is authentically the Messiah of Jewish expectation, yet he is also recognised first by those who have no theological right to recognise him at all.
There is something wonderfully unsettling here in the way we imagine God’s mission. Some often assume that God is already fully present in the church and absent everywhere else, and that our task is to carry God out into a godless world (the mistake of Christendom that mission=outreach). The Magi tell a different story. God is already speaking in distant lands, already stirring hearts, already planting signs in unfamiliar skies. The church is not the owner of revelation but its surprised witness. It is God and God’s character at play here - and Israel has forgotten it was called by Yahweh to be a priestly people to the whole world - not for its own internal salvific needs.
This has profound implications for contemplative practice. As I have said many times now, contemplation is not about escaping the world into private religious or spiritual experience. It is about learning to notice where God is already at work, often beyond our habitual maps of holiness. The Magi are contemplatives of a kind. They pay attention. They watch the heavens. They respond to a quiet inner summons that refuses to be ignored. They undertake a long and costly journey not because they are certain, but because they are attentive and yearning for encounter.
In a distracted consumeristic age, Epiphany invites us back into this kind of attentiveness. The star is not blindingly obvious; it must be watched for, waited on, interpreted, trusted. Contemplative prayer trains us in this same discipline of noticing the subtle movements of God in and around us. It teaches us to read the signs that are not yet fully clear, to follow the faint glimmer of longing rather than the loud certainties of fear and the ego.
When the Magi finally arrive, they do not find a throne room but a child. They fall to the ground not before power but before vulnerability. Incarnational theology insists that this is what God looks like. Not distant majesty but smallness, not control but exposure. The Magi bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh, gifts heavy with symbolic meaning, but they lay them before a baby who can neither understand nor repay them. True epiphany always leads to this moment of unguarded offering, when the heart bows before mystery rather than trying to master it.
Perhaps the deepest gift of Epiphany for our spiritual lives is this: it reminds us that God is always ahead of us, already moving in places we have not yet dared to look. It frees us from the anxious need to defend our borders and instead invites us into a spacious trust. If God could reveal the Christ through Persian astrology, if God could draw non-Jewish mystics into the centre of Israel’s salvation story, then God can certainly meet the seekers, doubters, wanderers, and spiritual refugees of our own day.
To live Epiphany contemplatively is to loosen our grip on the idea that God belongs to us. It is to kneel alongside strangers at the cradle of God, aware that they may have arrived by a road we do not recognise, guided by a star we have not yet learned to see.
Image taken from Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash
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