“Where is the newborn King of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:2)
Right before I sat down to write this homily, I got called
to visit a dying parishioner. My homily
was about searching for the Divine, particularly about the search of the Magi,
and here I was standing before a child of God who was about to encounter the
Divine. All of us are on a life long
search for the transcendent, and this soul, so close to death, was about to
come face to face with the same God that the Magi encountered in Bethlehem under
that star.
We spend our lives waiting to encounter God. We spend our lives searching for joy, peace,
fulfillment, and more often than not we go searching in all the wrong
places. The Magi no doubt searched until
the day the star appeared and it is that search, and that openness to that
search, that ultimately leads them to finding the Christ Child.
The beginning of this New Year affords us the opportunity to
take up that search anew. Perhaps we
have been stuck in neutral (or reverse) when it comes to our spiritual
life. Perhaps we have abandoned the
search all together. Today’s Solemnity
of the Epiphany is a wake up call to seek out the living God who comes to make
all things new. Each of us has a longing
for the transcendent, for something new, and all our answers lie here in this
manger. Unfortunately, sin squashes that
search for something beyond us. Epiphany
by its very definition means a sudden revelation or insight. Once we open our eyes to see this sudden
revelation and behold that we don’t have to search for very long to find the
living God, our lives are immediately transformed.
This past Thursday, in his Epiphany homily Pope Francis
concluded: “The Magi
experienced longing; they were tired of the usual fare. They were all too
familiar with, and weary of, the Herods of their own day. But there, in
Bethlehem, was a promise of newness, of gratuitousness. There something new was
taking place. The Magi were able to worship, because they had the courage to
set out. And as they fell to their knees before the small, poor and vulnerable
Infant, the unexpected and unknown Child of Bethlehem, they discovered the
glory of God.”
It
is indeed a New Year. We are indeed
tired of the old and familiar and are longing for something new. Our search ends here at the manger as it did
for the Magi. As the Holy Father said,
may we have the courage to “set out.” A
friend of mine tweeted last night, “Do not ask God to guide your footsteps if
you’re not willing to move your feet.”
We must ask the Holy Spirit for the gift of courage to be able to seek
out the God who calls us to newness of life.
The star of Bethlehem has indeed risen.
May we follow that star like the Magi and be transformed into something
new that reflects the very glory of God.
