Sunday,
January 8, 2017
The Feast of
the Epiphany
We Experience
Light As Joy
If We Celebrate It With Praise
Appreciating And
Accepting Jesus As Light Leading The World Into His Glory
Inventory
Do you feel
guided in your life? By what? What do you use from day to day to keep you on
course toward your life’s goals?
•Do you have
more than one goal in life? If so, what unifies or harmonizes them?
Input
The Epiphany is
all about Jesus leading us by his Light to his Light. The theme is light and
motion — guided by a vision of glory.
Light and joy
go together. Joy and praise go together. This is a feast of Light which we will
experience as joy if we celebrate it
with praise.
Joy without
praise, joy unexpressed, is like a smoldering fire. It is real but not
exuberant. If it is not shared, it is not fully experienced. It is stifled
happiness.
The way to
suffocate a house fire is to close all the windows. If someone opens one, the
fire will explode outward and become an inferno. The fire of light and love
that is God’s grace within us follows the same law of nature. If it is not
expressed it is suppressed.
The Entrance Antiphon announces, “The Lord is coming: kingship is his, and
government and power.” But the antiphon will leave us cold unless we
express a response to it. The best response is to join in the proclamation,
make it our own. The way to hear the Good News is to proclaim it. If we do, the
message will inflame the messenger.
In the Opening Prayer we ask God, “Lead us to
your glory in heaven by the light of faith.” The Alternate Opening Prayer specifies: “Draw us beyond the limits
which this world imposes, to the life where your Spirit makes all life
complete.” Faith is a light from beyond this world — a sharing in the knowing
act of God himself — and it is leading us to a “glory” that is also beyond this
world, the glory of God himself. Does this make us poignantly, painfully aware
of how limited the lives are of those who have never had, or who have given up,
the faith? They are still bound in, enclosed within “the limits which this
world imposes.” Limited knowledge, limited understanding, limited hopes, a
limited sense of destiny, and nothing to love except the limited goodness of
creatures evoking a limited response — with every relationship terminating in
death. Enclosed within that darkness, the best they can have is a dim view of
everything — even when they experience it as brilliance.
But if we don’t
express our faith, give praise to God for what we see — praise him publicly,
enthusiastically, authentically — others have no way of suspecting the “more.”
In this context the expression “to damn with faint praise” takes on new and
sobering meaning.
That is why we
celebrate the Epiphany: to recall and to reflect to others the Light we have
received, the Light by which we journey, the Light that is leading us “beyond
the limits which this world imposes” into the fullness of life that is found in
sharing the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.” To him we proclaim in the Gloria:
You alone are
the Holy One,
you alone are
the Lord,
you alone are
the Most High,
Jesus Christ,
with the Holy Spirit,
with the Holy Spirit,
in the glory of
God the Father.
Amen.
We need to proclaim this to the world.
Isaiah’s trumpet
Isaiah 60: 1-6 summons us to
praise: “Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!” This is exactly what the liturgy
invites us to do at the beginning of every Mass: “Stand up! On your feet,
believers! Rise up and sing. Show your splendor in letting the Entrance hymn rock the rafters!” Is
anything less than this worthy of what we celebrate, of what we are about to
do?
Why do we rise
up? Isaiah tells us, “because your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines
upon you.” We have the light. We didn’t find it for ourselves, we didn’t figure
it out. It was just given to us. But it makes us different!
“See, darkness
covers the earth.” Isn’t that disturbingly obvious every time we read a paper
or turn on the TV? “And thick clouds cover the peoples” — clouds of ignorance,
bad example, distorted education, prejudice, divisiveness, hostility, addiction
to violence.
“But upon you
the Lord shines, and over you appears his glory.” It appears to “those who have
eyes to see.” But how many cannot see because we have thrown dust in their
eyes? The dust of our own acceptance of violence, our own idolatry, the
devotion we show to the gods of our culture: prosperity, prestige, productivity,
position and power? How many can’t see our glory because we are hiding it under
a “bushel basket” of cowardly reserve, apathetic participation at Mass,
conformist behavior in social and professional life, just plain laziness about
Scripture reading and prayer? And yet the glory is there. The light is within
us. We are the light of the world. We just have to let it shine.[1]
“Raise your
eyes and look about,” Isaiah invites us: “Nations shall walk by your light….
They all gather and come to you.” Actually, they are coming to us now. People
are seeking the truth and finding it in the Church. Those who defected because
they suffocated the light within themselves by not letting it shine are being
replaced by those who “want out” of the darkness. These are coming,
“proclaiming the praises of the Lord.” They need to find us proclaiming his
praises also, so that we can all rejoice in the koinonia, the “communion in the Holy Spirit” that is the visible
“glory of God” on earth.
If we “proclaim
his praises” enough, that glory will bring about what the Responsorial (Psalm 72)
exults in: “Lord, every nation on earth
will adore you.”
The Preview
Matthew 2: 1-12: This
can have humble beginnings. The visit of the Magi may seem impressive in the
small-town setting of Bethlehem, but, aside from the fact that we don’t really
know what the “magi” were, there were only three of them and they didn’t stay
long! (Actually, we don’t know how many there were. We guess three because
three types of gift are mentioned). The story is not meant to show the nations
streaming in to Jesus, but just to make the point that from the very beginning
the Good News was meant for all.
This
was to counter the “fundamentalist” Christians of the “judaizing” or Pharisee
party, who claimed that letting the Gentiles into the Church without requiring
them to observe all the Jewish customs was an innovation introduced by Paul and
the Apostles, something “Jesus never did!” Here, as elsewhere, Matthew shows
that, though the mission of Jesus himself while on earth was only to the Jews,
the Father did send others to him and he accepted them.[2]
In
our day we must guard against the tendency to restrict the Mass — or even
Communion — to a special “elite” who meet all our customary benchmarks, some of
which are stricter than our faith requires.
Just
as obviously, we need to resist any attempt to impose one language on the
liturgy. It is typical of colonialism, and contrary to catholicism (small c) to
repress native languages. Christians do not have any “sacred language” such as
Hebrew is for the Jews and Arabic for the Moslems. As a “catholic” Church, we
consider all languages equal, both for worship and for proclaiming divine
revelation. All we ask is that they be intelligible to their hearers. For us, this
is a logical conclusion from “Lord,
every nation on earth will adore you.”
This is the
overwhelming theme of the celebration of the feast of the Epiphany: that every nation on earth will adore him.
That his light will shine out to every human being on earth, through every
human being enlightened and enlivened by his grace. This is what the Church
lives and exists for, to evangelize the world. And the first act of
evangelization is praise. How can we excite others about something we don’t
appear to be excited about ourselves?
A Propulsion to Praise
In Ephesians 3: 2-6 St. Paul says we have
something to be excited about! It is “the mystery
unknown in former ages but now revealed by the Spirit,” that “in Christ” the
Gentiles are now coheirs, members of the same body, and copartners in the
promise of the Gospel. We are compelled to praise God for the glory he is
bringing about:
Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ.... He chose us in Christ.... to the praise of his glorious grace .... He has made known to us
the mystery of his... plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ.... so that we... might live for the praise of his glory. In him you
... were marked with the... Holy Spirit...
to the praise of his glory (Ephesians 1:3-12).
If we are not
moved to praise him, we haven’t really heard the Good News.
Insight
How
do I feel now about praising God at Mass?
Initiative:
Join
the “cheering section” at Mass. Sit with others. Sing. Get with it.
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