Imagine you are commissioned to write a film; a film about the most extraordinary period in your life when everything you thought you knew was turned upside down. And strangely, although everything now is the wrong way up you know in the core of your being that this is the way it was always supposed to be. You had thought that you were settled, grown up, that life wasn’t ever going to fundamentally change from the way it had been for the last 10, 20 or 30 years. Yet through sharing in the life and beliefs of one man your whole existence has been changed; your relationships have changed, you’ve given up your old job and you’re now committed in a way you’ve never been before- not even to your husband or wife or children or parents.
And you know that having grasped reality- what life is really truly about you have now been given the task of sharing this new way of life with everyone else. Not just your family and friends the people you love- but everybody. People you don’t know, or people you do but don’t particularly like, because now of course in a certain way you love everybody. This isn’t a sentimental kind of love but a love which means you understand everyone is valuable because every human being is the subject of God’s delight. Even the people your family and friends- and you yourself at one stage- regarded with disdain or contempt. No one is outside God’s love. You realise now that everything- everything- is suffused with the glory of God and that everyone has the potential to give witness to this glory.
This is of course the task that faced the gospel writers. Their lives had been changed through sharing in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. They wrote so the communities that they were part of could grow in the likeness of Jesus Christ. It is this which Paul speaks of when he writes “for surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you,”
Each gospel is written as the gospel according to one named individual. They each have their own particular spin.’ They each betray the story of how Jesus Christ changed the lives of a particular person, or rather a particular community, and they tell the story of how our lives might be changed too. We live our lives in dialogue with scripture; you may think that it is our job to interpret scripture but of course our real task is to allow scripture to interpret us.
Matthew’s gospel is one shaped by his witness to Christ’s sense of radical inclusion. No where is this more clear than in Matthew’s birth narratives which are rather like a trailer for the main feature; just as outsiders are brought to witness Jesus’ birth so throughout Jesus’ adult life and ministry the marginalised will be part of the main action. No one is excluded from God’s embrace in Jesus Christ.
Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus tracing his lineage back to Abraham, Isaac and Joseph. But along with some of the heroes of the Jewish faith there are a few disreputable characters. To begin with this is a geneology which includes women and women such as Rahab- a prostitute from Jericho. So at the outset we are given an account of Jesus’ background which includes people normally considered outsiders; but here the outsiders are crucial to the unfolding of events through which God’s promises are realised.
In the same way Jesus is visited by the Magi- men from the East who practiced the art of astrology- something denounced elsewhere in scripture.
As the story of Christ’s nativity has been told and re-told across different cultures the presence of these pagan foreigners coming to worship Christ has lost some of its shocking grittiness. The wise men are now, ironically, so much part of the story that we risk losing the full impact of their presence as outsiders. Over time they have gained an illusion of respectability albeit with an alluring hint of the exotic. But these men would have been objects of contempt for Matthew’s community. That foreigners of all people should be witnesses to Christ’s glory shows how topsy turvey God’s promises are. Although the journey of the magi might provide us with an example of faithful perseverance it is equally a story of God’s faithfulness to the outsider.
Through God’s grace the magi, secular outsiders, have burst on to the religious stage and grabbed one of the main parts. How might we understand this relationship between secular and religious in our own time?
The weeks around Christmas are a time when it seems that the religious and secular uneasily compete for space on the public stage. In a period of two weeks religious and secular festivals have been laid one on top of another each claiming priority. As we know Christmas is a festival which was laid upon a pre-existing pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Now the media is full of examples of local councils seeking to iron out Christian references; it as if there are parts of societies seeking to rid a festival of any religious content.
The next big religious festival is today- epiphany- yet between Christmas and Epiphany we have New Year- generally regarded as an entirely secular festival. Given its secular tone we can find ourselves making largely secular resolutions- go to the gym, eat more healthily, read more (at least these are some of mine).
This year I went to church on New Year’s Eve and experienced a very real sense of the religious and the secular competing for space. As the congregation met in the church by candlelight from beneath us in the crypt came the beat of music as party goers saw in 2007.
At midnight the priest carried the Blessed Sacrament out into the street and in this way presented Christ to the world. At the same time fireworks were going off in nearby streets. In a very real way the secular and religious jostled for space, and yet it didn’t seem wrong either; perhaps what is wrong is our division between religious and secular. The feast of Epiphany demonstrates that God’s categories don’t always match our own- that his faithfulness and grace means that Christ appears to people who might never otherwise enter the religious frame.
Epiphany allows an opportunity- the quiet after the storm of Christmas and New Year, to consider who are the magi of today- the people which society deems to be outsiders but who seek to bring their gifts to Christ? We might also want to explore whether there are parts of ourselves which we consider to be beyond the sphere of religious thoughts and practices. What are those parts of ourselves that we might belatedly present to Christ?
The writer of Matthew’s gospel grappled with these questions and so was transformed; in reading Matthew we can understand that there is nothing in our lives- or the lives of others- that will keep us away from Christ’s radiant glory. Amen