Sermon for the Epiphany, January 6, 2010

Solemn Mass

by the Reverend Stephen Gerth

Isaiah 60:1-6,9; Psalm 72:1-2,10-17; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

In the summer of 1998, while at a two-week course outside of Minneapolis, a group of us headed off to Stillwater, Minnesota – a town on the Saint Croix River that is full of bookstores, and in particular one bookstore for theological books, Loome’s. While browsing I came across a title I did not know. It was a volume by the late Louis Bouyer, one of the most important liturgical scholars of the last century.

The book I found was called The Paschal Mystery. It was published in French in 1947. The copy I found was the first English edition of 1951. I want to quote his opening words. Bouyer wrote,

To say that the Easter observances are the center of the ecclesiastical year leaves much untold: they are the center where all the liturgy converges and the spring whence it flows. All Christian worship is but a continuous celebration of Easter . . . [1]

I don’t know the liturgical literature that well, but I think it is fair to say that few people would have understood or expressed the heart, the genius, if you will, of Christian worship in that way in 1947, 1951. But I can think of no better insight to approach today’s gospel lesson than Bouyer’s words about the liturgy always being about Easter. The gospels, especially the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, are not biography, but proclamations about Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Paschal mystery.[2]

Matthew and Luke write stories that in many ways are very different. In Matthew, Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem, and Matthew uses the flight to Egypt to explain how Joseph, Mary and Jesus get to Nazareth. In Luke, Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth, and Luke uses the census to explain what they are doing in Bethlehem.

In Matthew the annunciation is to Joseph; in Luke it is to Mary. In Matthew there are wise men; in Luke there are shepherds. The wise men bring gifts; the shepherds bring praise.[3]

In Matthew an evil king murders innocent baby boys; in Luke the infant Jesus is identified as a sign of contradiction, and his mother is told that a sword will pierce her soul.[4] But these biographical narratives are not the point. What we experience as differences between them are beside the point too for both evangelist. The content in each gospel is there as part of the good news that Jesus died and rose.

Tonight, with the wise men, Matthew begins to show us the king of the Jews.  Jesus begins his life as all of us do with the nakedness, blood, and crying of a newborn child. We know that this child will be taken from Bethlehem to avoid the sword of Herod, so that he may can rise from the grave.

Jesus will die with an unusual nakedness, bloody cruelty and the cry of the forsaken. Then, Jesus rises clothed in glory. From conception to resurrection Matthew shows us an unsentimental kingship of Christ. It’s something that makes a lot of Christians, protestant and catholic, nervous.

The principal commentary on the infancy narratives in English remains the one by the late Raymond Brown.[5] I think I finally bought a copy and began to read through it about the time Matt Mead arrived as our curate. I was surprised to learn that the wise men have been far more popular in Christian piety than the shepherds. They themselves were often depicted as kings. They knelt before the child; they brought gold. Representations of them in the catacombs in Rome appear about 200 years before those of the shepherds. When the middle ages come around, the wise men become really popular. Shepherds don’t leave relics; kings do. I did not know until I read Brown that the largest reliquary in the world is for the bodies of the wise men in Cologne Cathedral. This shrine is still a place of veneration.[6]

But what I was most surprised to learn in studying the infancy narratives was that they were about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Once I heard this, I no longer found myself making fun of fundamentalist ideas about Jesus’ birth. Somehow I had grown into young adulthood not knowing there was another and better way to understand the Scripture – better not because it obscures literalist difficulties; better because it brings to the fore the most important things, because it brings to the fore what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted us to know: Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The Easter mystery itself does not answer every question or resolve every difficulty. God is God. We are not. Perhaps it is at the limits of our human questions that faith lives, that faith answers. Why is their sickness? Why is there death? Why is there evil? These questions are raised in Genesis, and still the only answer we really have is faith.

Many of you know that Matthew in many ways is my least favorite gospel. Yet it contains passages that move me deeply. Near the top of my own list of most important stories in all the gospels would be what we call the Great Judgment, where Jesus identifies himself as the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked, the imprisoned, the stranger.[7] It is in Matthew too that we hear God’s kingdom is like the smallest seed,[8] like the pearl[9] or field containing the treasure that a man goes and sells all he has to buy it.[10] It is also in Matthew that Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[11]

From the coming of the wise men to the child, Joseph will make one more appearance in Matthew’s narrative, when Herod is dead and another dream will reveal to Joseph that he is to return from Egypt with Jesus and Mary and to go to Nazareth. Mary will appear only once more, when she and Jesus’ brothers send word to him that they would like to see him. Jesus’ response is to ask, “‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’  And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.’”[12] This is the invitation to the heavenly banquet, to the kingdom of heaven. This is the invitation to faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York.
 

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