14 January 2019

The Sun of Righteousness: Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, Sunday after the Nativity, 12/13th January 2019

In today’s Troparion of the Nativity (Tone 4), we sang that those who had once worshipped stars were now taught by a star to worship the Sun of Righteousness and to recognise the Dawn from on high.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the Wise Men as ignorant or superstitious, because across the whole known world, from the Persian Magi to the priests in the Temple of Jerusalem who were trying to advise an unwise King Herod, the minds of those steeped in the greatest accumulation of knowledge and experience were studying the ordered movements of the heavenly bodies, to see where there might be a divine pattern in creation that could be applied to how we should live and act as humans in the world below. Any variation or unforeseen phenomena were scrutinise to try and understand whether there was evidence of a warning, or a sign of favour, or a command for a new direction, or an old prophecy coming to pass with immediate consequences for the course of the future. It is said that, as well as the offering of sacrifices, the Liturgy of the Temple in Jerusalem was meant to imitate the circular movement of the sun, the moon and the stars, with priests dressed in white and other coverings to symbolise the heavenly beings and the angels, not so as to worship them but to induce here in the world through God’s service among the clouds of incense, the will, the blessing and the living glory of the Lord in heaven. In our worship at the Divine Liturgy, we likewise circulate around the altar; our priests are vested for service amid the angels at the very throne on which Christ our God comes to rest in our midst, and where He reveals Himself vested in the Body and the Blood of the Eucharist so that we acclaim Him as He gives Himself to us, saying “God has appeared to us”.

We have seen his star in the east,” said the Magi likewise to Herod, “and have come to worship Him.” It seems increasingly to astronomers that the alignment of stars, or a comet or a planet, and the movement of the earth at some time in the period following the Lord’s birth indeed supports St Matthew’s account that the path of a heavenly body appeared to move and so it was matched step by step in the earthly tread of the Wise Men, from their roads out of the east and down to Jerusalem, then on to Bethlehem. For a very short time, I was a student in Jerusalem, where one of the professors took us to Bethlehem not just to see the sacred cave of the Nativity but to attest to the archaeology of an ancient well nearby. “This proves it,” he said.  “This was how the Wise Men were satisfied that the heavenly firmament which appeared alive with momentum to them had now come to standstill. They looked down into the water and saw the star was fixed, by its reflection.” Whatever weight we may give to these conjectures, we gain an insight into the ancient system of reading the universe to discern the Divine Plan that wisdom was not some static body of knowledge, but a dynamic mechanism by which God guides the world by His laws for our good, and projects our way by His light towards His glory.

Thus the star is not an exhibition of glory way up in the heavens, but the sign that shows that the Glory has come to shine in our world. It rests over Bethlehem, not so that we may look up, beyond and away, but so that we may focus our vision with heaven’s upon the world it intends to save - and behold the Dawn of God within the humanity that He has come to obtain from us, and by sharing it to give it a new direction and set it in a new light - one that dazzles and amazes us because it shines not from an external source but has been kindled to a blaze from within.

St Paul in today’s Epistle (Galatian 1.11-19) bears this out with his own story of beholding Christ not following an outside explanation, but by revelation within. He tells of how he, too, went off to follow the discovery of Christ that he was astonished to find was shining out through his life, by a journey into the east, then a return to Damascus and in the end to Jerusalem to confer with the holy Apostles Peter and James. He follows the steps of the fourth of the Wise Men. Paul will have told them of his life-changing encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus; Peter will have borne witness to his experience with James and John on the mount of Transfiguration, when divine light was seen changing the very appearance of humanity within the incarnate Christ; James will have recounted the family’s testimony to the events at his divine Brother’s nativity, and the cave that many said was almost too light to be approachable, yet where God came in proximity to His people and enabled them to enter in and behold Him in the Child. And all will have recognised in each other’s story the same brilliance of Emmanuel, God with us, the Christ Himself.

But, as St John reminds among the first words of his Gospel, “The light shines in darkness.” The Wise Men having seen the Light rely on the cover of the darkness to steal away from impending danger. The Holy Family must conceal the Light from the premature threat of death before the true import of its majesty can be revealed in a new cave of resurrection once its glory has been understood upon the Cross of Life. Instead, the Herodian soldiers emerged out of the dark dream-world of the Magi and St Joseph to visit the nightmare of slaughter upon the Holy Innocent children (today’s Gospel, Matthew 2.13-23).

Yet “the darkness does not overwhelm the Light”. We may not look to the pattern of stars for our clues nowadays to understand the ways of God. But we do believe that God has charted a course for us and that it involves turning our humanity inside out, so that the evil, the harm and the deception that we would prefer to lie buried within us are brought out into the light of knowledge (cf. Troparion of the Nativity, Tone 4). We fear this revelation of who we really are, because we know we are sinful and ugly within. But Christ is a Sun of Righteousness to warm us, and to bleach our guilt in light. Because of this we can endure the shattering of our illusions about ourselves like St Paul did. Because of this, we can overcome the shame of our denial of the light of the world like St Peter beside the lesser fire of the guards who arrested Jesus.  Because of this, we know to be constant in life in pursuit of our own bright and strangely leading star, which is quite simply for us the way of the Cross. As our beloved friends in the Salvation Army and the Quakers say: no Cross, no Crown.

Within a few years, the God of heaven had gone from becoming the child of the house of David in Bethlehem, to be the new Moses bringing the Kingdom of God to the Promised Land once more from out of Egypt, and then to be a Nazarene who would take the trajectory of His life as God made Flesh from life, to sacrifice, to death and a new creation, by which all that is at fault is not ultimately rejected but ascended. By the same token for us, this same unclear path of adversity is also the only path there is. It is the path of hope, of finding your way if you lose it, and of knowing that ultimately the light from heaven that shines above you is never going to depart from you, but will always reveal that Christ is God with us, shining from within to make us holy and the living citizens of heaven on earth. Imagine what it is to look in the mirror and to see that what stands before us God has decided to make holy. Imagine what it would be like, looking round to each other today, if the people we can see, and the people seeing us, are beholding holy people. Imagine the people outside who have no conception of the Kingdom glimpsing it by just a glance at us coming down from Mount Tabor, or emerging from the cave at Bethlehem. This is out of proportion to realistic imagination, but it is no more than what Christ told us would become of us. For as we sang earlier on (Troparion of the Resurrection, Tone  8), “You came down from on high as the Merciful One, to free us from our sufferings – O Lord, our life, and now our resurrection, Glory be to You.”

This is why, because it was the will of the Father for His Son, we must always have the same optimistic and forgiving belief in the worth of humanity, and in the power of the Sun of Righteousness to warm and lighten it into the Kingdom.

No comments:

Post a Comment