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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - The Epiphany 4th January


Of all the nativity festivals, the Epiphany is perhaps the most colourful and yet, at least in Anglo-Saxon cultures, the most neglected, it is really eclipsed by the earlier Christmas feasts and the celebration of the New Year, it is the full stop at the end of the holidays!

Here’s our chance to reclaim this feast as a purely religious festival. One idea might be to make it a day of hospitality, welcome and ecumenism. The readings for the feast point out that the ‘Magi’ represent the world beyond faith confines, beyond our denominational securities. We read, ‘Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body and co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel (Ep 3.6).

All through these days of Christmas the clear message is that the Word made flesh, the light that came into the world, revealed in Jesus, somehow was and is so often recognised by those on the margins of faith or estranged from it.
Perhaps that is because in their lives and hearts all pretense and subterfuge is removed, they look, they search and they see. For those of us involved in faith the baggage we carry sometimes clouds our own search, tires us out so that we don’t bother to search a little harder, look a little more closely at what God might be doing in our own world.

The Magi, those wise, religious, persons from the East risked everything to follow their star and find the answer that they sought. They found deceit and danger in the establishment world, instead it was in the poor and unnoticed that found the God they sought and it was to the child Jesus they gave their fabulous gifts and worshipped him!

Their lives were changed; they didn’t return back to their familiar ways, that route, as personified by Herod’s cruelty, was no longer one that led to life!
So what about us? Maybe we should see this feast the call to recognize ourselves as part of the wider Christian family in which all are welcome, those whose mission is partly that hospitality of graciousness to others, going that extra mile in love and service, like the Magi following the star and offering their gifts.

And it’s a feast of light and joy, when we share with others the revelation that the true Morning Star that never sets has come. As Isaiah says, ‘raise your heads and look about!’.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.

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