Reflection for Sunday – January 5, 2025

Susan RollSunday Readings Homilies

Readings: Isaiah 60: 1-6; Ephesians 3: 2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2: 1-12 
Preacher: Susan K. Roll

Have you ever set out to give one gift and found yourself giving something very different?

I don’t just mean under the Christmas tree or stuffed in a stocking.  It might be a gift of our time or presence that takes us, and perhaps the recipient, into some unexpected place.  It might be the gift of just the right thing to say.  It might be some comment that, years later, the hearer tells you changed their life or made them stronger.  It might even be the gift of our lives, how we lived them, maybe the choices we’ve made, that could turn into a gift we hadn’t imagined.

If you’re like me, you still have Christmas gifts lying about under the Christmas tree, or what passes for a Christmas tree.  Some were gifts given to you, gifts that may have spoken of who you are or what your interests are, reflected back in the good intentions and generosity of the givers.  Some may be still wrapped, until you have a chance to give them to your recipients.  And you hope the gifts will be not only helpful and pleasing to the recipients but convey something of your love for them.

My mother, late in life, confided that every Christmas Eve she would lie awake, worrying that she hadn’t found enough presents for the two of us children, or we wouldn’t like them.  She needn’t have worried.

Today’s Gospel is partly about gifts that are not what they seem, but more than they seem.  How many times have you seen the Epiphany cartoon that shows three women muttering about the impracticality of the Magi’s gifts.  What would wise women have brought?  Diapers!  A casserole!  Warm blankets, for God’s sake.

To penetrate under the surface of the “gold, frankincense and myrrh” we need first to understand the story as, precisely, a story.  As in the nativity account in Luke 2, too many details don’t add up historically to allow us to read the account as history.  It’s a literary construct.  But it really does make the writer’s point about the universality of the Christ, whose roots can be found in the Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah:  “Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance … caravans of camels shall fill you … all from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense.”  The hoped-for peace and prosperity of Zion was translated into the hope for the Anointed One, and then in turn translated into the hope for this tiny child.

The symbolic freight of each of these particular gifts appears already in the work of the church father Irenaeus (130- 202 ): myrrh because, for mortal humans he would die and be buried, gold because he was the eternal king, and incense to show that he was God, even to those who did not know him.  The nature of the gifts points to the sacrifice, the attitude of self-giving, the posture of worship, on the part of the givers. 

In fact, one of the New Testament words used for “worship,” prosphora, means to “carry before” oneself— to bear before, to hold something out in front of you in order to offer it.  To present the present, as it were.  Visualize every Magi figure you’ve ever seen represented in a crèche, holding out a small treasure chest, and that’s the image. 

We come, holding the gift out before ourselves.  And then we let it go.

Now at Epiphany, perched at “the intersection of the timeless with time” (T.S. Eliot), with our gaze on both at once, represented in the simplest and most down-to-earth of settings, the gifts and their meaning could transcend all we could hope for.

Susan Roll
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