Scripture Reflection – The Epiphany of the Lord (Jan 7-8)

Once again it’s the problem of the Christmas Cards and the representative appearance of three men from the East in the Crib, and in the depiction above! We become side-tracked. Someone even thought up names for the men! We place too much store in what we don’t know and not enough credence in what we should know!

Of these “wise men” we know little – they could be Persians and therefore Zoroastrians. Whatever, they serve a purpose. They are gentile people who have been motivated to come in search of a ‘king’. In other words they are representatives of all those nations the ‘king’ will invite or call into his Kingdom.

Yet those who knew what the prophet had written of the place where the Christ child and future ‘king’ was to be born, did not come. In time they would reject the invitation and not heed the call that Jesus came to offer by his salvific life the Kingdom of God emerging in our world.

The shepherds were the first to come after they received the announcement of an angle and the heavenly hosts. They were Jewish, but outcasts who lived on the periphery of society looking after their sheep. They were thought of as uneducated vagabonds who led their sheep over other people’s property destroying the planted crops by feeding their sheep as they went.

Our Feast this weekend is about inclusion. Jesus will call both Jew and Gentile, in other words all people, into the Kingdom without favour or prejudice. God, in Jesus, seeks the salvation of everyone who is open to accept the invitation to belong to the Kingdom. The Incarnation and Nativity of Jesus is a great salvific light which now shines upon our world lighting the path which leads all people into the Kingdom.

Salvation is not pocketed in a mystical aspect of our spiritual selves. It has a profoundly social dimension. It urges us to build Christian communities that are inclusive: tolerant, accepting, understanding, patient, reconciling and freeing. Another way of looking at the social dimension of inclusive salvation is God’s healing and restorative plan for humankind. For us the question is: “How restorative will our lives be this year?”