Epiphany (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 4, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany, C, Vigil
January 4, 2025

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Happy New Year! This is Msgr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, his “manifestation” to all the nations represented by the wise men coming from afar.
• There are many angles by which we can approach this great encounter. We can focus on the meaning of the homage or adoration the Magi give Jesus when they arrive. We can meditate on the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. We can ponder the significance of the star.
• But insofar as I have just begun full-time my new work as National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, I’d like to look at it from the perspective of how Christ is the light Isaiah prophesies in Sunday’s first reading who would shine over all peoples, so that all nations might walk by his light and kings of various peoples by his shining radiance. Jesus is that Light from Light who came into the world to illumine not just the Jewish people, not just those who would eventually hear the Gospel and become Christians, but all peoples everywhere.
• Over the course of the centuries, this focus on the wise men coming from afar as representatives of all the non-Jewish peoples of every nation and all time is the most traditional way by which Christians have looked at the Solemnity of the Epiphany. The prophets Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had all announced God’s intention to be a savior of all peoples, but the visit of these non-Jewish magi was understood by the early Christians as the beginning of the fulfillment of that plan. They were the first but certainly not the last in a great procession prophesied that has taken place over the centuries as non-Jews from the east and the west, the north and the south, have come to Bethlehem to find in the newborn Jesus their light, salvation and Savior.
• The wise men were, first, those who were seeking God arduously through God’s first epiphany, which is the manifestation of God in creation. They were seeking him in the stars God had made. Following that light with a small-L, they were longing for the Light with a capital-L. Theirs is an extraordinary witness. Perhaps moved by the ancient Sybilline prophecies that Michelangelo depicted in the Sistine Chapel, or even by Balaam’s prophecy from the Book of Numbers, “A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Nm 24: 17), when they saw the star at its rising, they not only interpreted that God was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God was specifically heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. 2000 years ago, in the deserts of the Middle East and on the seas, people, we know, were highly dependent on the fixed stars in the sky as references for their direction. They firmly believed that God had made them this way for that reason. Whenever anything happened in the sky that was new — like the appearance of a comet, or meteor shower, or a planet’s or star’s shining more brightly — the ancients thought that it had to bear some message from the creator of the heavens. When they saw the star of Bethlehem at its rising, they didn’t respond just as curious astrologers but as those who hungered to find what they had long through their studies sought. Led by the star, and their simple trust in its supposed meaning, the wise men went on a journey toward the Holy Land. Pope Francis said (2017) that they reflect the image of all those who long for God, but also asked (2018), why they alone saw it. He answered: because they hadn’t ceased raising their eyes to heaven. Many, he stated, can keep their gaze fixed on earthly realities and creature comforts. Many, likewise, he conjectured, only go for what’s flashing, and perhaps the star was not that eye-catching or that much brighter than other stars and worldly lights. As a fourth-century bishop (Chomatius of Aquileia) quipped, “The star was seen by everyone but not everyone understood its meaning. Likewise, our Lord and Savior was born for everyone, but not everyone has welcomed him.”
• Unlike many of their contemporaries, the wise men, seeing the star, were willing to make the decision to take up the journey. They overcame every sense of self-sufficiency, the anaesthetization of their heart, the refusal not to seek more out of life, or the fears they might have had of taking risks. They were willing — in fact, eager — to be changed. And they set out tirelessly on a journey. We don’t know their itinerary, but the Gospel gives us indications that their pilgrimage was long in time and distance. Herod asked them the exact time of the appearance of the star, and then, a short time later, after they did not return to him, he proceeded to kill every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age. Thus, it seems that the time of their preparation and the journey to get to Bethlehem probably took 18-24 months. And then there was the journey back! Whether they walked or had the help of animals we don’t know, but we do know that they made the journey of great time and distance because they believed God was speaking to them through the star. They were seeking the truth, and they were willing to make the sacrifices that seeking and trying to live the truth entails. They showed by their journey that they had placed God, however they understood him at the beginning of their journey, at the center of their life. When they arrive in Bethlehem, we see that worship was the end and goal of their journey. To worship means to center one’s life on God rather than oneself. It means to sacrifice what is non-essential for the one thing necessary. God for them was that unum necessarium!
• Here we come to the role of the Church and the summons to mission. When St. John Paul II would preach on the Epiphany, he would say that the “Church’s missionary activity … finds it starting point and universal scope in the feast of the Epiphany” (1998). “The journey of the Magi from the East,” he stated in 1995, “is like a great symbol of all those roads on which men, from near and far, from the extreme ends of the earth, walk over the centuries towards the light of Christ. He who now, Newborn, allows himself to be found and worshiped by the Magi, one day, at the end of his earthly mission, will say to the Apostles: ‘Go all over the world and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mk 16:15), and with these words he will imprint a precise direction to the history of the Church. … Those who have succeeded the Apostles in the mission to bring light to all nations, to preach to all nations, have indicated to men the same way saying: Go to Bethlehem, there Christ is born; go to Nazareth, there he spent the thirty years of his hidden life; stop on the shores of Lake Galilee and in many places of the Holy Land, where He taught and worked miracles, giving signs of his divine power; and above all go to Jerusalem, where he was crucified to take away the sins of the world and reveal himself as the Redeemer of man; go to Jerusalem, where he is Risen on the third day manifesting the power of life that is in Him, life stronger than physical and spiritual death.”
• During his first celebration of this feast as the successor of St. Peter he said, the Magi are “the beginning and the prefiguration of all those who, from beyond the frontiers of the Chosen People of the Old Covenant, have reached and still reach Christ by means of faith. … The Epiphany is the feast of the vitality of the Church. The Church lives her awareness of God’s mission, which is carried out through her.… ‘Mission’ is the proper name of the Church, and in a certain sense defines her. The Church becomes herself when she carries out her mission. The Church is herself, when men—such as the shepherds and the Magi Kings from the East—reach Jesus Christ by means of faith.” He said that the Church is meant to “more aware of the vastness of her mission every year” as a result of this feast, to realize “how many men it is still necessary to bring to faith! How many men must be won back to the faith, which they have lost, and that is sometimes more difficult than the first conversion to faith! But the Church, aware of that great gift, the gift of the incarnation of God, can never stop, can never tire. She must continually seek access to Bethlehem for every man and for every period. The Epiphany is the feast of God’s challenge” (1979).
• The Epiphany is the feast of God’s great missionary challenge to you, to me, to the whole Church. It’s a challenge to become true evangelizers, reflecting the light of Christ, radiant like stars, leading people to Bethlehem, Nazareth, Calvary, and ultimately to the eternal Jerusalem. As we are transformed by our own encounter with Christ, we, like the Magi, are meant to leave by “another route,” sent out as modern Melchiors, Balthasars, and Kaspars, as wise men, who are able to lead others to the Source of wisdom, so that all those searching for God — in the stars, in the sciences, or even in other religions — may come to discover with us in Jesus the glory of God in the highest and the road to peace on earth. And so, as we prepare for Sunday, let us resolve like the Magi to make the journey to Bethlehem, to center our life on Jesus in worship, and to receive from him the grace we need to live up to God’s great missionary challenge to us to help bring all the nations, indeed every creature, to Christ with us.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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