Manifestation and Mission, The Solemnity of the Epiphany, January 4, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Solemnity of the Epiphany
January 4, 2026
Is 60:1-6, Ps 72, Eph 3:2-3.5-6, Mt 2:1-12

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• The Epiphany, the “manifestation” of the eternal Son of God, is an incredibly rich solemnity. After paintings of the Madonna and Child, the Epiphany is the second most depicted scene in history. In today’s first reading, God through the prophet Isaiah, talks about a two-fold dimension of this feast. “Jerusalem,” he says, “rise up in splendor! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you. See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; But upon you the Lord shines, and over you appears his glory.” But then it becomes clear that that light and glory are not meant to stop with Israel. Isaiah tells them, “Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance. Raise your eyes and look about; they all gather and come to you: Your sons come from afar, and your daughters in the arms of their nurses. … Caravans of camels shall fill you, dromedaries from Midian and Ephah; All from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the Lord.” That’s what we mark today. The Lord’s manifestation with its light and glory and then the beginning, in the coming of the wise men, of how the peoples of nations shall walk by that light. In past years, we have had a chance to look at various angles of this feast: about hope, about the star, about life as a pilgrimage together with others, about the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and about the adoration they give. Today, however, insofar as you are Missionaries of Charity and I serve as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, I’d like to ponder the two different missionary angels of this great solemnity, the Light that has come in Jesus and the way all nations are meant to walk by that light.
• The Magi have always symbolized the great object of the Church’s mission: the Gentiles, all the non-Jewish people of the world. This was almost always the subject of St. John Paul II’s homilies on this day. Earlier in my priesthood, I found this highly annoying. I wanted to preach a homily to seminarians on retreat on the priestly significance of the gifts the wise men brought and how it led to the even greater gift of their adoration. For ideas I decided to go through all St. John Paul II’s homilies on the Epiphany looking for insights. As I went year by year from 1979 through 2005, he gave a few references to the gold, frankincense and myrrh, but almost every year, he focused rather on how the wise men represented all the nations who could come to walk by the manifested One’s light. In 1988, he stated, “The event of the day has been called by the Church, for centuries, with the name of Epiphany. The Magi, who came from the east, are at the beginning of a great itinerary, whose past goes back in the history of the chosen People of the ancient alliance and the future leads to all the peoples and nations of the earth. With the coming of the Magi from the east it appears at the same time that the light that Jerusalem brings in itself is not only destined for Israel. In the light of the new Epiphany, God reveals himself in Jesus Christ to all peoples and to all the nations of the earth. The divine light is intended for everyone, which penetrates the darkness of human existence.” 15 years later, he added, with a reference to today’s second reading, “The Magi, who come from the East to Jerusalem, represent the first fruits of the peoples attracted by the light of Christ. They recognize in Jesus the Messiah, and they show beforehand that now is the fulfilment of the ‘mystery’ of which St Paul speaks in the second reading: ‘that the Gentiles are called in Christ Jesus … to be co-heirs of the promise through the preaching of the Gospel’” (2003).
• The wise men were those seeking for God. They didn’t have the grace of Biblical revelation but they had two other sources. The first were the heavens, where they were looking to discern messages from the Creator of the heavens and earth. When they saw a star at its rising, they were driven to discover what its message was. There were also prophecies outside of Israel, from women called Sybils, that heralded the future birth of a universal king who would be king of all. One of these Sybilline prophecies predicted that the birth of the king would be preceded by a sign in the heavens. The famous Roman historian Suetonius wrote in his Life of Vespasian, “There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world” and Tacitus wrote in his Annales, “There was a firm persuasion … that at this very time the East was to grow powerful and rulers from Judaea were to acquire universal empire.” This was the context in which the wise men would have been looking upward. When they saw the rising star, they not only interpreted that the Creator was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God might specifically be heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. And they were willing to do anything — including a journey that likely took 18-24 months in preparation and execution — to determine whether that was indeed what was occurring. In contrast to King Herod and the chief priests and scribes in his court who didn’t move even six miles downhill to investigate whether the long-awaited Messiah had in fact come, the wise men are icons of the type of hunger that so many have for God, of the journey people are ready to make to seek, find, come to know, love, serve, follow and share the glory of Israel and the light of revelation to all nations.
• Their finding Jesus, remaining in his light, and adoring him are only the first of the missiological applications. The second is that after the journey, St. Matthew tells us they returned “by another route,” which the great saints of the Church have always said points to far more than a detour to evade Herod. It suggests that they returned changed, they went back differently than they arrived, converted more and more to the new King’s way and categories, to the path of faith, to the life of Christ-like love. They themselves became witnesses to what they observed. They became bearers of the Lord’s light and glory. It would have been tempting, indeed understandable, for them to have wanted to spend the rest of their lives with Jesus, but they prioritized bringing word of him home so that others may know that the fulfillment of humanity’s deepest longings had indeed come. They therefore show us that the hunger for God is always meant to translate in a hunger to share him. That those who have discovered the gift are in turn meant to help others discover the gift. That paying him homage leads to seeking to give others far more than gold, frankincense and myrrh, but the treasure of knowing the newborn King not just of the Jews but of the universe and helping others enter his kingdom.
• John Paul II always used to ponder this application in his preaching on this day. In his first Epiphany homily in 1979, three months after his election, he said, “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. The Second Vatican Council helped us to realize that the ‘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. When in the Christ-Man and through Christ they find God again.” In 1995, he added, “Today’s liturgy thus becomes the epiphany of the great mission, which starting from God leads to man through the coming into the world of the Son of God, and extends through the heart of man to other men, to all those who still do not know the light descended on Jerusalem and ignore the way to reach the cave of Bethlehem. The path of the Magi who came from the East is like a great symbol of all those ways on which men, 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 worshipped 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 give a precise direction to the history of the Church. The great movement that leads to all the nations of the world corresponds, in God’s plan, to the coming of Christ in the flesh.” One year later, he summarized, “The Church’s missionary activity, through its many stages down the centuries, finds its starting point and universal scope in the feast of Epiphany.” And finally, 25 years ago this Tuesday, the day on which the Epiphany is celebrated in the Vatican and in many Catholic countries, he published a great apostolic exhortation, the Church’s pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium, in which he named the Biblical motto for the thousand years of Christianity then commencing and now a quarter-of-a-century in execution. “Duc in altum!” “Put out into the deep.” Looking back on that document a year later in 2002, he said, “I return to that unforgettable moment and once again offer to each of you the program of the new evangelization. I repeat to you the Redeemer’s words:  ‘Duc in altum!’ Do not be afraid of the darkness of the world, because the one who is calling you is ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8:12), ‘the bright morning star’ (Rev 22:16). Jesus, one day you said to your disciples: ‘You are the light of the world’ (Mt 5,14); may you grant that the Gospel witness of these brothers of ours [newly ordained bishops, successors of the apostles, sent out to the nations] may shine out for the people of our time.Make their mission effective, so that all whom I have entrusted to their pastoral care may always glorify our Father who is in heaven (cf. Mt 5,16).” So the Epiphany of the Lord is the beginning of the Epiphany of the Church, which, like the wise men, has been on mission ever since, a mission to bring us from Christ’s early epiphany to his eternal one. That’s what we prayed for at the beginning of Mass today: “O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.”
• Someone who experienced both aspects of the missionary dimensions of the feast, and now rejoices in its everlasting fulfillment, is the great American saint, the saint of this city of New York, whom the Church celebrates today. The foundress of the first American religious order, the foundress of the first Catholic school for girls in the United States and essentially the American Catholic school system, Elizabeth Ann Seton was raised an Episcopalian, the granddaughter of a Church of England priest. She had faith and was pious. But eventually she grasped that there was something more. Seven years into her marriage, her husband Will came down with tuberculosis and suffered terribly for two years as Elizabeth cared for him. Eventually doctors advised him to travel to Livorno, Italy, in the hopes of an easier situation for his lungs. There he died. While there, Elizabeth stayed with Will’s Catholic business partners who had a chapel in their home with the Blessed Sacrament. She became exposed through them not just to the Catholic teaching on the Holy Eucharist but the way Catholics practically respond to the reality of the Eucharist. She began slowly to yearn for Jesus. She wrote to her sister-in-law Rebekah, “How happy would we be if we believed what these dear [Catholics] believe, that they possess God in the Sacrament and that he remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick.” The Lord himself had planted within her that desire. She couldn’t believe at first that the Real Presence was true, but she wanted it to be true. The Lord was leading her, like a star, on an inner journey to his ongoing Eucharistic epiphany. A couple of weeks later, she wrote Rebekah that when she happened upon a Eucharistic procession, “I fell on my knees without thinking when the Blessed Sacrament passed by and cried out in agony to God to bless me if he was there, that my whole Soul desired only him.” As she, perhaps involuntarily, paid homage to her Eucharistic Lord, her prayer was heard. She would come to believe what Catholics believe. She would be blessed by having her whole soul desire him. She returned to the United States and immediately began instruction to become a Catholic. About a year later, in March 1805, at St. Peter’s Church in lower Manhattan, she would enter the Catholic Church and experience something even greater than the wise men had in Bethlehem: she would receive Jesus in Holy Communion. She counted down the days to her first Communion. The night before she would receive him for the first time, she could barely sleep. And when she did receive him, finally, she wrote a friend, “It seemed to me my King had come to take his throne. At last,” she emphasized, “God is mine and I am his.” She became one of the Catholic Church’s greatest Eucharistic converts and a great Eucharistic apostle, helping her five children — and countless others educated by her and her sisters — to come to possess and be possessed by Jesus, even more humbly present in the Eucharist than in the manger. During the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, which had the joy to stop here at this convent, as my fellow pilgrims and I accompanied Jesus through the streets carrying on our person a first-class relic of her, we prayed that others, like St. Elizabeth, would seek the same Jesus she loved, cry out for his blessing and follow her and us on the path of Eucharistic conversion, holiness and mission.
• As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Epiphany today on her feast, we thank God for the gift of the lessons he teaches through her and the wise men about the search for him and about how to be his instruments to share Christ, God-with-us, in his ongoing Eucharistic manifestation with those hungering for him, whether they know it yet or not. We ask for the grace to leave this chapel today by another route. We ask to be filled with the Lord’s light and glory. The Mass is Christ’s continuous epiphany, but our contemporaries need us to be the “wise men,” the new Mother Setons, who show where the star of the tabernacle lamp and altar candles still burn to help and encourage those we know to join us on the journey to find Christ and come into a life-changing communion with him. God is calling us, you and me, to be missionaries of his Eucharistic charity, indeed, modern Melchiors, Balhasars, and Kaspars. As we fall to our knees today before the same Lord before whom they prostrated themselves as a small, poor, vulnerable infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, God wants us, like them and Mother Seton, to discover here in this Bethlehem Light from Light and the glory of God in the highest and then be transformed to bring that light and glory to the ends of the earth. Come, let us adore him! And come let us pray for the whole world to join us in that homage!

The readings for this Solemnity are: 

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