Epiphany may seem like a strange time to focus on Jesus’s Jewishness but it strikes me this year as the perfect occasion. In light of today’s Gospel reading, it seems important to draw attention to the fact that the magi came from the East looking not “for the universal savior, but only for the ‘king of the Jews.”1 Further, the Jewish priests explaining to Herod that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, cited the prophet Micah: “And you, O Bethlehem in the land of Judah … a ruler will come from you who will be the shepherd for my people Israel.”2 Note that this prophecy does not foresee the one born in Bethlehem as “the shepherd of all people,” but “for [God’s] people Israel.”3
It is no exaggeration to say that the Church is Israel-extended, not superseded. In and through Christ, by the Spirit’s power, God’s Covenant made initially with Israel, is open to everyone. In its essence, this Covenant, which is repeated no fewer than seven times in the Jewish Scriptures is “I will be your God and you will be my people.”4 In passing, it is worth pointing out that in the Bible, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in our uniquely Christian Scriptures, seven is the number of perfection.
As Saint Paul makes clear in his Letter to the Romans, in their relationship to the Jews, Gentile (i.e., non-Jewish believers) “are like branches grafted on to the roots and the trunk of the tree of God’s Covenant.”5 God’s Covenant with the Jewish people is irrevocable.
As Christians, we view the New Testament as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. As the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation states: “God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New.”6
The great twentieth century theologian, Karl Barth, in his magisterial work, Church Dogmatics, pointed out:
The Word did not simply become any “flesh.” … It became Jewish flesh. … The Church’s whole doctrine of the incarnation and atonement becomes abstract and valueless and meaningless to the extent that [Jesus’ Jewishness] comes to be regarded as something accidental and incidental7In Saint John’s Gospel, Jesus himself tells the woman at the well: “salvation is from the Jews.”8
Of course, Jesus is both the universal Savior and shepherd of all people. He is, in fact, King of the Universe. But he is only these things because he is first Israel’s Messiah, David’s descendant, the King of the Jews, as the inscription on his cross mockingly yet accurately noted.9
Every epiphany is an apocalypse. This is demonstrated by Herod’s slaughter of the children of Bethlehem after the departure of the magi and by Jesus being nailed to the cross. This is why it strikes me as strange that we reserve the word “apocalypse” for the end of the world. Jesus’s Incarnation is itself an apocalypse, an event “so earth-shattering that it enacts something akin to the psychoanalytic concept of trauma” on the world, which "long lay... in sin and error pining."10
Essentially, “apocalypse” refers to an unveiling of something previously hidden. It was not intuitively obvious to the casual observer that Jesus of Nazareth was the Only Begotten Son, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, in the flesh. But those with eyes to see and ears to hear experience this Epiphany.
To experience an Epiphany is not only to see the of God in Christ but experience the revelation of yourself to yourself.11 Such an encounter cannot help but change you in a way similar to how the patriarch Jacob was changed. After his wrestling match with God, he walked away with both a permanent limp and a new name: Israel.12
“The Bible is very easy to understand,” observed Søren Kirkegaard.13 “But we Christians,” he continues, “… pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.”14 If we permit ourselves to understand God’s word, to be challenged by it, our apocalypse, Kierkegaard continues, “is nothing else but faith right in the middle of actual life and weekdays.”15
What do I mean? Take something from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, found a few chapters on from our reading today in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, from the section known as the “Theses and antitheses.”16 In the example I have in mind, the Lord introduces the thesis and then gives the antithesis: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’” (thesis). “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (antithesis).17
It is by loving your enemies, Jesus insists, that you become “children of your heavenly father” who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”18 Failing to do this, Jesus likewise insists, makes you no different from everyone else. This gets back to the one Covenant God seeks to enter into with the whole of humanity, at least as it is expressed through the prophet Jeremiah: “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people.”19
Living in this apocalyptic way is how others can experience their own epiphany through you. This is what it means to be the “missionary disciples” we are all called to be in light of our baptism, in and through which we died, were buried, rose with Christ.20 According to Saint Paul, this happened so that “we too might live in newness of life.”21 This newness of life is the apocalypse, the unveiling of God’s kingdom in the world, that results from our encounter with, or epiphany of, he who died and rose again.
1 Mark Galli, “Killing Jesus’ Brothers and Sisters: Why did we turn on the Jews so quickly? And what do we do about it now?; Matthew 2:2.↩
2 Matthew 2:6; Micah 5:1.↩
3 “Killing Jesus’ Brothers and Sisters.↩
4 See Genesis 17:7; Exodus 6:7; Ezekiel 34:24; Ezekiel 36:28; Jeremiah 7:23; Jeremiah 30:22; Jeremiah 31:33.↩
5 Romans 11:17-18; “Killing Jesus’ Brothers and Sisters.↩
6 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation [Dei Verbum], sec. 16.↩
7 “Killing Jesus’ Brothers and Sisters.↩
8 John 4:22.↩
9 Matthew 27:37.↩
10 John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, 7; “O Holy Night.”↩
11 Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et Spes], sec. 22.↩
12 See Genesis 32:22-33.↩
13 Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, 201.↩
14 Ibid.↩
15 Ibid., 279.↩
16 See Mathhew 5:21-48.↩
17 Matthew 5:43-44.↩
18 Matthew 5:45.↩
19 Jeremiah 7:23.↩
20 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, sec. 119.↩
21 Romans 6:4.↩
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