Epiphany: Our Compelling God

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6
Matthew 2:1-12

God is very compelling.  God can grab your attention and hold on tight.  God can capture your imagination and you find yourself spending the rest of your life following whenever and however God leads you.

That’s the kind of passion the prophet is describing in our first reading.  People are coming from every direction and streaming into Jerusalem, the place where the temple is, the dwelling place of God.  They have left everything, only grabbing their best things to bring as gifts.  They are coming only to be close to God, to follow God, to bask in the glory of God.

There is a bite hiding in that reading though.  This passage was written when the Jews were in exile.  The Assyrians had completely wiped out the northern kingdom.  They used a tactic of lining the streets with the bodies of their enemies stuck on poles like shish kabobs.  Gross, and terrifying.  Then the Babylonians had come and conquered the southern kingdom.  They weren’t quite as awful.  Instead they forced the people from their homes and sent them on a trail of tears a 1000 miles long.  These are the people in exile the prophet is writing to, describing a vision of the perfect world, a world where enemies aren’t smashed, or slaughtered, or revenged in any way.  Instead in this vision the Jewish people, home in Jerusalem, welcome their enemies.  As a sign of God’s reign, the kings and soldiers and people who had oppressed them are received with hospitality.  What an amazing vision of the world where the Lord’s glory has come.  It is a vision, not of defeating enemies, but of converting enemies.  The glory of the Lord is friends and enemies so powerfully drawn to God that they become brothers and sisters.  It is a vision where people find God that compelling.

In the letter to the Ephesians, the message of welcome to the Gentiles — that would be everybody besides the Jews — echoes the prophet.  The saving promise of Jesus is for all people.  The Gentiles are coheirs.  And it’s not a magnanimous spirit that makes the community so welcoming to these outsiders, but it is the spirit of God, the grace of God, given for the church’s benefit.  Paul, their leader, had been an enemy of the church, but rather than being destroyed, he was converted.  His fidelity to Jesus was grounded in something so compelling, so life-grabbing, that he left his old ways behind and spent the rest of his life following Christ.

In our gospel even in the very beginning with Jesus, when he was still a baby, the whole world was being drawn by the compelling nature of God.  Magi were members of a priestly caste from Persia.  Persia, of course, is modern day Iran.  We’re talking about Iraneans who were being drawn by a star, drawn by a promise of a newborn king who had something wonderful to offer them.  They left everything, took their best gifts and didn’t look back.

All of these readings are about life-altering passion.  I’ve been gripped by some life-altering passions in my day. When I first met my husband, it was as if my whole world shifted from blue-tinged to red-tinged overnight.  Within 24 hours, the focus my entire life zoomed in on him and I couldn’t see anything else.  My heart throbbed and overflowed just to be near him.  I was so focused on loving him that other things just didn’t matter — things like my things, or my need to be right, or even hard work.  The only that mattered was spending time with him.  That was passion.

I’ve felt that kind of single-mindedness again when I first met each of my children when they were born.  I would happily spend the whole day just looking at them, kissing them, holding them.  I remember joking that if heaven is half as good as nursing a baby of mine, sign me up.  I could spend hours just feeling their skin and smelling their little baby smell.  That was passion.

That’s the kind of life-snaching passion that we’re hearing about in these readings.  And it’s passion for God. 

When I was 27 years old and entered RCIA, I was grabbed by that kind of passion. My weeks revolved around Mass and RCIA. I loved both.  Even after I was baptized, I was starving for more so I took every class I could find.  It was only two years later that I entered ministry, hungry for more.  Many of us have had experiences when our sense of God was strong and magnetic and pungent.  For some of us it was at Evangelization Retreats, or in adoration, or in times of crisis.  But at some time or another, God has grabbed us.

But like all passions, for me the intensity cooled over time.  Today I don’t spend my days figuring ways to find more time with my husband. I don’t stare at my children all day.  I don’t leap out of bed to read Scripture or pray. 

What was it then that was so compelling about God?  When you think back to those times yourself, what was so captivating about the Lord?  And now that time has gone by, what keeps us pulled into God’s gravity field?  Just like my relationship with my husband and my children, just because the intensity has cooled doesn’t mean the commitment isn’t just as strong, if not stronger.

I think that for me there are two things that make God so captivating that our lives become the stream into Jerusalem, that we will follow stars if only they will lead us to God.  The first is the realization that the God of the Bible is truly God.  That God is real.  That God has universal power, that God is almighty and all-knowing, and that God acts in each of our lives every day.  That God is.  When we realize that the Lord is God, our world fades out of focus and God gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

The other thing is the realization that what God offers us is truly salvation and not some magic-hand shake into the cloud parlor in the afterlife.   But that the Lord offers us a salvation that is for today, for right now.  God’s salvation is the same thing as that irresistible pull that draws us streaming toward God.  It’s a life where the trite things — like possessions, and comfort, and being right — fade in importance as our lives are overtaken by love, and justice, and commitment to God.

Realizing that God is truly the all-powerful deity and that God’s salvation is relevant today are not things that we will ourselves into believing, they are things that we simply realize from the evidence all around us.  In this Christmas season, having celebrated the incarnation of the divine, having spent good time with people we love, having witnessed and been part of an outpouring of charity, there is evidence all around us.

What is it that you have to realize, from the evidence all around you, to drop everything and stream toward God?