January 3, 2022
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the Solemnity of the Epiphany on January 2, 2022 at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; and Matthew 2:1-12.
Most of us are familiar with the story of the Epiphany, when some Persian astrologers – whose number and gender are not specified by Matthew – become the first non-Jewish people to recognize Jesus as the Messiah.
Today, on the solemnity that Catholics in many parts of the world consider to be the most important event of the Christmas season – and will wait until Thursday to celebrate – I’m struck by the contrast in the sizes of things in the Epiphany story. Christ, the totality of the second person of God, is constricted into the body of a tiny child. Wealthy astrologers travel great distances as directed by heavenly bodies, and have an epiphany – which, on a chemical level, was simply the sparking of particular synapses in their brains.
In this new year, let us pray that we will each have epiphanies of our own, recognizing that God, creator of the stars of night, intimately loves us, just as we are!
I know a number of wise men and wise women. As someone with two college degrees from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester who later designed and tested large telescopes, I know quite a few people who have worked on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Due to a weather delay, it was on this past Christmas Day that Webb launched heavenward from French Guiana. It will take 29 days to reach its destination, a place called the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L2, roughly 1 million miles from earth. Once it arrives, there are six months of complex operations that must go just right before this engineering marvel can begin sending us high-quality images.
As scientists and engineers designed Webb in the 1990s, they needed to invent new technologies. The cost overruns and schedule delays on the project are legendary. Over Webb’s long, arduous history, Congress repeatedly threatened to stop funding it. The costs for this literally astronomical project were figuratively astronomical. Should the government be spending so much money on this?
[Pause.] If we think about it, and if we use our imaginations, we can perceive some odd parallels between the journey of the Webb Telescope and the journey of the magi. The magi came from a place in the Middle East that most of us couldn’t find on a map any easier than French Guiana. They journeyed to Bethlehem, a village that probably seemed as remote 2,000 years ago as Lagrange Point L2 seems to us today. Family and friends may have shaken their heads and thought that the magi’s long, arduous journey was impractical. And when the magi returned back home and told their story, there were probably plenty of Persians who protested gold, frankincense, and myrrh being lavished on a poor, unknown family far, far away.
Our own journeys of faith may have some parallels to the endeavors of the magi and the Webb Telescope, too. Sometimes, we have to travel far in order to “see.” Like the magi and the NASA scientists, we begin heading towards a goal in faith and hope, not sure what we will experience when the full glory of God is unveiled to us.
There may turn out to be parallels in the accomplishments of the magi and the Webb Telescope. We think that Webb will be able to peer back in time 13.7-billion years, back to what we think is less than the first 1% of time after the Big Bang. There’s also hope that Webb will be able to confirm the theory about how “dark matter” holds the universe together. Webb could radically alter our understanding of the universe.
Matthew presents Jesus’ birth as setting up a clash between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth. When they arrived in the Holy Land, the magi obviously went to Herod’s opulent palace to find the newborn king… but he was not there. When they arrived in Bethlehem, they found the tiny ruler of an entirely different kind of kingdom, a kingdom beyond their imagination and reason, created by the one who created us all from the dawn of time, and who now broke through time and space to become like us. For the magi, everything changed right then. They could no longer sleep soundly, but they began to dream. And their dreams changed the direction of their lives.
Perhaps we, too, can look more deeply into what we see today, not merely into the world of science where my wise friends will literally see things that will enlighten us all on the beginnings of the universe.
We discover new things all the time. Perhaps like those Persian astrologers of old, we might dare to be surprised by our king, who calls us to continually open our hearts. May we witness the glory of the Creator of the stars. May we experience the love of the Creator’s only-begotten Son dwelling among us. And may we be joyfully inspired to occasionally change direction… and keep dreaming.