a reflection before Theophany

Today is the Sunday before the Great Feast of Theophany, January 6, the celebration of the Baptism of Jesus Christ. This feast falls between the feast of His Birth on December 25 and the feast of His Presentation in the Temple on February 2 forty days after His birth. At the beginning of the month there was another, lesser feast – the Circumcision of Christ, eight days after His birth. Much later in the year there is a Great Feast, the Transfiguration, which now falls on August 6, but - liturgical historians tell us - used to be commemorated together with all the feasts I have just mentioned as a single celebration of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In short, these feasts were all celebrated as parts of one great feast, the feast affirming the ways in which the divine nature, and saving work of Christ, were seen manifested in and through the major events of His life. In the Nativity, the baby was revealed as the Saviour: to the Holy Family, to the Shepherds, to the Wise Men from the East; at the Presentation in the Temple, Jesus was manifest to the Elder Zechariah and the Prophetess Anna as the divine Messiah of God - to and for the nations, as well as for Israel; in His Baptism, the Father Himself proclaimed,  and the Holy Spirit witnessed to, Jesus as the Son of God, and this also happened at the Transfiguration. The life of Jesus is seen in light of the Psalmist David's affirmation that God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us. This means that God is not unknowable, although He is, because He has chosen, determined, desired and desires to reveal Himself to us. It may be an admirable modesty to say that one is an agnostic, that is, one who simply doesn't know about God, and indeed there is a sort of healthy agnosticism rooted in modesty,  in the inherent limitations of our human capacity to know and understand God. After all, we not only have definite limitations as creatures, but even those things that we can know, we know subject to our fallen, broken, sin-tainted and partial ways of knowing. It is very easy to be wrong, mistaken, deluded. But God Himself has revealed to us such knowledge concerning Him as we are able to know. He has not left us to our own idiosyncratic and feeble gropings after what we think might be truth, but has given us all that we need to come to a knowledge of Him which is appropriate and adequate for us.

We can state this another way. When believers have reflected on the life of Jesus, as known to them in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church generally, they have seen the biography as something that is to be interpreted and understood in light of the experience of faith in the life of the Church, itself a gift of the Holy Spirit Who always testifies to Christ. Thus we say that the Spirit of God has shown and continues to show that in the person of Jesus, God is revealing Himself in the most personal, most intimate, so-most-appropriate-as-to-be-absolutely-perfect way. To know the Lord Jesus Christ is to know God, and the Lord Jesus Christ is for us the meaning of everything. We read the texts of the Old Covenant, all the Old Testament, and discover Christ anticipated, foreshadowed, expected. Indeed, we can read the book of nature in such a way that everything is a sign and witness to Him.

One of the most important aspects of this divine self-revelation in Christ, with a tremendous import for our moral vision and understanding, is that it is from beginning to end paradoxical in
terms of typical human expectations. A virgin gives birth. The eternal God enters time. The uncontainable is contained. The uncreated is created. The Law-giver submits to the law. The All-knowing grows in wisdom and understanding, One Who has no need of baptism is baptized. The All-powerful and Immortal One voluntarily submits to human weakness, to human awkwardness, to humiliation, to death. It is not through power but through love that He attracts and receives worship. It is friendship rather than compulsion that draws us into His service. He prefers companionship with the weak, the marginal, the outcast, the hurt and needy to that of those who are powerful, successful, tasteful, clever, good-looking…. From the very beginning, the apostolic Church understood that such paradox was a stumbling block to the sophisticated and the pious. It is not only the Greeks and the Jews who find the paradox of Christ offensive. We ourselves are tempted to make of our faith something conformable to fashions of sophistication and piety….

Nonetheless – the clear teaching of the Church, for those who will listen, and the clear example of authentic sanctity, for those who love the saints, is that the very structure of our salvation in Christ is paradoxical. May it be that through the life-giving paradoxes of salvation that our hearts will be enlarged, our moral imagination expanded, our spiritual education matured, our hope given strength!