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Exactly one year ago
on New Years Eve, a young couple learned that they would be having their
first child sometime in late August or early September 2002. And, just
four months ago, a healthy baby boy was born to a very happy mother and
father. Several weeks later, after professing their faith in God,
rejecting the power of Evil, and stating their belief in the
resurrection of the body and life in the world to come, a
priest baptized their infant son. A festive family christening
party ensued and, for this young couple, everything in the world seemed
just about perfect.
On this past New
Years Eve, exactly one year to the day of the physician’s announcement
that the young couple would be having their first baby, their infant son
died. Only four short months ago at his baptism, the parents held their
first newborn in their arms, experiencing great joy and hope for their
future, thankful to God for blessing their lives with a son. Now, four
very long months later, the parents held their baby in their arms as he
breathed his last.
How suddenly
happiness transforms into sadness! How quickly joy and hope give way to
grief and despair!
It’s truly a sad and
heart-wrenching story, isn’t it? Wouldn’t each of us like to be able to
re-write this ghastly script so that, in the end, there would be no
death and everyone would live happily ever after?
Unfortunately, no
matter how much or how hard any one of us wishes, no one can re-write the
script. Not the parents. Not the doctors. Nor can we re-write the
script. Like the Wise Men from the East in today’s gospel, all we can
do is to contemplate the sad and tragic facts to discern where they are
leading us, and, hopefully, to discover for ourselves the only source of
true and abiding happiness, the type that can never be taken away.
Looking at this
couple, they found great happiness in their newborn son. For this
couple’s happiness to endure, however, everything would have to follow
the script they had written, not only for themselves and their marriage
but also for their infant son and their new family as well. Tragically,
it was a short-lived happiness, dangling from the beginning on what
proved to be a very fragile thread. Where the couple believed that God had expressed
Himself so powerfully just four months previously and made them so
happy, the parents today experience God as so very absent. With
the death of their infant son, happiness has given way to sadness. And,
as they contemplate the facts they cannot change no matter how hard they
might try or wish, their grief has only one target, God,
who the young parents believe didn’t manifest Himself in the powerful way they
so desperately
wanted during their time of great need.
Many—if
not most—of
us are very much like this couple. We look for happiness in the things
of this world that promise to give us so much joy and hope. As long as
everything proceeds according to the story as we’ve scripted it, it’s so
easy to be thankful to God for his blessings. But, when everything
suddenly falls apart and we find ourselves shocked and grieved by the
realization that a different script has been substituted for the one
we’ve written, we find it so easy not only to blame God for all that has
gone awry in our lives but also to justify our anger at Him for not
doing what we want, when we want Him to do it, and in the way we want Him to do
it.
It’s something that
happens perhaps all too frequently. Unlike the Wise Men from the East,
however, we allow unhappiness to blind us from contemplating the hard
and painful facts, from seeing the “larger pattern,” and from
“connecting the dots” which would otherwise reveal what really is
transpiring in truly awful events and circumstances and the pathway we must trod if we are to discover where
true and abiding happiness is found.
Perhaps it sounds
strange, but it truly isn’t strange from the perspective of faith:
God is most present when we are most powerless. Whether we’re
clinging to a dead child or spouse, standing alone and facing a terminal
disease we know that we cannot conquer, seeing a child or spouse selling
one’s soul to an addiction, reeling after having been terminated from a
job, or realizing that our parents refuse to love one another, we
desperately want it to be the other way around, don’t we? And, in our
impotence, we demand: “Why doesn’t God do something?”
Powerless to keep
their infant son alive, this couple wished with every sinew of their
being that the Almighty would swoop down from heaven and intervene—to
show forth the power of His mighty arm—and
save them from the awful moment of terror staring them straight in the
eye. As hard as it is to conceive, it was in their powerlessness at the
very moment of their infant son’s death that God was manifesting Himself.
The facts of this tragedy were pointing out the pathway this couple must
trod, that is, if they are to discover where their true and abiding
happiness is to be found. In that moment of the young couple’s
powerlessness when the power of Evil robbed the young couple of what had
made them so happy, God was present as the facts of their infant son’s
death cast light upon the choice confronting the young couple: “Do you believe the power of Evil will
ultimately be victorious? Or, do you believe in the resurrection of the
body and
the life of the world to come?”
When we find
ourselves powerless to ward off the death of a child or spouse,
powerless to overcome a terminal disease, powerless to stop a beloved
from selling one’s soul to an addiction, powerless to get our job back,
or powerless to make our parents love one another, we also wish with
every fiber of our being that the Almighty would swoop down from heaven
and intervene—to show forth the power of His mighty—and
save us from the moment of terror staring us straight in the eye. As
hard as it is to conceive, it is in these moments of powerlessness that
God is present. The facts of the tragedies cast light upon the pathway we
must trod if we are to discover where our true and abiding happiness is
to be found. In the moment of our powerlessness, when the power of Evil
robs us of what makes us happy, God is present as the facts challenge
us: “Do you believe the power of Evil is almighty? Or, do you believe
in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and of earth?”
It is so easy to
mouth the Creed Sunday after Sunday, that is, as long as everything
proceeds according to the script we’ve crafted. It is so easy to delude
ourselves into falsely believing that nothing will ever shake our
faith. But, when the power of Evil intervenes in our lives and
re-writes the script and as the ensuring terror looks us square in the
eye and we stand powerless in the middle of the chaos, it is in this
moment that God is present...as hard as that is to believe. And the
facts cast light upon the self-defining choice before us: “Do you believe the
power of Evil is almighty? Or, do you believe in God the Father
almighty, Creator of heaven and of earth?”
The word “Epiphany”
means “manifestation.” Today’s Feast of the Epiphany is the day when
Christians throughout the world celebrate how God manifested His
presence through a powerless infant who was to be discovered by
traveling westward, following God’s light and leaving behind everything that made them happy. For
the Wise Men from the East, the facts told them that their true and
abiding happiness was to be discovered in a powerless infant—not
a powerful king—because
the infant they would find in that manger in Bethlehem was God’s only
Son, “Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not created.” The Wise Men didn’t know it at the time but, one day in the
not-all-too-distant future, this powerless infant would experience powerlessness as he would suffer and be put to
a gruesome death. We
all know what he said as he gasped his last breath: “Father, into your
hands I commend my spirit.” Through the powerlessness Jesus freely
embraced, God the
Father manifested His almighty power and raised His only Son from the
grave on Easter Sunday, putting asunder the greatest of all
manifestations of Evil, the power of death.
As strange and as
contradictory as it may sound, God manifests His almighty power in our
powerlessness. While the Wise Men brought gifts of gold, frankincense,
and myrrh to pay homage to the great truth they discovered laying before
them in that manger in Bethlehem, let us not forget that God Himself had
just given the world the gift of His only Son, the one who freely took upon
himself our powerlessness, to the point that he hung powerless upon the
Cross facing the fact the he would die.
The Feast of the
Epiphany is not really about the Wise Men and the gifts they gave
to the infant Jesus. The feast is also not really about us and what we
give to God. Instead, today’s feast is about remembering what God has
given us and continues to give us. If we but follow the light of
faith and contemplate the facts
surrounding our powerlessness, we—just
like the Wise Men from the East—can
choose to trod the pathway that leads to true and abiding happiness.
This pathway is discovered only by those who
freely chose in the pain of their powerlessness to believe “in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and of
earth...in the communion of the saints, the resurrection of the body, and
the life of the world to come.”
Double click on this button for
a brief history
of the three astrologers.
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HOMILY
