From the Pastor


January 2, 2005

Epiphany, celebrated this year on Sunday, January 2, means showing: Christ is shown as Messiah for the whole human race, "the Gentiles." The two "showings" or manifestations, were when the Holy Child was shown to the Magi and when as a man Christ was baptized and his sonship to the Divine Father was publicly declared. All of us were baptized, and so we have some connection with the second. None of us that I know of, not even those especially privileged, had three regal Persians come to peer into our cradle. The story seems so exotic that it is the one that most nervous critics are quickest to call a pious fable. We have less reason to do that now than ever, for the Visitation of the Magi is becoming more and more like the latest news. Pope St. Leo the Great, defier of the barbarians, said in the fifth century that the first Epiphany "is not past in such a way that the power of the work which was then revealed should be past as well."

First, the "three Wise Men" probably were Zoroastrians, highly skilled in astronomy, and while the worldwide number of them today is down to about 70,000 they are a distinguished and self-reliant sect — probably the oldest extant monotheist religion — with a remarkable number of celebrities, from the classical conductor Zubin Mehta to Freddie Mercury of the proto-heavy metal group "Queen." Secondly, their land is well known to us in the tense daily news as Iran — probably more politically crucial now than ever. Thirdly, there are more "Gentiles" now than there ever were, and they include many who profess to be Christians and even Catholics. For the Gentiles are those who do not know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Much of Protestant Christianity, outside the Evangelical sphere, has eroded into platitudinous humanism, and many "cradle Catholics" have turned their backs on the radical mystery of the cradle in Bethlehem: They reject dogmas and moral doctrines which contradict the ways they have slipped into the secular mentality of our age. These are the Gentiles to whom the merciful Lord chooses to show himself through us. He said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Epiphany is an obligation to behave in such a way that we can say, "He who has seen me has seen Jesus." St. Paul said that it was no longer he who lived but Christ who lived in him, and in the nineteenth century a man who had confessed to St. John Vianney said that he had seen Christ in a man. A parish is a real parish only if its parishioners show Christ to the Gentiles and in our case that means, for starters, all the Gentiles who live and work between 34th and 43rd Streets.

Fr. George W. Rutler