In an ecclesiastical calendar not obsessed with Sundays, today is the Feast of the Epiphany. In France, people have to be reminded that it is not just the feast of the marzipan-filled cake with a bean in it: they come together all through the month of January “pour tirer les rois”, i.e. to draw the kings – to see who gets the bean (invariably a child, who gets a cardboard crown and gets to choose his queen or her king).
Epiphany, as the local priest reminded us, is Revelation. Not in the sense of the Apocalypse: it is not the opening of a secret book, but the making clearer of something already partly known. It is, for once, a feast of and for scholars: the Three Kings were three Wise Men or Magi: they were scholars, probably from Persia, whose study of the constellations (the distinction between astronomy and astrology came later) had told them that a new king would be born in Judea. One wonders why that news was important enough to make them assemble strange gifts and mount their camels in the dead of winter. Something in their studies must have told them that this would be more than a new monarch in a foreign state: they clearly came prepared for something out of the ordinary. One almost wonders if they had read Isaiah.
In any case, they were the first goyim, the first Gentiles, to see the new-born Meshiach. And so their feast celebrates the revelation of the Meshiach’s importance for people beyond the Jews, which was to be one of the keys of Yeshua’s preaching, of St Paul’s, and of the whole orientation of the early Church. If the Meshiach had just been a new King of Israel, he might have been important to the region but hardly beyond. Even if he had been an Isaic Meshiach strictly within the Jewish faith, his reputation might have filtered through to a Jewish diaspora throughout the Middle East, but Greeks, Turks and Romans would hardly have thought him relevant.
As it was, though, they ended up listening. And what they heard convinced a surprising number of them that this man, who had healed bodies and souls, who had loved Jews and Samaritans equally, and who had risen from the dead and eaten grilled fish with the living, was a) the Son of God and b) the incarnation of God’s love for the human race in its entirety; that he was the new Alliance, a rainbow that now extended over all the earth; that he was the new Torah, one that embraced not only Jews but any and all who welcomed it/him in faith.
It also meant that unlike a second King David, who would syllogistically have been mortal and thus temporary, this Meshiach was and is still here: a forgiveness still accessible, a love and a healing still present, right here and now.
And for those of us who are scholars, this feast is a comforting reminder that even the learned are not excluded from the New Alliance. For the Beatitudes mention the “poor in spirit”, ptochi to pneumati; but those are not necessarily poor in mind or learning: they are those who have humility, who realise that they have nothing to contribute to God and everything to receive from Him. And that, curiously, is something true scholars understand: for over a lifetime of study, the more one learns, the less one feels one truly knows. If we can learn to apply that humility to our humanity, we too my find a narrow gate and slip into the Kingdom of Heaven where we may meet, not only (as Eliot ironised) Sir Philip Sidney but the Three Magi themselves – who would have much to tell us.
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