I hope you all enjoyed the festivities
and celebrations of Advent and Christmas. I would like to thank all those who
made these celebrations so meaningful. At this time too, I would like to thank
you for your good wishes, Christmas cards and gifts. All are very much appreciated.
Today we celebrate the Feast of the
Epiphany and the great Gospel story of the visit of the Magi. We are familiar
with the term Magi, although it is more common to refer to them as the 3 wise
men, or the 3 kings.
As people of faith, do we know the
names of these important visitors? They are: Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior.
The three wise men were called to come and give worship to the child Jesus.
They were called by the powerful light of a star and by careful study of Old
Testament Scripture. As scholars of non-Jewish heritage, they realized that the
messiah has come to visit his people.
The Feast of the Epiphany is the
celebration of the manifestation of Jesus the Lord to the Gentiles. And this
manifestation is represented by these mysterious kings from the Far East. The
visit of these kings will make clear that the King of King came to save all
people of every nation. This is the manifestation of the New Covenant. This is
the beginning of the universality of Christ’s church; that universality we call
Catholic.
The Magi journeyed far and for quite
some time to pay homage to Jesus. This would not be an easy journey. Yet their
faith in the promise of new hope motivated them to press on. They did not have
the advantage of witnessing Christ’s miracles, reading the stories of Jesus in
the New Testament, they hardly could know of the passion, crucifixion, death
and resurrection that were to come. Still their faith was enough.
And they came not to say hello, here we
are. No, they came to pay Christ worship and to bring him their finest gifts.
And these gifts we all know so well; gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold is the
most precious of all earth’s metals, frankincense is the incense that is burned
in churches down through the centuries to make a pleasing offering to God and
myrrh is a byproduct that is used in the holy oils for anointing. These
precious gifts represent all that the life of Jesus, sent to us through the
Virgin to save us, is all about; for He is our priest, our prophet and our
King.
What does all of this mean for us
today? These men gave their all and
sacrificed much to be able to do so? We can ask ourselves what kind of time to
we devote to giving ourselves to Jesus? If we truly reflect on a typical day or
a typical week in our lives what would we discover about our faith commitment
to Christ?
Today, we can ponder the example of the
3 wise men, these mysterious Kings from the Far East known as the Magi. God
called them, as He calls us, by name.
I hope you all have a good week!
Fr. Phil
I hope you all enjoyed the festivities
and celebrations of Advent and Christmas. I would like to thank all those who
made these celebrations so meaningful. At this time too, I would like to thank
you for your good wishes, Christmas cards and gifts. All are very much appreciated.
Before we reach
Christ's birth in Luke's gospel we are already well aware of how special Mary
is. The angel Gabriel calls her "most highly favored" and her cousin
Elizabeth exclaims how she is "most blessed". She is the one in whom
the blessings spoken of by God to Moses are to be fulfilled. Yet she has no
claims to greatness. She is a maiden betrothed to a man named Joseph in an
insignificant village in the unimportant region of Galilee. Luke traces the
genealogy of Jesus through his foster-father, Joseph. Mary herself, in her
great hymn of praise on her visit to Elizabeth, will speak of her own lowliness
and marvel at how God has chosen the weak and poor to confound the rich and
powerful.