A Revelation of Hope and Happiness
Michiel Peeters - Epiphany means “revelation”. St Paul says it in today’s 2nd reading: “The mystery [God, the meaning of life] was made known to me by revelation.”
Without God, man cannot live. Not only in a “passive” sense—because man doesn’t give being to himself. But also in an “active” sense: man cannot live as a human being (that is: reasonably, freely, happily) without God because we have something within us, we have an “organ,” we have a “sense,” that is made for infinity, that needs an infinite space to flourish.
Mystery has created man for happiness, and this happiness consists of a lived relationship with infinite Mystery itself, a relationship that is called to grow in time and include everything. However, since man doesn’t see God, he forgets about Him. He continues to search for happiness in all he does, but since he doesn’t live the things as signs, they won’t fulfill him, and, in time, his unhappiness and frustration grow.
But God, the Mystery who created man, has had mercy on him and not left him in the dark. Mystery has become a man. “He who could just have helped us has wanted to come” (St Bernard). And not only: this Man has reached us, you and me, tonight, 2,000 years later, 3,000 kilometers further.
The magi were not Jews. They were not educated to wait for the Messiah. They were not close at hand, like the shepherds. However, they were human, real human beings, intelligent, searching, using their intelligence to try to grasp life’s meaning, to discover the Mystery. Since the stars in the sky are strong signs of the Mystery, they studied them.
At a certain moment, they saw a new and extraordinary star that attracted them so much that they decided to follow it. The powers that be find such a thing disturbing. Power cannot impede that one runs into something extraordinary. But it will try everything to impede that one follows this encounter, that it becomes a story, a history. Still, power cannot impede this if we don’t want that, if we continue to use our hearts. Using our hearts is the great weapon God has given us against the intrigues of power.
In fact, nothing could stop our magi. They continued to follow the exceptional sign. Ultimately, it brought them to a child, to the smallest human presence imaginable. The magi were not scandalized by its appearance, by Mystery’s epiphany: a child with his mother, the poorest, the humblest imaginable human reality, pretending to contain the meaning of the world. They recognized the exceptional, and they adored, and then went back to their country, “overjoyed”; their lives and that of the world would never be the same again.
Dear friends, substantially, we are in the same condition as the magi. Each has a heart made for happiness. To each has been announced—in some way, however subtly—that the meaning exists, that it is possible to find it because it has had mercy on us, it has come to us, it can be found in a poor, humble, maybe ridiculous but real and tangible human presence. Today, this human presence is the Christian company, the Church.
As the magi did after seeing the star, we, too, are called to verify this announcement.
When we accept this sign, this possibility, this company, when we permit our encounter to become history, adventure, when we verify what it conveys with our hearts, we too will see great things.
Our lives, too, will dramatically change for the good and become signs themselves, stars that shine in the “darkness [that] covers the earth, and [through the] thick clouds [that] cover the peoples.”
The author has not revised the text and its translation.
