The Great Unveiling

The coming of the Magi from the Orient to the manger at Bethlehem is the beginning of the definitive end of the uniquely vertical relationship the people of Israel had with God. As if representing the entirety of the Gentile world, the Wise Men open themselves up to the reign of the incarnate, divine King. The verticality of the Jews is now intersected by the horizontality of the Gentiles and the locus of this grand meeting is in the heart of the Baby in swaddling linen.

How was it that the Magi were able to discover the stable in Bethlehem and that within it the King of all ages would be encountered for the first time? It will largely remain a mystery in this life, but it would be safe to say they worked with the tools their surrounding culture provided them. The most important tool they used was that ancient guidance the people of the East sought in the study of astronomy. The timing and placement of the stars in the night skies somehow directed them to Jerusalem. Was it not by means of such an obscure sort of knowledge as astronomy that God drew close to the Wise Men so that in turn they might draw close to Him? Was it not such an oriental outlook of the heavens that brought the Wise Men west to Heaven Itself?

How is it that, even in our day-to-day lives, God is searching for any avenue, any inlet, any obscure path to draw us to Himself? He called out to the Magi through their astronomy, how does He show us a path to Himself? In Heaven, what astonishment we will experience when we learn of every way in which God was reaching out to us, even in the most unlikely of circumstances. The clear and swift calls of grace we experience through inspirations in prayer or the reception of the sacraments by no means exhaust the work of God in us.

How many more of these calls of grace come to us in the mundane activities of the day or, better yet, even in the unpleasant encounters we might have with others. There are no better illustrations of God using unlikely ways to reach out to us than in the stories of Flannery O'Connor. In her fiction, it is often through no good, lousy, wretched, and miserably obnoxious people that God has an inlet to our world.

Maybe these sorts of characters in real life cooperate in a mysterious way in bringing about the sovereignty of God in believers. Perhaps, in turn, the great imperfection of believers act as means for God's kingdom to reach the despairing in our world. Countless are the ways in which the holy world of the saint conflates with the miserable world of the sinner, and yet God is in the midst of it all, almost forcing His way through every aperture that fails to separate the divinity of His life from the mortality of our deaths. By every means possible God enters our lives through our weaknesses so that we can gladly boast with the Apostle Paul in our very weakness (c.f. 2 Cor 9).

Rightly has the Epiphany been recognized as a revealing of God to the nations. In that sense it foreshadows that great unveiling that will occur at the Apocalypse. Then the curtain will be removed and God will be the proper subject of worship for all creation. But until that time, as the Lord excitedly pursues news subjects for His kingdom, we ought not be surprised by any avenue He might choose to carry forth His great hunt.

Just as before a rain storm the clouds slowly gather and amass to darken the sky, so too is the cloud of God's presence, the Shekhinah, slowly forming. Who knows how much longer the firmament can hold back the downpour? Ignorant as we are of the forecast, we do know one thing: in our individual deaths are found unique instances in which the torrential reign of Christ will pierce that great void by which we have been so long cut off from the Father.