A Homily for the Sunday after the Epiphany

Blessed art thou in the Temple of thy Holiness.

—Song of the Three Children, v. 31

We have entered the season of the Church year called “Epiphany.” Epiphany means “manifestation” or “showing forth.” The feast of the Epiphany, which the Church celebrated yesterday, is associated with the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, in the person of three wise men, or magi, who came from the East bearing gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh. And so this morning we find ourselves singing, “What star is this, with beams so bright?” and “We three kings of Orient are.”

But Epiphany is not limited to the arrival of the three wise men. In the nineteenth century, Christopher Wordsworth, who was the Bishop of Lincoln and also the nephew of the famous poet William Wordsworth, wrote a poem about the various epiphanies that we commemorate Sunday by Sunday through the season. (You can find it in the Hymnal as hymn number 53.) After recalling that Jesus was “manifested by a star / to the sages from afar,” he goes on:

Manifest at Jordan’s stream, / prophet, priest, and king supreme;

And at Cana, wedding guest, / in thy godhead manifest;

Manifest in power divine, / changing water into wine. . . .

Manifest in making whole / palsied limbs and fainting soul.

Thus he describes the Gospel lessons for the next several Sundays, which tell about our Lord’s baptism by John in the River Jordan; his first miracle, wrought at Cana of Galilee; and his miracles of healing. The bishop’s poem concludes with a prayer:

Grant us grace to see thee, Lord, / mirrored in thy holy word;

May we imitate thee now, / and be pure, as pure art thou;

That we like to thee may be / at thy great epiphany;

And may praise thee, ever blest, / God in man made manifest.

The “great epiphany,” the great manifestation, will of course be our Lord’s return in glory.

But today we are bidden to consider another—perhaps a lesser—manifestation. We have heard in our Gospel lesson the story of Jesus as a twelve-year old bar Mitzvah boy manifest at the Temple in Jerusalem. This is the sole glimpse we are given, in the canonical Gospels, of Jesus’s youth, between his family’s flight into Egypt and his baptism in Jordan. More significantly still, this is in Saint Luke’s Gospel the only mention of Jesus in the Temple between his presentation when he was forty days old and his purging of the money-changers at the beginning of the week of his Passion.

As we have heard, Jesus went to Jerusalem at the Passover along with Joseph and Mary and a number of their relatives and neighbours, thus making the annual pilgrimage required by the Law of Moses. When the caravan formed up to return to Galilee, Jesus stayed behind; and when his mother found him, three days later, he was sitting with the teachers asking them questions and astonishing them with his answers to their questions. When Mary said that she had been looking for him, he asked her, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business.” But the phrase that is here translated “about my Father’s business” can also mean “in my Father’s house.”

This early presence of Jesus in the Temple was indeed a kind of epiphany, a kind of manifestation. It was among other things a manifestation to Saint Mary. When she had first brought Jesus to the Temple, as a baby forty days old, she had heard the prophecy of Simeon: “A sword shall pierce your own soul, also.” And Simeon had prayed, “Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Simeon’s prayer is now echoed in Jesus’s own words, “Did ye not know that I must be about my Father’s business, in my Father’s house?”

For the pious Jew, the Temple was precisely God’s house. When David became king of Israel he lived in a palace in Jerusalem; but the ark of the covenant was still in the tabernacle (which was a large tent). David said to the prophet Nathan: “I live in a house of cedar, while the ark of God is housed in curtains.” But God sent a vision to Nathan and had him say to David: “Are you the man to build me a house to dwell in? . . . When your life ends, I will set up one of your own children to succeed you, and I will establish his kingdom. It is he who shall build a house in honour of my name, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son.”

After David died, Solomon became king, and he took this prophecy to apply to himself. And Solomon had the first Temple built in Jerusalem; and Solomon’s temple stood for three and a half centuries, until it was destroyed by the Babylonians, who carried the Israelites away into captivity. When the Israelites were allowed to return, two generations later, one of the first things they did (after rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem) was to rebuild the temple. It was this second temple that was desecrated by the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century b.c.; that desecration prompted the Macabean revolt and the rededication of the Temple, which is commemorated by the festival of Hanukah.

In the first century b.c., King Herod the Great rebuilt and redecorated the Temple. It was in the second Temple, as rebuilt by Herod, that Jesus was found discoursing with the teachers. It was from that same Temple that he later cast out the money changers and sellers of livestock, It was the veil of that same temple that was rent in twain during the earthquake that followed Jesus’s death. The second Temple was eventually destroyed by the Romans in the year 70; of that building only the lower part of the western wall remains to this day. The temple mount itself is now the Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the dome of the rock.

During a span of more than a thousand years, except when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon and when pagans were in control, sacrifices were offered daily in the Temple. Millions of bullocks, sheep, and goats, and tens or hundreds of millions of pigeons, were slaughtered there as propitiation for sins or in thanksgiving for blessings. But as imposing as the Temple was, it was not destined to stand forever.

Because, the bar Mitzvah boy, who in this morning’s Gospel lesson comes voluntarily to the Temple, and who reminds his mother that he must be in his Father’s house, about his Father’s business, is in fact the same Jesus who whose death on the altar of the cross has made all of the sacrifices ever offered on the altar of the Temple obsolete, whose offering of himself has accomplished what the offering of all of those animals over all of those years was never able to accomplish.

In today’s Gospel lesson the boy Jesus is manifested in the Temple, but this is a foreshadowing. For Jesus, not Solomon, was the son of David spoken of in Nathan’s prophecy. It is Jesus (and not Solomon) whose kingdom and whose throne are established forever. It is Jesus (and not Solomon) who is called the Son of God the Father. And it is Jesus (and not Solomon) who would build a dwelling-place for God among men.

And what kind of dwelling-place, what kind of temple, does Jesus build? The new Temple, the Temple that was always intended, is the Church; but not the church building—God does not dwell in a house of cedar, or of stone, or of stucco. The new Temple, the Church, is a building of a different sort altogether. That is explained in Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, where he told the Ephesians (and us):

You are God’s people, members of God’s household. You are built upon the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets, and Jesus Christ himself is the foundation stone. In him the whole building is bonded together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you too are built with all the rest into a spiritual dwelling for God.

And what is the sacrifice that is offered in this new Temple, in place of the bulls, and rams, and goats, and pigeons that were offered and presented in Solomon’s temple? The answer to that is suggested by this morning’s Epistle lesson, taken from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, and paraphrased in our great Eucharistic prayer:

Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves (our souls and bodies), to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.

And this, our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is thereby joined with Jesus’s own sacrifice of himself, the one oblation, once offered, which is the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

Church of Saint Mary Madalene

Orange, California

7 January 2007