Today we celebrate the manifestation of our Lord to the Gentiles through the Magi, and
we look to their example and ask for their intercession, these holy men who bowed down
before divine wisdom and submitted their own human wisdom to him.
In the West, we tend to focus on the three kings, whereas in the Eastern Church, Epiphany
is not just the visitation of the three kings to Bethlehem, but it's also the wedding feast
at Cana, where our Lord worked the first wedding.
The first miracle and the baptism of our Lord in the Jordan, where the Holy Trinity
manifested, or the Father and the Holy Spirit manifested their favor and put a sign over
Christ as he was being baptized by John.
But today, Jesus is manifested to us in his true nature and in his mission, and we humble
ourselves.
I suppose it's very fitting, especially in modern times, that we should focus on the
Magi in the West, where we tend to worship our technology and our tools and our human
wisdom, human philosophy, and where philosophies that are opposed to Christ become more and
more part of our culture.
and it becomes more difficult to embrace the wisdom of God.
Magi came from the East, and we don't know a lot about them.
There's a lot of speculation about who they were.
Sometimes we refer to them as kings, sometimes as wise men.
That's what magi, or the singular magus, means.
It means wise men.
But it's also the word that's used for magician.
They were certainly pagans,
and they didn't know the revelation of the Jewish people the way the Jews did.
Apparently they must have known something about it.
But they were somewhat eclectic, apparently, in their outlook,
and they were open to finding the truth.
So even if they were involved in wicked business,
they were willing to be enlightened.
Even in their...
quote-unquote, human wisdom,
they were willing to be enlightened.
And they humbled themselves enough to see something more in the stars
than what most of the pagans saw.
They witnessed this miraculous star that was brighter than all the others,
and that moved in a way which was completely out of keeping with celestial bodies,
and they followed it.
And it brought them, first of all, to Herod,
and then...
to the Lord himself.
And there at the stable,
they offered their symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh,
acknowledging by the gold the divinity of Christ,
or the kingship of Christ by the frankincense's divinity,
and by the myrrh the fact that he was to be a victim and a sacrifice for our sins.
Today we can look to them,
and...
beg God for that true wisdom.
They had a world wisdom which they were willing to let go,
in order to find God and discover His wisdom.
And, west of them, that they embraced at Bethlehem, in front of the manger,
was the wisdom of adoration, reverence and silence and...
of pure joy.
And finding something which we can't completely comprehend
but we know is the truth.
God gave them the grace to know that the truth was to be found not in the powerful like Herod,
not in their own wisdom which they read in books,
but was to be found in this little infant lying in his poverty in a feeding trough in an animal's stable
with his poor mother and with his poor father, St. Joseph.
That's where they found wisdom, and it wasn't something that was explained to them.
It was something that they witnessed and experienced by seeing the sign and by opening their hearts to God.
In the end, you know, in the face of foolishness, of the presumed wisdom of this world,
which is really the foolishness of men and a kind of foolishness which can lead us to destruction and to hell ultimately,
ultimately.
We need the wisdom of God, and it's something for which we need to sacrifice and pray
because we become more and more inclined to depend on our own devices, our own technology,
which very often results in the culture of death.
And the Magi were involved in that.
In a way, Herod wanted to see the child dead and then ended up going after all the children in that area,
all the male children within two years of birth in that area.
And the angel appeared to them and, or in a dream, spoke to them
and let them know that they shouldn't go back to Herod and collaborate with him.
And so they didn't.
They left, and their cooperation with that grace saved.
Saved our Lord's life, in a way.
Made it more difficult for Herod to figure out what he needed to do
and gave St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother time to get our Lord out of Bethlehem and to Egypt.
And, you know, God provides us with solutions.
We need to, you know, do our part, of course.
But most of what we have to do is discover the wisdom of God,
and that's usually done on our knees.
And when we worship our tools and our technology or whatever else that is not God,
it's usually that pride by which we try to stand on our own
rather than by going to the source and humbling ourselves.
So we try to do that today as we celebrate Epiphany.
And also as we bless an icon, a very special icon today,
of the Blessed Mother.
The Blessed Mother and the Christ Child.
For a long time we've planned to have a shrine to the Blessed Mother,
kind of pro-life shrine where anybody can come to pray to the Blessed Mother,
whether it's a married couple that wants to conceive or a mother who's had a miscarriage
or a mother who's had an abortion or whatever, you know.
We need a culture of life, and Our Lady is the mother of life,
the mother of the author of life, and so we still don't have the shrine.
It'll be next to the Divine Mercy Shrine in the back there in a similar kind of frame.
But meanwhile, we finally have the icon, and the icon has been donated
in honor of Father Bonaventure's father, Joseph Maguire, by his family.
And so we give thanks for that and to the Maguire family for this opportunity
to have this blessed icon.
The icon really speaks for itself, but it was an icon used on a much smaller scale,
smaller size, by midwives who were delivering babies.
And the title of the icon is Helper in Childbirth.
And there's a little description of the icon there at the altar rail,
which will kind of give you an idea of the meaning.
But she really speaks for herself, and she's very beautiful.
And so is Jesus.
So this is also a manifestation for us, and I encourage you to venerate the icon
and pray to the Blessed Mother for all the graces we need on this Feast of Epiphany.
And then, of course, after Mass, we'll be gathering downstairs for the rest
of our celebration, but we turn to the Blessed Mother this afternoon and ask her for the grace
of Epiphany to see what God has done for us.
What our Lord wants us to see and to respond to it in wisdom.
It will be the time of our hamburger dressess.
The little gift he gave us, God has given us more than enough.
The born Nine Heavenly Son has run away out of the city of Thessalonica and is walking
his way to Jerusalem.
Then we part з, to you Jesus Christ to whom all the goods of this world come through
the deep and the sin of the world.
And unto the Son of Man that we have become, we have the United States throne.
And in that all creation.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.