The Peace Pulpit

As you probably know, this feast of the Epiphany concludes our celebration of the whole Christmas season. In many parts of the church, this feast is celebrated with even greater joy and celebration than the feast of Christmas itself. It's the culmination of the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, into our world. It is celebrated as the most important feast of the Christmas season. As we listen to the second lesson today, we get a sense of why in the early church, and for many hundreds of years in fact, this feast was so important.

In order to listen deeply to the lessons today, it's important to remind ourselves once more that we have begun the season of Advent. The word Advent, as you know, means, "coming." So we're celebrating a season in which we're expecting someone or something to come into our lives. Of course, the someone is God who comes into our lives. In this season of Advent, we expect God to come in different ways.

Some years ago, a Dominican priest named Albert Nolan wrote and published a book that was entitled Jesus before Christianity. That might seem like a puzzling title to you because we would say that Jesus and Christianity are the same, but what Fr. Nolan was writing about very convincingly was that Jesus, when He lived among His disciples here on earth and then when He first began to live within the community disciples, proclaimed a very radical, even revolutionary message, a message that is very hard to hear and to really take in and understand, and then to follow.

Now as we try to listen for a few moments within the depths of our hearts to what God is speaking to us today, there are a number of things that we can reflect on. The first thing, I think, comes from that passage, St. Paul's letter to the Church at Thessalonica, where Paul reminded the people that God's message that they had received, they accepted it, not as some human thinking, but rather as a living power among them because they accepted what God spoke not as a human word, but as God's word.

These words of Jesus at the end of today's Gospel are perhaps among the most misunderstood words of Jesus in all the Scriptures, in all the Gospels because many, many people, and perhaps some of us, interpret these words as Jesus declaring there are two totally separate realms. There is Caesar's, the political, human realm, and then there is God's. There are two separate forms of our existence, what we might call in current terms the religious and the political, and they should never be brought together. They are totally separate.