One of the earliest heresies that the Christian church fought was Marcionism, the conviction that Jesus should be interpreted in abstraction from the Old Testament. I spent so much time drawing together the Old Testament themes of covenant and sacrifice because I share that anti-Marcionite conviction that it is impossible to make sense of Jesus apart from his Jewishness. The categories that Paul and the Gospel writers used to present Jesus as the Christ were, almost exclusively, drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures.

While driving around town the day after Christmas I couldn’t help but notice the number of Christmas trees that had already been tossed to the curb. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We live in a culture that is fast paced, overly commercialized, and constantly moving us on to the next event. I was reminded of this again on December 27th. I went to the mall to take care of some Christmas returns, yet I could find very little evidence of anything remotely Christmas; only merchandise and signs reminding me that Valentine’s Day was less than two months away.

Epiphany is often seen as the completion of the Christmas story. While Epiphany provides a nice bookend to the Christmas season, there are lessons we can learn from the visit of the magi that remain relevant to this day.

Lesson 1:
See Him: We need to actively seek out God in our lives. God speaks to us and gives us directions. While there may not always be a big sign, like a star, we needn’t expect something huge or unavoidable to hear Him. Rather, we should survey the heavens, and be attentive to God’s whisper and have the courage to act.

The Church encourages us to look to the Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph for inspiration, example and encouragement. They were a model family in which both parents worked hard, helped each other, understood and accepted each other, and took good care of their Child so that He might grow up not only in human knowledge but also as a Child o God. Jesus brought holiness to the family of Joseph and Mary as Jesus brings us holiness by embracing us in His family.

Lord Jesus, as I kneel before your manger in adoration, let my first Christmas word be : thank you. Thank you, Gift of the Father, for coming to save me from my sins. Without you I do not know even how to be human. The characteristics of your human body express the divine person of God’s Son. And in that wondrous expression, Lord, you reveal me to myself. Thank you for that saving revelation in your sacred humanity. As the Christmas liturgy proclaims, in Christ we experience “the holy exchange that restores our life.”

The idea behind this practice is straightforward enough: the splashing of the blood on the people signaled God’s pledge of fidelity (his lifeblood) to them, and the splashing on the altar represented Israel’s reciprocal pledge of fidelity to Yahweh, each saying to the other, in effect, “As this blood is poured out, so will my life be poured out for you.” Once more the linking of covenant and sacrifice was on clear display. It is, incidentally, by no means accidental that this confluence of Torah and sacrifice precipitated the emergence of the formal Israelite priesthood.

In the course of three terrible days, we are told, Abraham led Isaac to the mountain of sacrifice, enduring the plaintive questions from his son. As the rabbis and commentators have made clear, Abraham must have gone through a spiritual and psychological torture beggaring description. Then, at the climactic moment, as he was about to plunge the knife into his son, an angel spoke, telling Abraham to desist, since God now knows that Abraham would withhold nothing from Yahweh.

Ancient peoples—Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Aztecs, and Hebrews—came together in the practice of offering sacrifice to God or the gods. The idea, in itself, is relatively simple, though it was expressed in a wide variety of ceremonies and practices. Some part of the earth is returned to the divine principle—offered up—in order to establish communion with the sacred power. In the Hebrew context, both grain and animals were sacrificed to God, either as thank-offerings, sin-offerings, or simply as signals of communion and fellowship. But in even the most benign of sacrifices, some living thing was destroyed.