Epiphany 2026

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 1 A dependable staple of social media around Christmas and Easter are bad faith posts featuring charts and videos comparing the story of Jesus to other figures in world mythology. An abundance of miraculous births, redemptive deaths, and glorious resurrections from Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian sources older than Jesus are presented with a smug “gotcha!” attitude. Now, one need only spend five or so minutes of research to find that these parallels are not nearly as close as internet atheists claim they are, and have sometimes even been completely fabricated by 19th century scholars with an ax to grind. However, this desire to seek patterns in the stories we tell does make, I think, an important point about the person of Jesus, though not the one disgruntled internet users think they’re making. René Girard was a French academic who professed no religion and worked in a wide variety of disciplines, presenting provocative ideas about human nature. He suggested that imitation was the root of human desire, envy its fruit. Growing in jealousy and competition, people are set against one another. When the tension of competition threatens to tear their communities apart, they unconsciously project this fervor onto a single victim, the mob against the martyr. The community becomes collectively implicated in the murder of this innocent 2 scapegoat, the prior tension resolves, and the victim is made sacred for the miracle of restoring order. Now this is a brief and maybe inadequate summary of a complicated idea, but the novel and unsettling theory Girard presented to the world was that ancient societies and the myths, cultures, and religions that sustained them were founded upon the collective murder of individuals, told and retold from the perspective of the murderers. When Girard turned his attention to the Bible in the 1970s, he found, as he expected, the same repeated patterns of the scapegoat. Though he was startled by one difference: these stories were being told not from the perspective of the mob, but from that of the victim. This typology culminates, of course, in the Paschal Mystery. The story of Jesus is not the familiar one of the victim who is deified for the order his death brings, but of the God who willingly offers himself as victim. The only true innocent, the only victim with the authority to silence his victimizers, Jesus participates in the sacrificial system and thus exposes and destroys it. This all led Girard to become a practicing Catholic and to devote the majority of his work thereafter to reshaping his theories in light of Jesus Christ, whom he refers to as “the end of all mythology.” 3 Now, in saying all of this, I may have, like the wise men, taken the long way home, but Girard gives us a compelling image of what it is we are celebrating today in the Epiphany. Matthew’s Gospel, the only one of the four which tells the Epiphany story, is one of fulfillment. The book begins tracing the lineage of Jesus from Abraham to Joseph. It is filled with citations of the Hebrew scriptures, often giving us asides about the words and actions of Jesus fulfilling specific messianic prophecies. This Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the one whom all of Judaism has awaited and foretold. He will bring peace, he will liberate and redeem the Hebrew people. In Luke’s account, as we heard during Christmas, the coming of the Messiah is announced first to the shepherds near Bethlehem, the common and the lowly. In Matthew’s telling, a later visit is emphasized, one that equally subverts our expectations about who would come to greet the infant Messiah. While tradition has gone as far as to designate these visitors as three kings and give them each a name, we know little about them from the biblical account alone. They are wise men of the East who bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the holy family. They bow down in deep reverence to Christ. 4 This is more what we would expect for the birth of the Messiah than the stable and the shepherds: Gold as to a king, Frankincense as to a god, Myrrh that foreshadows the tomb, kneeling in adoration. But who were these men? The term rendered as “wise men” in most translations comes from the Greek word magoi, priests of ancient Persian religion, astrologers who looked to the stars and planets for divination. It was through this pagan astrology that they knew of Christ’s birth, that they knew a king of the Hebrew people had been born. Psalm 19: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” The Messiah has come to set his people free, the Creator has entered into creation, Infinity has entered space, Eternity has entered time. The foundations have been shaken and their shaking reverberates through every fiber of Being. As I said the Sunday after Christmas regarding John 1, there is no story, no created being, no aspect of the individual person that is not bound up in the story of Jesus, of he who was in the beginning with God, of him through whom all things were made. Yes, says Matthew’s Gospel, this child born in Bethlehem is the fulfillment 5 of the Law and the Prophets, the promised Messiah of the Hebrew people, but the stars sing so greatly of his arrival that the song is heard and comprehended even by those who are outside of the covenant, those not under the Law or spoken to by the Prophets, by those telling an entirely different set of stories. The life of Jesus both subverts and exceeds all expectations of the Messiah’s coming. Born in a manger, raised as a carpenter, ministering as a wanderer, killed as a criminal, this was no one’s expectation of the King of Kings. Christ was not merely the greatest of prophets, but the one who spoke through every prophet. He did not merely conquer empires, but conquered death. He did not merely establish a new social order, but a new reality. He did not come only to set his nation free from oppression, but to set all people free from sin. He is at once the child born in the stable and the one through whom the universe was born. Christ is the end of all mythology, the summit towards which all stories reach, the fulfillment towards which every human heart longs, the Eternal Word that speaks all that is into being. Yes, the Messiah has come to set his people free, but he has come also to do more than they could ever ask or imagine. And it was these wise men from the East, these gentiles, who were the first to 6 acknowledge this, the first to rejoice in the Good News for all people. All that we have in us to create is but types and shadows of he who created us, always pointing, always seeking, always telling, even when taking the long way home. Will we listen? Amen.