“Christ in you, the hope of glory”
This is a translation of the homily for Epiphany (year III) in Uskedal Church in Kvinnherad, Norway, Sunday 5th January, 2025. The readings are as follows: Isaiah 51:4-8; 2 Corinthians 4:1-6; and Matthew 2:1-12. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version of Scripture (RSV), unless otherwise noted. As the Gospel I have chosen the text which can be used all years but which is technically in year I. I have done so as I think that text should always be the gospel reading for Epiphany.
As some may have observed, this homily was offered yesterday, a day early. In the Church of Norway we celebrate it on the nearest Sunday. I am not the biggest fan of how this plays out. I have no problem that churches may want to celebrate Epiphany on the nearest Sunday, but the calendar is set up in such a way that they call the nearest Sunday “Epiphany” and call the coming Sunday “the second Sunday of Epiphany.” But that means that the calendar is only in sync with other churches on years where the Sunday falls on the 6th of January or later. This year, for example, you have the weird consequence that the second Sunday of Epiphany lands on the 12th of January, which almost everywhere else would be the the first Sunday of Epiphany.
Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):
Let us Pray:
Eternal God, you let the star lead the Magi to Bethlehem. We pray: Be a Light for us on our way. Let all peoples see your glory and praise He who came with salvation, your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.
This Christmas, I have been listening to a beautiful responsorial chant, performed by the choir Grex Vocalis. The chant was O Magnum Mysterium, “O great mystery,” which in the Western Church is part of the Matins of Christmas. It concerns the great mystery, that God became man, that He was revealed to us:
O great mystery, / and wonderful sacrament, / that animals should see the newborn Lord, / lying in a manger! / O blessed virgin, whose womb / was worthy to bear / the Lord Jesus Christ. / Alleluia!
It is a beautiful chant, and I would encourage everyone to listen to it. We are still in the Christmas season. The first weeks of the season of Epiphany, which begins today, or technically tomorrow, January 6th, is part of the Christmas season, and lasts until Candlemas on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas Day, when we celebrate the presentation of Jesus in the temple. And the focus is, as the name suggests, on who Jesus is, on how He has revealed Himself to us. Because today we celebrate the day of the revelation of Christ, Epiphany or Three Kings’ Day.
Epiphany comes from Greek, epipháneia, which means “revelation.” The day itself is actually tomorrow, January 6th, or the thirteenth day of Christmas, but here in the Church of Norway we celebrate it on the nearest Sunday. This day is one of our oldest church days, perhaps the oldest after Easter. It was celebrated before we started celebrating Christmas. The focus is on Jesus revealing to us who He is, and today the focus is on preaching the Gospel, preaching of Jesus Himself. For what is the core of the gospel?
It is Christ Himself, the Word who became flesh, as we read from the Gospel of John (1:14), which is the Gospel reading for Christmas Day. Today we do as John the Baptist did, as he made witness of Christ, of the true light that came into the world (John 1:6-9). Yes, Christ, who is God, came to us and became man, as the light of the world. As he says later, in John 12:46-47: “I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” Christ is the light, and we are all called to proclaim this, to lift up the name of the Lord.
As a priest, I am called to preach Christ. I shall not conceal Him but reveal Him to people. All of us who have the ministry of preaching have a mission to preach the whole Christ. We shall not conceal Him but reveal Him to all people. We shall preach the Word made flesh. In today’s second reading, we read: “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing” (2 Corinthians 4:2-3). And further, in vv.5-6: “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”
Christianity is not a religion where we preach one thing to the masses, while we preach a secret knowledge to the “elite.” God has revealed Himself, exposed Himself, to all, and through the Spirit he leads us into all truth. But the fact that Jesus has revealed Himself does not mean that we understand everything. The gospel is still “the great mystery,” as the chant says. In 1 Corinthians 4:1, St. Paul writes of the apostles and those of us with preaching responsibilities that we should regard us “as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” And the core of these mysteries, Christ tells us, is this, that He has“ come as light into the world, that whoever believes in [Him] may not remain in darkness.”
In Colossians 1, St. Paul writes that he is set to fully preach “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints,” namely “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (vv.26-27). And today, on Epiphany or Three Kings’ Day, we commemorate the Magi who preached Christ through the gifts that they gave Him, as we have read in today’s Gospel reading.
They are examples to us in that they preach the whole Christ. They came with gold, frankincense and myrrh. Through the gold, they proclaimed that He is Lord and King. Through the frankincense, they proclaimed that He is our High Priest who sacrifices Himself and who always intercedes for us. And through the myrrh, they proclaimed that He was going to die, as this ointment was used to embalm the dead. They preached Jesus as God who became man to die for us. Og dette får vi syngja om etter preika, då vi skal syngja salmen Deilig er den himmel blå (“Lovely is the blue sky”).1 This hymn teaches us that Christ is the light og the star that will shine not only for the Magi but also for us. As they, we are also called to proclaim Christ, proclaim the Word of God, both Christ as the Word made flesh and the Scriptures, in which we find the message. But the point is not necessarily the words in themselves but what they point towards, the reality in which they participate. We proclaim the mystery of God: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Anda mystery is not something that can be fully comprehended in this life. But we can grasp it on faith, even though there is still something dark, obscure, and unknown about it. But we do so in the concrete, not just in our thoughts, but also in words and deeds. But most of all, we grasp it in what we receive, in the preached word, in baptism, in the Eucharist. For there Christ comes to us. The mystery is that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), that God became ma for our sake. When we proclaim the Word, we proclaim the person of Christ, the Word made flesh.
We preach Christ, our Saviour and Lord. For this is the Gospel. When Christ said, “Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15), and when St. Paul said that he preached “the gospel of God” (Romand 1:1), this was not just a vague expression for “good news.” No, the word “gospel” was an established expression in the Greco-Roman world, including in Israel. When the emperor came to power, he proclaimed a “gospel”: “Augustus is Lord. Now there will be peace and order.” But often it was just empty rhetoric; the emperor cared about you as long as you could pay taxes. But in Christ, we see something different. Here, we find the righteous king, the good prince, the Prince of Peace as it is said in Isaiah 9:2.6:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Yes, the light shines forth from Christ, who is “the light of the world.” He is the true King, the one who can truly proclaim the “good news.” The gospel is that it is Christ, not Herod, Caesar, Augustus, Napoleon, Haakon, Olav or Harald, who is Lord and King. Or, as St. Paul tells us today: “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord.” But He is not like other lords. His power cannot be defined into our categories. In Him, we gave a Lord who does not first and foremost present us with a list of demands. He is not like the kings of old who mostly only cared about the people as long as they were of benefit. In the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the power of the emperor was seen as derived from divine power.2 The emperor stood as a direct representative of the Roman gods, especially the god Jupiter, also knows as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, “Jupiter the maximally greatest,” the Roman equivalent of Zeus.3 The Romans said that the power of the emperor flowed out from the power of the gods. But in Christian thought we see something new. The emperor, or any king, has a secular power that is of a completely different character and essence than God’s. Jesus does not have a regime of violence, His power is not of the same nature as ours. And this also does something with our understanding of earthly and secular power. For above the emperor, above the king, above the president, we find a completely different type of power. And that power is not about coercion, about how to get people to do as much as possible for you. God gives, we receive. And God gives Himself completely and fully.
At the top of the cosmos stands the symbol of power above all symbols of power – neither the throne, nor the scepter, the crown, the sword, nor the fasces that were used by the fascists and that can be found in the coat of arms of the Norwegian police, but the Cross, that place where God showed His power by being humiliated and by dying as a human being, for our sake. God’s power is primarily manifested in what to us seems completely opposite. But that is actually how God reveals Himself to us. God, the One, who is completely beyond being, completely beyond our categories, lies hidden “under his opposite,” as Martin Luther put it.4 He reveals Himself, paradoxically, in that which is hidden. He conceals Himself in a man, Jesus, in the waters of baptism, under the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in suffering and death.
Where we would not believe that God would come to us, in the physical, the degrading, even in death, there He comes, in all His glory. And that is how we share in salvation. To have eternal life is to die to our sins and to what separates us from God, so that we may be risen up to new life, which is exactly what happens in baptism. As St. Paul puts in in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” God’s power is therefore not about what He can squeeze out of us, but what He gives us and, paradoxically, about God’s humility. You will never find an ancient text, in Greek, Latin or Norse, which says Zeus, Jupiter, or Odin are humble. That would be scandalous. But in the Bible, in Philippians 2:6-8, this is exactly how Christ is described:
Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
This is the completely radical message that we hold forth today, on Epiphany. We proclaim the God who reveals Himself to us in Jesus, hidden “under his opposite,” in a man who first came as a little poor child, who was nevertheless adored by the magi, and who later, on the Cross, appeared to be completely humiliated, broken, and defeated. But that is exactly where he won, as we read in Colossians 2:14-15: “Having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.” Christ is the Lord who takes responsibility for us and gives us new life. He is the righteous king who gives his life for his people, who is not like the other princes and kings, who oppress the people and exercise authority over them. He is the Lord who serves. As He says in Matthew 20:28: “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” He is a friend who gave his life so that we may live. He gave Himself for us, for our sins. And sin is more than just bad behavior. It is about the path we choose, how we live our lives, as a whole. We have not lived up to what God created us for – to praise God, to thank Him, for who He is, for what He has done, and to be a servant for our fellow human beings.
We have not lived up to this, and we have a sad tendency to ignore this, both the task itself and the fact that we have not lived up to our calling. But then Christ comes. As I said, he does not come primarily with a list of demands. He comes with grace. Where earthly kings often are merciless, He is “full of grace” (John 1:14). We need not be afraid, for He is our Saviour.
But then we must remember that we are also allowed to live in this, as disciples of Christ. For after Christ has delivered us from the power of darkness, He also calls us to follow Him. We can be a light to others because Christ can shine through us, because Christ lives in us. We do not do it by our own power. This is something that, so to speak, wells up from us, because through baptism we have shared in the great mystery; that Christ is in us. It is about what the Eucharist is often called: the mystery of faith. It is precisely there that we are specifically allowed to receive. There we are allowed to draw upon the power of Christ, which works in us. There we are allowed to have a very concrete encounter with the risen Jesus Christ, here and now.
This is what we are called to preach, and I encourage you all to do so: Proclaim the great mystery: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
This is a hymn by the Danish theologian and priest, Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, melody by Jacob Gerhard Meidell (1840), found in Norsk Salmebok 2013 (Stavanger: Eide, 2013), no. 90.
The following reflections have been stolen boldly from William Grosås.
I have seen Jupiter Optimus Maximus translated as “Jupiter the best and greatest,” but I find that quite flat and uninspired.
In Latin: sub contrario. See Marius Timmann Mjaaland, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology (Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), 41-45.