EPIPHANY OF THE LORD – usus recentior
4 & 5 January 2025
‘Our impotence in bonds’
The ancient term for this weekend’s feast is “Manifestation” – a manus festus, in which God’s clear and radical appearing could be touched with the hands – in which the Divinity has taken flesh in the arms of His Virgin Mother, adored by the Magi.
These days, though, “manifestation” has become a watch word of a New Age spirituality, permeating our way of thinking. It can mean, to some moderns, the attempt to make tangible, by hints, suggestions and expressions of desire to the impersonal universe, often without the work or spirit necessary to bring it about, what things are hoped for in the human heart. A teenager may well, during their exams – a necessary intrusion in the life of the learning – find themselves hoping that, despite the lack of effort or practice that the year has offered – they could ask “the universe” to give them a desired grade. “I’m manifesting a good mark,” a daydreaming child might say. And, with this exercise complete, they may turn back to the computer game, comic book or sunbathing that they would rather do. The lonely might think the same thing, magicking out of nowhere a would-be groom – tall, brown eyes, in finance: these aspirations are “put out there” with the hope that some cosmic force would make it happen. After all, if it’s been manifest, it may possibly come true.
What may the Magi, these wise men of the Old Age, have “manifest” if they could? Likely, it would be of some great ruler whose birth had been foretold in the ancient prophecies. But, being wise, they put no confidence in merely telling the universe what they wanted to see, but set out to find what the star had led them to find. Certainly, they had put in the work with their study; but they also knew – somehow, in their ancient religion – simply to trust in what the Lord would make manifest to them. And, what did they find? Much more than they could have conjured up. This is because it was not something of their own imagination and effort, flawed as it is by sin and ignorance. It wasn’t a reliance on some fanciful, impersonal cosmic force that could grant wishes. Rather, they behold Something that exceeded what they could have “manifested” in the very God-Man with His Virgin Mother, wrapped in swaddling clothes. God, far greater than human thoughts, and the true longing of every human heart, had appeared before them in what St John Henry Newman called “omnipotence in bonds”.
In Dublin, in 1857, when Newman preached a lengthy sermon to the students of the Catholic University, he apologised to them that he his sermon would be something of an “intrusion” on their holiday. To think, Newman reflected, would be the most fitting response to the glory of the Christmas mystery, which raises our hearts to the Lord. What did Newman mean in speaking of what the Magi saw as “omnipotence in bonds”? It would not have been sufficient for the Magi to find a king – majestic as that would be; what the Magi are drawn to is more than a simple king, far greater than their own ideas could manifest. When they do arrive, they would not have concluded this in a stable (or cave), attended by shepherds and animals, that a Great King had arisen. What they see made manifest is God-as-Man, personal, intimate: an infant (weak and helpless) subject to human authority in a strange inversion of what we would, by reason, expect. They see God– almighty – bound in a human nature, with a little body bound in swaddling clothes. And here we could begin to ask, in the face of this logic-defying reality, who could do this to the all-powerful One? No one could, of course, except God Himself. And why would God do this, accepting the humiliation of being bound in this way? But for love of us. A great truth is made manifest to the Magi, and to each of us: true power, true sovereignty, truth Himself is not eradicated by weakness, but is mystically magnified by it.
By His Own voluntary action, God has taken on Himself, in Jesus, a Self-imposed weakness to set us free from our own weakness – an “impotence in bonds”, made manifest in our sinfulness. In this voluntary act, where God takes human weakness on Himself, Jesus does not lose His Divine Power. Rather, He makes manifest a higher dimension of it – which is shown through humility and love: “Greater love has no man than this…” to “empty Himself, taking on the form of servant”. Who God is, and what He has revealed to us, about His nature and our weakness, and the lengths that He endures to make manifest that love urge us to a voluntary action, too.
What voluntary acts does God’s manifestation demand of us? What would we want to manifest in 2025?
We could hope to less caught up, this year, in our own desires, hopes, resolutions and aspirations. Typically, when we are, we miss out on what God has desired and hoped for us – which we learn from the Scriptures, the lives of the saints, and the Sacred Liturgy of the Church. What is it that God desires for us? That we are saved, and come to live with Him in heaven. This is really what we desire, at the bottom of our heart, from ancient times any way. It’s a desire that’s obscured by sin and ignorance – a double darkness – but it really is what we want: to be freed from desires that are disordered, which bring unnecessary suffering, and to be set free.
And how will this be achieved? Not by any mechanism of our own choosing, desiring or manifesting – but by God’s Own self-manifestation in His Son, Who has taken flesh and dwelt amongst us. We need to trust in God’s plan for our salvation, and not lean too much on our own understanding. It’s not for us to try to manifest a reality that matches our expectations, but to lean in to what God has in store for us, by His providence, and then to be faithful to Him. Nothing we could simply will or hope or desire or manifest will surpass what God has instore for us. We can do many more things, of enduring value, when they derive from Him and are directed to Him. As Newman recalls, in that same sermon, “the breadth and depth and richness and variety and splendour of this created world which we behold is simply nothing at all compared to the vastness of the Ocean of perfection which lay concentrated in the intensity of His unity”, swaddled in the manger and adored by the Kings. This little King, though He is visited by the sages, “borrows nothing from them; He owes nothing even to the highest of them” – rather, “they… owe it to Him that they are even able to remain in their own proper nature, and they derive from Him, moment by moment, every pulsation of their life and every ray of glory as they possess”. And so, too, should we see ourselves in His presence, even now, at every moment. Nothing that we have or are we have on our own; each is a manifestation of God’s love – a love that wills our existence, suffers for us, permits us to suffer with Him and will draw us, at the end, to Himself in eternal glory.
Rather than make blind prods at an impersonal universe, we could increase our efforts to ask the personal God, Who knows us and loves us, to let His Will be done: we can still ask for the Maths results, the romance and the other needs of the day, but we must learn to do this subject to His Will, accepting all that comes from Him, whether we like it or not. And if we receive what we desire, we rejoice; if we suffer, we see His mysterious plan unfolding in that difficulty – and we rejoice in our weakness, so intimately known by the Christ Child, Who has come to suffer with us and for us.
We need to accept the movements of the day as ways in which God’s will can be made manifest to us. And what will this make manifest, this new life that depends more and more on God’s Will than our own? God willing, we will become wise men, too. The mark of such a man is present in the image of those who come to the Lord, and seeing the Child and His Mother, kneels down and adore Him. This requires a voluntary act on our part, to allow God’s manifestation to be known and loved. It means making frequent confessions as an act of self-humbling love; it demands a devout reception of the Lord in Holy Communion. It urges us, even outside of Mass times, to rejoice in the feasts of the church – coming here, for example on the feasts of the Oratorian saints in January (16, 24, 30). It must urge us also to suffer willingly and well for Him, if this is what His Will permits. To do this will make us truly wise, seeing His love made manifest in all of the events of our life, and in the life of His Church.
If we do all this, what will be manifesting? The glory of God, omnipotence in bonds, worshiped by the Magi – and by those who truly believe. United to the prayers of Our Lady, who remembers all these things, and us, let us ask the Lord to make us into powerful signs of His love in the world. Amen.