In giving the infant Jesus gold and frankincense, the Magi evoke Isaiah 60:3, 6 in which Gentile nations bring these gifts to the God of Israel (see also Tobit 13:11, Psalms 72:10-15). In addition, myrrh is an oil that was used to consecrate levitical priests and the wilderness tabernacle, the forerunner to the temple in Jerusalem (Ex. 30:23-33). Myrrh was also used as a burial ointment.
God takes the initiative in leading us to religious faith. It is our personal experience that God is always the initiator when it comes to salvation. We do not have to go chasing after God as if God were hidden and avoiding detection.
God reaches out into the ordinary happenings of our lives where we go about the daily business of work, family, and friends. God reaches into those secret places in our hearts where no one else has seen anything, where we ourselves are hardly aware of any existence of any event. We may appear to be simply doing our daily work and just simply living our lives, but God is there with power and with love. God is there with self-revelation.
Our ordinariness is blown wide open with the revelation of God’s love and concern for the person, the individual. Personal and unique are always characteristics of God’s approach to any human being.
Are there ever any hints that God is up to something? Are we sometimes forewarned that God is about to show that God is there with love and compassion? Yes. At times, those moments of divine self-revelation are preceded by a series of community-based or family-type experiences. Most often, we encounter God when we have just encountered some powerful experience of love on the human level. All of a sudden, it seems, God is there, where God had seemed absent for so long!
Our personal moment of “epiphany,” a moment of God’s revelation of presence, power, and love, happens in God’s own good time. Having just come through some transforming event, glad or sad, in our lives, we are suddenly ushered into the presence of the Lord Most High! That is our experience of God’s ‘Epiphany.”
After such experiences of God’s presence and love, we come together with others of similar experience to share, to support one another, to worship, and to serve together. Thus, Church happens.
Ever since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) especially, the Church has come to acknowledge that God is at work and can be found in all the great religions of the world. The faith of the Jewish people continues to be a valid and God-given work of the Lord for the Jewish people. Islam proclaims the unique sacredness of Allah and the duty of its followers to be faithful. The holiness of the universe has been the witness of Hinduism. Buddhism continues to call people to an inner surrender to the holiness within each person. Native religions on all continents testify to the presence of God within creation.
The Book of Daniel contains some of this same kind of prophetic literature: Apocalyptic.
