God bless us and may the Virgin protect us!

With fresh wishes for this New Year, here is the commentary on the readings for the Solemnity of the Epiphany 

Epiphany of the Lord [6 January 2025]

*First Reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah (60:1-6)

The reference to the symbols of gold, frankincense and myrrh, present in this text of the prophet Isaiah, made it chosen for today's feast of the Epiphany of the Lord with obvious connection to the gifts of the Magi, but there is much more. Notice all the expressions of light that are in this passage: 'Clothe thyself with light, for thy light cometh, the glory of the Lord shineth upon thee' ... (as the sun rises) upon thee shineth the Lord, his glory shineth upon thee ... the nations shall walk in thy light, kings in the brightness of thy rising. In short, your light, the splendour of your dawn will make you radiant. Contrary to what one might imagine, as is often the case with prophets who cultivate hope, we must immediately deduce that the general mood at the time was rather gloomy. Why was the general mood gloomy, and what did the prophet suggest to invite the people to hope? As for the mood, let us look at the context: this text is part of the last chapters of the book of Isaiah; we are in the years 525-520 BC, that is, about fifteen or twenty years after the return from exile in Babylon. The deportees had returned to their homeland, and it was believed that happiness would be established, but this long-awaited return did not fulfil all expectations. There were those who, having remained in the country, had experienced the period of war and occupation; the exiles who had returned from exile hoped to regain their place and their possessions. Since the exile lasted fifty years, those who had left had died there and the survivors who returned home were their children or grandchildren. This should not have made reunions any easier, especially since those who returned could not claim their parents' inheritance because, precisely because of the long period of fifty years, the property of the absentees and exiles had been occupied and others had taken possession of it. Moreover, many foreigners had settled in the city of Jerusalem and throughout the country and had introduced other customs, other religions. It was evident that this mass of such different people was not an ideal climate for living together. The first cause of disagreement was the rebuilding of the Temple. Since their return from exile, authorised in 538 by King Cyrus, the first returnees, who formed the so-called 'community of return', had re-established the ancient altar of the Temple in Jerusalem and had resumed worship as in the past. At the same time, they wanted to start rebuilding the Temple, but some people considered heretical wanted to intervene. They were a mixture of Jews who had remained in the country and foreign pagan peoples settled there by the occupier mixed together even through marriages who had taken up customs judged heretical by the Jews returning from Exile, and for this reason the 'community of return' refused that the Temple of the One God should be built by people who would later celebrate other cults there. This refusal was badly received and those who had been rejected opposed it by all means: the result was the halting of work and the waning of the dream of rebuilding the Temple. As the years passed, discouragement grew and spread.  Sadness and discouragement, however, are not worthy of the people who are bearers of God's promises, and that is why Isaiah together with the prophet Haggai decided to awaken their compatriots by inviting them not to feel sorry for themselves and to set to work to rebuild the Temple.  Knowing this context, Isaiah's almost triumphant language surprises us, but it is the usual language in prophets. If they promise all this light, it is because the people are morally down and it is in the darkest night. Yet it is precisely during the night that the signs of the dawning of the day are scrutinised, and the role of the prophet is to restore courage by announcing the dawn of the new day. It is clear: the more the prophet insists on the theme of light, the more it means that the people are oppressed by the darkness of discouragement. To lift their spirits, Isaiah and Haggai insist on a single argument that is fundamental for the Jews: Jerusalem is the Holy City, chosen by God to make the sign of his presence dwell there. God himself made a commitment to King Solomon, deciding that "here shall be my Name".  We can thus summarise and actualise Isaiah's message: "You are in a tunnel, in the deepest darkness, but at the end of the tunnel light awaits you. Remember the promise: the Day is coming when all will recognise in Jerusalem the Holy City'.  So do not let yourselves be discouraged and get to work, devote all your strength to rebuilding the Temple as you have promised. In all times when one feels discouraged by difficulties and is groping in the darkness of uncertainty, prophets are needed to awaken the courage of hope. Isaiah makes this clear with determination and this is his reasoning: when one is a believer, even the darkest darkness cannot stifle hope. And here it is not a matter of a promise linked to a political triumph, but of God's promise: one day the whole of humanity will finally be reunited in perfect harmony in the Holy City. 

*Responsorial Psalm (71/72) 

This psalm makes us witness the coronation of a new king, when the priests pronounce prayers over him that collect the wishes and dreams of the people at the beginning of each new reign. They wish for political power for the king, peace and justice, happiness, wealth and prosperity for all, and the chosen people have the advantage of knowing that these dreams of men coincide with God's own plan. However, the last verse of the psalm, which is not part of today's liturgy, changes its tone: it no longer speaks of the earthly king, but of God: 'Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, he alone performs wonders! Blessed be his glorious name forever, may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen! Amen!" And it is precisely this last verse that offers the key to understanding the entire psalm composed and sung after the exile in Babylon (thus between 500 and 100 BC), at a time when there was no longer a king in Israel. The vows and prayers are therefore not about a king in the flesh, but about the future king promised by God, the Messiah-King. And since this is a promise from God, one can be sure that it will come true. The entire Bible is shot through with this indestructible hope: human history has a purpose, a meaning where the term 'meaning' means two things: both 'significance' and 'direction'. God has a single plan that inspires all the events of the Bible and takes on different names according to the different authors: it is the "Day of God" for the prophets, the "kingdom of heaven" for the evangelist Matthew, the "design of his benevolence (eudokia)" for St Paul (Eph 1:9-10). God loves humanity and tirelessly re-proposes his project of happiness. A project that will be realised by the messiah who is invoked whenever the psalms are sung in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Psalm 71 is the description of the ideal king, whom Israel has been waiting for for centuries: when Jesus is born, about 1000 years have passed since the prophet Nathan went to King David on God's side and made him the promise of which our psalm speaks. (cf. 2 Sam 7:12-16). From century to century, the promise has been reiterated and better specified. The certainty of God's faithfulness to his promises made it possible to discover little by little all its richness and consequences; if this king really deserved the title of son of God, then he would be in the image of God, king of justice and peace. At every coronation of a new king, the promise was repeated about him and one would dream again, but the Jewish people still wait, and it must be acknowledged that the ideal kingdom has not yet seen the light of day on earth. One would almost end up believing that it is only a utopia. Believers, however, know that it is not a utopia but a promise from God, hence a certainty. And the entire Bible is shot through with this certainty, this invincible hope that God's plan will be realised. It is the miracle of faith: faced with this promise, each time disappointed, two different reactions are possible: the non-believer says 'I told you so, it will never happen'; the believer resolutely affirms 'patience, for God has promised it, he cannot deny himself', as St Paul recalls (2 Tim 2:13).  Today, the Jewish people sing this psalm in the expectation of the Messiah-King, and in certain synagogues, Jews express their impatience to see the messiah by reciting this profession of faith by Moses Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher, physician and jurist (1135-1204) from Toledo in Spain: 'I believe with sure faith that the messiah will come, and even if he is late in coming, in spite of everything, I will wait until the day of his coming'.  We, Christians, apply this to Jesus Christ and it seems to us that the Magi who came from the East have begun to realise the promise: 'The kings of Tarsis and the islands will bring gifts, the kings of Sheba and Seba will offer tribute... All kings will bow down before him, all nations will serve him. And the day is not far off when all mankind will welcome Christ and the kingdom of his love will be realised.

*Second Reading, from the letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians (3:2-6)

This text is taken from the third chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, and in the first chapter Paul used the famous expression "the loving design of his will" (v.5), "making known to us the mystery of his will" (v 9). We find here the word "mystery" which for St Paul is not a secret that God jealously guards; on the contrary, it is his intimacy, into which he lets us enter. Paul explains further by saying: "By revelation the mystery has been made known to me": the mystery is the plan of love that God progressively reveals. The whole of biblical history is a long, slow and patient pedagogy that God uses to introduce his people into this mystery of his, into his intimacy. Experience shows that a child cannot be taught everything at once; it must be educated patiently, day by day and according to circumstances. One cannot give theoretical lessons in advance about life, death, marriage or family. The child discovers the family by living with parents, grandparents and siblings: when the family celebrates a marriage or a birth, when it faces bereavement, the child experiences these events with relatives who, little by little, accompany it in its discovery of life. God used the same pedagogy with his people, revealing himself progressively. This revelation with Christ took a decisive step so that history is divided into two periods, before Christ and after Christ, and the apostle explains that this mystery "was not manifested to men of previous generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit" and makes it even clearer that the mystery he is talking about is Christ himself, the centre of the world and history, and the whole universe will one day be united in him, as the members are united to the head. In the phrase "to bring all things back to Christ, the one head" (1:10), the Greek word we translate as head means precisely the head. It is also really about the whole universe, and Paul specifies that "the nations are called in Christ Jesus, to share the same inheritance, to form the same body, and to be partakers of the same promise through the gospel". In other words we can say that the inheritance is Christ, the Promise is Christ, the Body is Christ, God's plan of love is for Christ to be the centre of the world and for the whole universe to be gathered in him. When we say in the Lord's Prayer, 'Thy will be done', we are speaking of this divine plan and, by repeating this invocation, we are impregnating ourselves more and more with the desire for the Day when this plan will be fully realised. Paul explains that this project concerns the whole of humanity, not just the Jewish people: it is the universalism of God's plan, a universal dimension progressively discovered in the Bible and well rooted in the people of Israel, since the promise of the blessing of all humanity is traced back to Abraham: "In you shall all the families of the earth be blessed" (Gen 12:3). The passage from Isaiah that we read in the first reading of the Feast of the Epiphany is exactly along these lines. Obviously, if a prophet like Isaiah saw fit to insist on it, it is because people tended to forget it. Similarly, at the time of Christ, if Paul specifies that 'the nations are called in Christ Jesus to share in the same inheritance, to form the same body, and to be partakers of the same promise through the gospel', it is because this was not taken for granted. We have to make an imaginative effort: we are by no means in the same situation as Paul's contemporaries; for us, in the twenty-first century, this is self-evident: most of us are not of Jewish origin and find it normal that we all share in the salvation brought by the Messiah. After two thousand years of Christianity, we know that Israel remains the chosen people because, as St Paul says elsewhere, 'God cannot deny himself', but we believe that we too are in this plan called to witness to the gospel in the world. At the time of Christ, however, the situation was different. Jesus was born within the Jewish people: this was the logic of God's plan and the election of Israel. The Jews were the chosen people, chosen by God to be apostles, witnesses and instruments of salvation for all mankind. The Jews who became Christians sometimes had difficulty accepting the admission of former pagans into their communities, and St Paul reminds them that even pagans can now be apostles and witnesses of salvation. Moreover, the episode of the Magi, narrated by Matthew in the Gospel of the Epiphany, tells us exactly the same thing. The last words of this second reading resound like an invitation: "the nations are called in Christ Jesus to share in the same inheritance, to form the same body and to be sharers in the same promise through the gospel". Certainly God awaits our collaboration in his plan of love: the Magi then saw a star and set out. For so many of our contemporaries, there may not be a star in the sky, but we are the witnesses of Christ and therefore in need of becoming full of light and joy. 

*From the Gospel according to Matthew ( 2:1-12)

First of all a historical observation: the episode of the Magi narrated by the evangelist Matthew gives us one of the rare clues as to the exact date of Jesus' birth. The date of Herod the Great's death is certain: 4 BC (he lived from 73 to 4 BC), and since he had all children under the age of two killed, these were children born between 6 and 4 BC. Therefore, Jesus was probably born between 6 and 5 BC. The miscalculation occurred in the 6th century, when a monk, Dionysius the Lesser, rightly decided to count the years from the birth of Jesus, and no longer from the foundation of Rome. At that time, as can also be deduced from other historical sources, 

the expectation of the Messiah was very much alive and was spoken of everywhere. Everyone prayed to God to hasten his coming, and some Jews thought that he would be a king: a descendant of David who would reign on the throne of Jerusalem, after having driven out the Romans and definitively established peace, justice and fraternity in Israel. Others more optimistically even hoped that this happiness would extend to the whole world. In this sense, several converging Old Testament prophecies were cited: first of all, that of Balaam in the Book of Numbers. I remember it: when the tribes of Israel were approaching the Promised Land under the leadership of Moses, crossing the plains of Moab (today in Jordan), the king of Moab, Balak, had summoned Balaam (a pagan prophet and soothsayer) to curse these invaders. But, inspired by God, Balaam, instead of cursing, had pronounced prophecies of happiness and glory for Israel, saying in particular: "I see it, I contemplate it: from Jacob a star rises, from Israel a sceptre rises" (Num 24:17). The king of Moab was furious, because he had interpreted this prophecy as the announcement of his future defeat against Israel. But in Israel, in the following centuries, this beautiful promise had been carefully conveyed, going so far as to think that the Messiah's reign would be announced by the appearance of a star. This is why King Herod, consulted by the Magi about a star, took the matter very seriously. Another prophecy concerning the Messiah is that of Micah: 'And thou, Bethlehem, the land of Judah, art not indeed the least among the chief towns of Judah: for out of thee shall come forth a leader who shall be the shepherd of my people Israel'. A prophecy perfectly in line with God's promise to David, according to which his dynasty would never die out and would bring the country the long-awaited happiness.

The Magi probably did not know all these things: they were astrologers and had set out simply because they had seen a new star rise. When they arrived in Jerusalem, they inquired with the local authorities. And it is here that we encounter the first surprise of Matthew's account: on the one hand, the Magi, pagans who have no preconceptions, are looking for the Messiah and will eventually find him by looking at the star visible to all. On the other hand, there are those who know the Scriptures, the scribes of Israel, who can quote them without error and can reveal their meaning... provided, however, that they themselves allow themselves to be guided by the Scriptures, but unfortunately they do not move a finger; they will not even go from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and thus will not meet the Child in the manger. It is indeed a provocation: those who waited for the Messiah like the scribes fail to see and therefore do not meet the Messiah, while the magi who are strangers to the scriptures allow themselves to be guided by the star, which they all saw, and arrive at the meeting with Jesus.  As for Herod, it is a different story. Let us put ourselves in his shoes: he is the king of the Jews, recognised as such by the Roman power. He is very proud of his title and fiercely jealous of anyone who might tarnish it. Let us not forget that he had several members of his family murdered, including his own sons. Whenever someone became a little too popular, Herod had him eliminated out of jealousy. And now a rumour spreads through the city: foreign astrologers have made a long journey and say: 'We have seen a quite exceptional star rise; we know that it heralds the birth of a child-king... just as exceptional. Surely the true king of the Jews has been born!". We can imagine Herod's fury and anguish. Thus, when St Matthew says: 'Herod was distraught and with him all Jerusalem', this is surely a very delicate way of expressing himself. Obviously, Herod could not show his anger; he had to know how to manoeuvre: his goal was to get some information about this child, a potential rival to be eliminated. So he first inquired about the location.  Matthew writes that he summoned the chief priests and scribes to ask them where the Messiah would be born. And this is where Micah's prophecy intervenes: the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Herod also inquired about the age of the child, because he already had a plan in mind to eliminate him. He summoned the Magi to ask them the precise moment when the star had appeared. We do not know their answer, but subsequent events allow us to deduce it: Herod ordered all children under the age of two to be killed, thus taking a wide margin. Most probably, in the account of the visit of the Magi, Matthew already gives us a summary of the whole life of Jesus: from the very beginning, in Bethlehem, he encountered the hostility and anger of the political and religious authorities. They did not recognise him as the Messiah, treated him as an impostor and eventually eliminated him by crucifying him as an evildoer. Yet, he was indeed the Messiah. A great lesson in faith for all! It is really true: only those who seek God sincerely and without preconceptions arrive, like the Magi, to meet Him and enter into the plan of His infinite Mercy

N.B. I attach this prayer taken from the prayer booklet of the Holy Trinity Mercy Sanctuary in Maccio - Como

PRAYER TO THE HOLY TRINITY FOR THE GIFT OF FAITH

Lord, sustain my Faith!

O My Lord, O My God

with deepest faith I am prostrate here to Thee.

Thou art Hope Certain in whom I am made safe!

Thou art Mercy, in Thee all things draw me!

Thou art Charity, Thou all-given to me!

Thou art Eternal Love in whom my heart is quenched!

For this immense Gift

Thou who art All and to me Thou givest me All,

Of the darkness of my night the Light pierces the veil,

And I sing and pray and cry, with as much faith as I can:

I believe, I believe

In thee One and Triune God, my One Lord!

Thou, Father, Thou, Beginning, who art the Source of it;

Thou, Son, Eternal Word, by Whom it grows;

Thou, Divine Spirit, Who confirmest me in it.

Thou, Most Holy Trinity, Impenetrable Mystery of Thee Only God,

in the Holy Sacrifice of the God who becomes Son,

grant that I may always find Food, Comfort and Strength

and Water that purifies,

to make me steadfast and holy,

In Thee who art the Way, the Truth and the Life,

By the sure hand of Virgo Purissima

Who to Thee, and by Thee for me, Thou Amor, Mother didst make,

Firm and secure in abiding

In the bosom of thy Holy and Beloved Bride,

the Faith that, in the Son, unites me and makes a gift to Thee!

+ Giovanni D'Ercole