Epiphany is the manifestation of God to creation in God’s own ways and God’s own terms. God in Jesus Christ ‘who though was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness…’ (Phil 2:4-5) is a God who was born in the human body. Jesus was an embodiment of the divine in the human body. The divine, be it in the Ancient near eastern religions or in the Greek philosophical thought, or in the Hebrew Biblical context was understood as someone who was always transcendental, who was beyond the material human flesh, and away from human pain and suffering. In the mystery of Christmas, when God in Jesus was born as a child from a mother’s womb, that news was something which was very radically good news for their times. God was always understood as divine in opposition to earthly, fleshy humans, and was spoken only in terms of the ‘beyond’ to human cognition and body. But Jesus Christ came to pitch God’s tent among the creation as ‘body’ God, God who (be)came in the human body. God in Jesus not only divinised the material creation by his birth in the human body, but also humanised, body-ised the divine. The body of Jesus Christ, becomes the site of hope for the ‘fallen’ human bodies, where life and death find new meaning offering hope to the material bodies. The ‘body’ God identifies with the material creation including the human bodies, specially with those bodies that have been broken, beaten, bruised and buried, to breathe in a breath of fresh life, life in all its fullness.
If Jesus’ birth was a celebration of the ‘body’ God in a child, the baptism of Jesus is a celebration of the Spirit who descended upon him in a bodily form of a dove (22v). The Trinitarian God is an em’bod(y)’ied God, who did not shy away to reveal and manifest Godself in the materiality of life, be it a human body or in the body of a dove. What does the incarnation of Jesus Christ in a human body offer to our Christian faith and praxis today? What does the Epiphany or the manifestation of the Spirit of God in a bodily form of a dove inform our Christian witness today?
When God has created the creation in the space of God-self, when God chooses to manifest in the materiality of life, the body of a broken/disfigured/disabled human and in the body of a dove, the call for a Christian discipleship is to discern the sparks of the divine in the entire creation, in the public sphere, in the materiality of life, in the bodies of life. Celebrate life in all and among all of God’s creation.
Epiphany challenges us to break down the barriers of ‘us’ and ‘them’, for God’s manifestation is to create an inclusive world, where the sacred and the secular, where the spiritual and the material, where the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’, and where the local and the stranger find a common home coexisting and cohabiting together in love.
Epiphany inspires us to celebrate the divine who comes in the bodily forms of the creation, inviting us to care for the birds, the animals, the flora and the fauna and the entire ecology, for God manifests through God’s creation. In the destruction of the ecology, we are destroying the means and methods of God’s manifestations. With the extinction of a species, are we paving way to the extinction of God’s epiphanies?
Epiphany provokes us to look for the manifestations of God among the sites of the margins. At the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit descended upon him in a bodily form of a wild dove in that wilderness. Why did the Spirit of God not choose a lion (ferocious) or an elephant (strongest) or a giraffe (tallest) or an eagle (who flies to greater heights) or an ostrich (which is a strong bird) but chose to descend in the form of a wild dove? The ‘body’ God’s preferential option is those weak, meek, common, ordinary, simple and the not so important bodies, and so the Spirit in this case chose to descend in the body of a dove. Led by such a Spirit of God, we are invited to explore the divine among the common, ordinary, meek, weak and on the margins, and work with those on the margins for a just and inclusive world.
May the epiphany of the ‘body’ God continue to be with us throughout the journeys of our faith, and help us to celebrate the freedom of God’s manifestations in the bodily forms, in the ordinaries and in the matters & materiality of life. Amen.
Raj Patta
7th January 2021
2 comments:
Thanks for the meditation.
Thanks for sharing the reflection. It is deeply meditative.
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