Epiphany #10 of 14: Reflection

God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.

(Galatians 4:4)

The purpose of my reflections on the Christian Calendar is to hand on to my children and my children’s children the content of my faith—that Christmas and Easter are really true and that changes everything. I wouldn’t want them, or anyone, to live without Christmas and Easter. To live, as Lewis puts it, as if it were “always winter but never Christmas” (LWW).

So we have moved from Advent through Christmastide and now well into Epiphany. Tradition has it that during Epiphany we should at least tell again the stories of the Magi and the flight into Egypt, and of Christ’s baptism, and of Christ’s first miracle. So far, we’ve told two, with one to go. There’s always more to be told about how “Jesus went about doing good and healing the oppressed” (Ac 10:38).

I’ve been struck by the humanity of these stories. It brings me back to the Apostle reminding us that Jesus, though “God sent”, was “born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem.” We tend to think of the virgin birth as signifying Christ’s divinity: “conceived of the Holy Spirit.” But the Apostle speaks of the humanness of Christ’s birth: “born of a woman, born under the law.” He does not just drop from the sky. He enters fully into human life.

The Jesus of Epiphany is always and already both the Son of God and the Son of Man. Unlike the Jesus of the gnostic gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas, who never quite touches the ground. For the gnostic gospels, Jesus is far above us with no need to heed the Law. Isn’t it interesting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell us of the humanity of the Son of God beginning with baby Jesus taken to the temple to participate in all the rituals “required by the Law” (Lk 2:39), to that scary escape into Egypt, to his insistence for John to perform the ritual of baptism. He has human feelings of hunger and thirst, of indecisiveness, even ignorance (“Not even the Son knows” Mt 2:36). He really did enter into our world. That’s why today “Christ is able to empathize with our weaknesses” (Hb 4:15).