These days I often turn for entertainment to podcasts and to crime series on television. The relevance of these leisure habits to the Feast of the Epiphany will be made clear in a moment.

One of my favourite podcasts is The Rest is History and it is presented by two distinguished historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Just before Christmas they did a two-part presentation about Jesus. Tom Holland demolished the absurd but now surprisingly widespread view that Jesus didn’t even exist, and they both attempted to assess which bits of the Gospels are historically reliable and which are what might be called pious embroidery. It was at this point that I took issue with them, for today’s Gospel was dismissed as pious embroidery. That may be what most New Testament scholars think, but there’s a case for its authenticity. I thought Tom Holland was going to make it when he explained “the criterion of embarrassment” – the idea that anything in the Gospels which would have been embarrassing to the early Christian church is almost certainly authentic.

The Magi are an excellent example of “the criterion of embarrassment”. The Greek word that Matthew uses – Magoi – can mean “Astrologers” or “Sorcerers” or “Magicians.”  There are two other Magoi in the New Testament, both in The Acts of the Apostles. One of them, called Simon, is baptized but only after he has repented of his evil ways. The other, Elymas, is roundly condemned by St Paul as a “son of the devil”, “an enemy of all righteousness, full of deceit and villainy” and is then struck blind. So those who doubt whether Wise Men really did visit Jesus, need to remember that Magoi were generally regarded by the early Christian community as disreputable and unreliable characters and that a visit by Magoi to the Christ child is not something that early Christians would have been inclined to make up. In early Mediaeval times there was indeed embarrassment about the Wise Men, and they were transformed into Kings in an attempt to give them greater status and an air of reliability.

So much for the podcasts, what about the crime series? Epiphany is all about the revealing of mystery – that’s why we heard those verses from Ephesians Chapter 3 which speak of “the mystery of Christ”, a mystery not made known to former generations. Just now we are catching up with the TV series Endeavour and grateful to Ian Lawson for recommending it. Like all good detective stories, it sustains the mystery until the climax while scattering clues so that the revelation as to whodunnit is surprising yet doesn’t seem contrived; offering the sort of surprise which makes you say both “Yes, of course…!” and “Why didn’t I see that coming?”

It’s easy to imagine the surprise of the Wise Men when it turned out that the new king was not the son of a current monarch but a baby born to an apparently obscure mother in a small provincial town. Yet it was a satisfying surprise – when they got to Bethlehem, they had no doubt that they were encountering the special baby whose birth had been marked by the rising and moving of the star, and they had no hesitation in acknowledging the kingship of Jesus by presenting the costly gifts which they had brought with them. The baby was not where they had expected him to be, not whom they had expected him to be, and yet they recognized him for who he really was. They experienced that special moment of thinking “Yes, of course…!”

Their Epiphany surprise was made possible by their study of the heavens, their willingness to undertake an arduous journey and their encounters with Herod and with the chief priests and scribes who knew the answer to the question “Where will the Messiah be born?” but who were expecting a different kind of Messiah – a liberator who would free them from the rule of the Romans and usher in the golden age of which the prophets, including Isaiah in today’s reading, had spoken. Most of them did not, either then or later, see in Jesus the fulfillment of those prophecies – and the adult Jesus, the challenging travelling preacher and healer whose earthly life ended on a cross – did not fit the picture they had of the way in which God would put everything right.

It’s easy to understand why, then and now, most people don’t get Jesus. Darkness still covers the earth, and we have moved forward into a new year in times of violence and uncertainty. Matthew’s Gospel acknowledges that. It is the most grown-up, the least sentimental of the Christmas stories, for it goes on to tell how Herod ordered the massacre of the Innocents and Mary, Joseph and Jesus became refugees.

Yet reading it in faith we are able to say “Oh yes, of course! This is how God comes to us and seeks us out…” Not as a tyrant demanding absolute obedience, but open to the best and the worst of human responses. The Epiphany mystery is not just a whodunnit, though the recognition that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, is central to it. The Epiphany mystery is also a Whatareyougoingtodoaboutit?”

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians explains that the whole point of the church is to be an Epiphany Church:

“…to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things”

There’s a technical theological term for that – it is “participatory eschatology” – in plain English, that means how we as the church play our part in God’s healing and redeeming work.  St Augustine of Hippo summed that up splendidly in one of his best one-liners:

“God without us will not; we without God cannot.”

“God without us will not” - because God is not the authoritarian tyrant some folk believe in and other folk reject. Rather God wants us to respond freely and lovingly.

“…we without God cannot” - because we’re human and broken, because our vision is clouded and our searching, like the searching of the Wise Men, doesn’t often take us straight to the right place – and that’s the whole point of Christmas and Epiphany, God becoming visible to short-sighted humanity, and showing us a better way.