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The Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Today’s solemnity is also an important occasion for welcoming you all to the School for Spiritual Direction and also for the installation of our new Prior and Sub-Prior. I would like to thank both Fr. Paul and Fr. Sam for their services to the Community as Prior and Sub-Prior in a moment of the history of this Community that was not at all easy. Today’s Mass, I am offering for your personal intentions.

The eternal word of God, has become manifest in Christ in order to give us a closer and more personal understanding of God; to give us an exigesis of God. As a matter of fact, Jesus Christ is the first Exiget that reads and explains what he read. And what is he interpreting, talking to us about? He is talking to us about the Father and how He experiences the Father. Jesus is reading His Heart, the Heart of the only Begotten Son of the Father. And that experience of “the Father and I are one,” He explains to us not only by word but also through His very life here on earth. He is Emmanuel; God with us.

This was His message. He shared with us His personal experience with the Father and this became divine revelation. He is not sharing something from a far away and distant world or from some other time. He is not telling us about a pre-existent experience. He was fully divine but He also was fully human. And His teaching is the revelation of a human being who experiences as a human being, that which signifies for him to be one with the Father. Jesus is giving us the human understanding of Himself as Son of God. Therefore, the Psychology and the understanding of Jesus are human. He did not anticipatedly know that which normal human beings learn to know. He was certainly full of the gifts of the Spirit and illuminated by them but they were given in a very normal and human way.

The manifestation (Epiphany) of God is made possible only through the emptying of God’s divinity, the Kenosis. In fact, Epiphany and Kenosis coincide with one another and therefore, the Light of God is made manifest through the Cloud: as we read in Matthew 17:5, the Luminous Cloud. It is in this beautiful but paradoxical truth that we discover the Christ who manifests God but is in need of a person, an Exiget, who can decode this message. Jesus as Revelation of God and of man, is in the complexity of His being, “the Word made Flesh” (John 1:1-18), and it is in this mystery where we are called to dwell if we are to grow in Love and understanding of who God is. As we read in the Gospel of John 1:17, grace and truth came and were made manifest to us through Jesus Christ.

Like the three Magi, we approach the manger with the conviction of faith that Jesus is the revelation of God made manifest to us all. And that this Epiphany has entered into the history of human kind in order to manifest the history of the heart of God. Jesus is manifesting today, to us, the Today of God for us. We are participating here and now in the Epiphany of God Today. History is the chosen way by which God makes manifest His salvific love to us all, a history that is the daily desire of humankind for the fullness of life… a moving onward towards the fulfillment (the pleion of Matthew 12:41) when Christ will come, the day after the last day and invite us to contemplate with Him, the Father as He truly is.