The Epiphany of Our Lord

In today’s gospel we are presented with three wise men who sought to discern the happenings of great events in the stars. A common misconception presents the wise men as kings. The probable cause of this confusion comes from Ps 72 that we sung today for our psalm, where we find the words: “The Kings of Sheba and Seba will come to you bearing gifts.” The Magi were not Kings, but scholars who studied the stars in order to gain knowledge. In the ancient world, there was a well-established belief that the birth of great men was portended in the stars. It was for events such as these that the Magi studied the heavens. Now perhaps these wise men were dis-interested truth seekers, but we all know that knowledge is power. We must be prepared to countenance the fact that perhaps the wise men had an ulterior motive in seeking out this new-born king. It is possible that they were seeking the inside track on the birth of the greatest king who would rule all the earth. They cannot have been unaware of the influence that they would have over this king by visiting him so early. They would be in a position to advise other kings in ancient Mesopotamia on how to create alliances with this powerful new king. We seek the truth, not only because it gives us satisfaction to know the truth, but also because of the power it gives us over our own reality.

The Magi evidently expected the new King that had been foretold by the star to be born in a great palace, surrounded by the high and mighty of the land with whom they might already begin to form friendships, alliances. They could then use this knowledge that they had gained to be advisors to their own Kings back in their respective homelands. At the very least, I’m sure that they expected to be treated well, and hosted by a King who would one day reward their homage. So they make a beeline for the capital, Jerusalem, where there is a splendid Temple and an imposing palace. And this is where things begin to go wrong for them. They are told that there is no new King that has just been born in Jerusalem, and they are dispatched to a much smaller and insignificant town of Bethelehem. Undettered, they still believe that something might come out of this trip and their efforts. Imagine their shock, though, when their search leads them finally to Mary and Joseph – two commoners, with their baby lying in a manger. Once they are presented with this scene, all hope of winning some benefit from this acquaintance of people so common and uneducated as these must have evaporated instantly.

But we are told that they did not return home disappointed or sad, but rather that they went home rejoicing. How did this transformation take place? How did they manage to renounce their expectations of converting their knowledge into power? The only answer that makes sense is that God lead them on a journey of transformation away from the predictability of their own plans and into the mystery of God’s own plans. Instead of transforming their knowledge into power, their knowledge was transformed into worship, as they came to realize the pettiness of their own small ideas of reality, and bowed before the superiority of God’s reality as revealed in the powerlessness of the child before them. Karl Rahner, the great Jesuit theologian has a marvelous rendition of the notion of mystery as it relates to God. Rahner says that too often we as Christians have defined mystery as something that we cannot understand for the moment, so that mystery is situated at the midpoint between no knowledge and complete knowledge, meaning that one day, the veil will be pulled back and we will understand the mystery of who God is and God’s plans for us. But Rahner says that this is not a helpful way to understand mystery, because in some sense God will always remain a mystery to us, even when we get to heaven. So for Rahner mystery is not defective knowledge, rather mystery is the point at which knowledge must be transformed into love if a relationship is to continue. Mystery is the point at which knowledge can no longer be converted into power, but must rather be converted into love, because we realize that we cannot control the reality before us, all we can do is surrender and worship a reality that radically escapes our understanding and our grasp.

Since the dawn of human civilization, we as human beings have sought out scientific knowledge as a means to securing power over the natural world that surrounds us. We have learnt to split the atom and harness immense energy in nuclear power stations. We have learnt to decode the genome and how to engineer genetically enhanced agricultural produce with higher yields and drought resistant crops. Advanced in medical science have increased human life expectancy in certain developed countries from way beyond the three-score years and ten recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. These advances have prompted some people like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man to predict that in a few decades we will be able to live forever. Yet despite our ability to produce high yield crops, we have not been able to solve the problem of world hunger. Despite having the medical science to enable people to live well beyond 100 years, there are still so many of our elderly who live such lonely lives they would prefer to end them prematurely. Clearly what we are short on is not knowledge, but rather love.

Despite its huge promise, scientific knowledge cannot and will not be able to get us across the line from the darkness of human ignorance into the light of divine peace and joy. This can only happen when we admit that our human knowledge has reached the limits of its capability to be transformed into power. At a certain point, no matter how much power we have, it cannot substitute for love. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in current debates around the dangers posed by AI. The big tech companies of our day, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon have all realized that knowledge is power. They have been collecting our data for decades now and have turned our data into money by selling it to advertisers. They have now realized that they can use the data that they have collected to train powerful AI systems that voraciously consume data in order to become more adept at performing complex tasks. They have realized that the more knowledge they are able to feed these LLMs, the more powerful they become. But there is a great fear about how this power will be used and whether an AI can ever really substitute a human. If the feast of the Epiphany invites us to anything, it is to kneel humbly with the Magi at the crib and contemplate how God is calling us to modify our voracious quest for new knowledge to turn into power and instead focus on how to transform the knowledge we already have into love.

Questions for reflection

1. In what ways do I use the knowledge that I have to wield power over others?
2. Where in my life do I feel that I have reached the limits of what knowledge can offer me?
3. In what ways has knowledge become an idol for me?