|
|
|
News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
|
_____________________________________________________________________________
February 2008
The Feast of Epiphany.
By Paul Friesen
“Wise men [magi] from the east came to Jerusalem… [saying], ‘we have observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.’” (Matthew 2:2).
How important is this story?
In the city of Xian—which was the ancient capital of China and is now the site of the famous excavation of the terra cotta imperial army—there is a temple complex. And within it there is what might be called a ‘stone library,’ a collection of stone ‘steles’ (free-standing stone columns the height of a tall man). On these columns are carved, in Chinese characters, the great texts of that civilization. The complete text of the I Ching, for instance, is there as is the Confucian Classic of Filial Piety. In the second hall, among others, is a stone column celebrating the origins of a Chinese community that rooted itself in what it called the Da Qin religion, a stone column which can be seen by any visitor in Xian today.[1]
A translated excerpt from the second part of that column reads: ‘My Lord Ye Su, the One emanating in three subtle bodies, hid his true power, became a human, and came on behalf of the Lord of Heaven to preach the good teachings…A virgin gave birth to the sacred in a dwelling in the Da Chin Empire. The message was given to the Persians who saw and followed the bright light to offer him gifts…He set afloat the raft of salvation and compassion so that we can use it to ascend to the palace of light…He left twenty-seven books of Scripture to inspire our spirit…We use abstinence to subdue thoughts of desire; and we use stillness to build our foundation. At seven we gather to pray for the salvation of all. Every seven days we have an audience with heaven…This truth cannot be named… [but] when forced to give it a name, we call it the religion of light.’[2]
The Da Chin religion, i.e. ‘The Religion of Light from the West,’ was of course, Christianity. We heard references to Jesus, to the Trinity, to the incarnation and virgin birth, to Sunday worship…and to the Magi.
We now know that Christianity reached the centre of China in the 600s A.D. The column in Xian was first carved for a Christian monastery nearby in 781 A.D. After a century of intermittent scholarship none of this is controversial—it is not stuff of sensational late night TV specials narrated by former science fiction stars!
We now know that Christianity first came to the powerful Tang dynasty of China 1400 years ago from the great Christian dioceses in what is today Iran and Iraq by way of the Silk Road—that great trading route of central Asia. The ancient Chinese church believed it was Persian magi who went west to worship the Christ Child, and presented gifts to him, and Persian missionaries who went East to bring Christianity to China while much of Dark Ages Europe was still pagan. And we now know that in at least some of the house churches in China today there are dreams and visions of Chinese missionaries retracing the Silk Road…west to proclaim the Gospel message again in the places it was first preached.[3]
Now what is the point of all this--beyond the truth that it is a great story? For Christians to celebrate the Epiphany is to celebrate the universal significance of the birth of Christ celebrated even by the skies, the skies created by one God and seen by all nations. We do not possess the Christ Child, any of us. Christ is not the light of individual consciences or of one theological system or another. The star that enraptured the magi shone for a few Persian sages but was significant for the whole of creation. The Lord God is not just the god of the hills or of the valleys (as some of Israel’s enemies once suggested), but is the Creator of the whole of creation. We don’t each struggle to find the light of Christ with our focus on the interior states of our spirit on our individual pilgrimages, as if that were the point of Epiphany. Rather it is the light of Christ, like the star of the magi, which does the finding of us.
‘So weak we are!’ said St. Augustine once, ‘[that] we seek the day with a lamp.’[4] It is the meaning of this day we call 'Epiphany' that the star, Christ himself, is revealed to us as we stand with our sputtering candles. The true light is as plain as day. [1] The story is told in Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Daoist Christianity (New York: Ballantine, 2001), p.206-207. A scholarly treatment of the stele is in Nicolas Standaert’s Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume I: 635-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p.10 ff. [2] This translation is from Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras, p. 226. [3] See David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing (Washington: Regency, 2003) for this and related stories. [4] Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John Rettig (Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1988), p. 67 (1.6-9).
|
|||
|
|
|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2008 |