Hello friends! Happy New Year!
Today is the 12th day of Christmas, as my true love said to me. Today is also called Epiphany. A variety of things are celebrated on Epiphany, but the classic is the arrival of the three magi/wise men/kings to honor Jesus who they take to be the new King of Israel (and who was probably about two years old by then).
In the “low church” world of my childhood (i.e., not much liturgy or attention paid to church calendars), it wasn’t a day we thought much about. Epiphany became significant for me a few years ago when I read a remarkable book by the Argentine philosopher, historian and theologian Enrique Dussel called Philosophy of Liberation. It’s small but pretty tough sledding. I definitely didn’t follow everything he said, but when Dussel used the word “epiphany” as a way to describe the knowledge we gain through the self-revealing of the poor and oppressed, and posed this as an alternative to traditional Eurocentric/Enlightenment sources of knowledge (the philosophical term is “epistemologies”), a lightbulb went off. Suddenly the opposite responses of powerful men on Epiphany two thousand years ago—both the magi and Herod—made sense.
I wrote the following piece (which has been lightly edited) in a rush of inspiration after reading Dussel, but it never saw much of the light of day. This moment, when the oppressed of Palestine are once again attempting to flee unimaginable violence into Egypt just as Jesus’ family did after meeting the Magi, seems like an appropriate time to share it.
Peace,
Nathan
“Phenomenology, as its name implies, concerns itself with what appears and how it appears from the horizon of the world, the system, Being. Epiphany, on the other hand, is the revelation of the oppressed, the poor—never a mere appearance or a mere phenomenon, but always maintaining a metaphysical exteriority. Those who reveal themselves transcend the system and continually question the given. Epiphany is the beginning of real liberation.”
- Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation
It was this night, in an empire whose puppet ruler would sooner kill a generation of children than let his ego or his house-of-cards grip on power be threatened, when three aristocrats handed their wealth over to the destitute refugee parents of a toddler wrapped in rags. For these three, the arrival of an utterly different kind of Lord revolutionized their very imagination of the cosmos. Christian tradition calls it the Epiphany. We might call it as an act of Jubilee and the wellspring of liberation.
In the crooked path that is Continental Philosophy, the phenomenology Dussel points to in the quote above marked a turn from abstract flights into “Reason” (or, what seemed reasonable to certain people at the cosmopolitan centers of Europe’s global empires) toward reflection on the world as it was presenting itself around Europeans and reflection on the experience of the “self” as it experienced that world. (Stay with me!) It was an important shift. History, place, human experience and eventually ecology would find their way back into the domain of philosophy. But still it maintained the same center. The same white men remained the Subjects reflecting on their encounters with Objects. The same peoples and cultures and landscapes and ways of being remained objectified and othered, categorized and colonized. Eurocentric presuppositions of empire were retained and left unexamined. It was not yet a turn that could overturn worlds.
But there has always been another tradition—another fragmented path (as Willie Jennings might call it) that has broken into the settled worlds of settlers, a prophetic witness issuing from the margins and underworlds of empires, an embodied presence containing such a disjunctive indictment of the beliefs and structures of the ruling class that the world would have to be turned upside down and inside out where its claims fully faced and followed.
For the exiled Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, this disjunctive declaration is called Epiphany: “the revelation of the oppressed…the beginning of true liberation.” Epiphany happens, for Dussel, when the poor appear enfleshed in the truths of their own raw, historical condition. Dussel calls this the “metaphysical exteriority” of the poor from the hegemonic worldview and systems of the powerful. Imagine an unhoused person sleeping on a street lined with luxury stores as wealthy shoppers scuttle by on the sidewalk like Levites on the Jericho road. The sheer existence of that unhoused person is a revelation of the injustice of the system and those shoppers’ place within it. Likewise with the contemporary presence of Indigenous peoples on the land called the United States of America, the plain and honest presence of the oppressed exposes the illegitimacy (and fragility) of an empire’s mythical foundations. In these ways, before anyone has even engaged in vocal protest, the oppressed are already witnesses to truths and ways of being that stand outside (exterior) and in opposition to the dominant consensus.
If the decolonizing voices scattered across history can be gathered together as a prophetic tradition named Epiphany, then the incarnation of Christ the Son and second member of the Trinitarian God into the dark Palestinian Jewish flesh of a poor and colonized child is the archetypal Epiphany event and a glittering revelation into the nature of oppression, liberation, and God’s own self.
Early Christian theologians, attempting to express the union with God and all things into which humanity has been restored through Jesus, often riffed on some version of the saying, “God became human that humans might become God.” In this conversation, we might tweak their claim as many liberation theologians have done before: Through the incarnation God revealed that God’s nature is an oppressed and liberating one to show that the oppressed and their struggle for liberation are themselves revelations of God. These are the places where union with God is most fully realized, the places where epiphanies begin.
Going back to the Epiphany story of the three wise men as told by Matthew, there is another remarkable act in the narrative. The poor, through/as Jesus, do more than reveal the truth: that the peace of empire is violence; that the empire’s way which claims to be for life is actually a way of death; that there is another way of life offered by the Creator to creation which is a peace founded on shared abundance and love expressed as justice. The Epiphany story demonstrates what happens when a select few among the powerful, because they are open to something new, hear these truths and are moved to do the only sensible thing: lay their wealth and power down at the feet of the poor who are revealed as the incarnation of God.
This response is the second feature of Epiphany and crucial to the means through which it inaugurates liberation. Epiphany shifts interactions out of the I-It mode of commodifying relationships demanded by empire, and moves us into an encounter wherein the powerful recognize that kenosis—the self-emptying modeled in Jesus that reveals the inner life of the Trinity (Phil 2:5-13)—is always first and foremost the responsibility of those with power, privileges, and resources to lay down and share. Note that the chief protagonist is still Jesus. This is not a first-century story of white man’s burdens or condescending charity. It is a grand reversal that draws everyone into its movement while centering Jesus’ family—ie, the marginalized poor.
Epiphany, when the utterance of the oppressed is witnessed to and acted upon by the powerful, draws those who would never touch one another into the nearness of intimacy. That intimacy would be inappropriate between members of exploiting and exploited classes if it were represented as an equal exchange (as some proponents of shallow reconciliation would have it). But in Matthew’s story, Epiphany prompts a holistic relational reconfiguring that naturally includes a socioeconomic repentance by the wealthy to the poor. Hebrew Scriptures call it Jubilee.
Viewed this way—as the simple annunciation of the poor and oppressed, in their own words, bodies, and communal life, that the world is unjust and could be otherwise; and the repentance and conversion of the powerful in response to that annunciation—the story of Epiphany celebrated today holds within it the hope of a new order of relations: what the New Testament uses a menagerie of language to describe from communion to unity, the Body of Christ, the New Heaven, New Earth, New Creation, and New Humanity. Jubilee, initiated by the Epiphany of the Oppressed, is the means through which a society passes from the old death-dealing injustice into the new life-giving justice. Simply put, from alienation to intimacy.
Wild claims like these could be brushed off if they have no power behind them. A raving prophet with no followers is of no concern to a king. But once people actually began to take them seriously, however, they pose a threat. Magi were showing up legitimately believing a homeless kid was the new king. Soon enough crowds were gathering. Even the powerful, as we see with Zacchaeus, began rejecting their stations and repenting of the plunder their posts reap. Once the truth of the marginalized takes hold, then those who depend on the status quo will do anything to ensure the center holds.
Jubilee has unequally distributed consequences. How else can inequality be overcome? Debts must be canceled, meaning credit lost for the financial elite. Slaves must be set free, meaning property and labor lost for slaveholders. Land must be redistributed, meaning the abolition of landlords.
For every revolution, there is a counter-revolution. Herod’s instant, homicidal response to the Epiphany is the original proof. The Pharisees showcase another backlash in slower motion. Like Herod, a regional puppet king serving a much higher emperor, the Pharisees were a group of people who only appear powerful to those beneath them. They knew they benefited from their station in the order established by the empire. Because they benefited, they convinced themselves that the current order was what was best for ‘the people.’ They also knew they were not ultimately in charge. If things got out of their control, they could lose what little power they had been given. So as the ministry of Jesus swept across Judea, the Pharisees turn to one another in fear asking, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone is going to believe in him! Then the Romans will come and take our holy place, and our nation.” Into that place of fear comes the calm, confident voice that always comes into such places of fear, “This is what’s best for you,” Caiaphas assures them, “let one man die for the people, rather than the whole nation being wiped out.” (John 11:47-48, 50).
Epiphany does not naively hope for liberation and a just new order. It knows that the Magi’s response is an option not many willingly take. Epiphany announces its hope as one who knows its claims, precisely because they are true and because that truth requires radical change, will stoke fear among the powerful. And when the powerful get scared, they turn to violence. Thus the hope of liberation, whose seed is the truth-telling epiphany of the oppressed, is hope in the sober joy that knows its day of Jubilee will only come through the night of crucifixion and the dawn of resurrection.
J. Kameron Carter said it like this:
“Jesus steps inside of that [world] and lives a life of sheer life. And that itself was the critique of the political order. So what did they try to do? Kill him. They killed him, but then they discovered that they’re trying to kill what’s unkillable. Christians call this the resurrection. The death of Jesus wasn’t necessary. It was the cultural reflex against a form of life that did not need death or its negative other to anchor.”
Epiphany declares a truth that prompts a movement that begins a transformation. That beginning, which foreshadows a startlingly new end, breathes terror into the bones of the powerful whose power relies on the present order being eternal. But only God is eternal. Only God can live eternally without resorting to violence to shore up life. So the terror of the death of the finite oppressive order leads to crucifixions. But crucifixions can never eliminate the truth, never stop the movement, never end the rolling tide of liberative transformation. Crucifixions, when they are unjust (and they are always unjust), become a new moment of Epiphany, a new revelation of the oppressed when the scapegoat’s exposed body peels back again the lie of imperial peace.
Thus every incarnation marks an epiphany. Every epiphany portends a crucifixion. Every crucifixion contains the promise of resurrection. For in trying to put the truth to death, the truth is further revealed. And resurrection—resurrection embraces us in the dew of the garden with certainty of our coming liberation into the community of shalom.
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