Solemnity of the Epiphany – 4 January 2026
In his correspondence with a young aspiring poet right at the beginning of the 20th century, the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“Be patient toward all that remains unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers, which cannot be given to you because you could not live them. At present you need to live the questions. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”[1]
Rilke’s advice to young to Franz Xaver Kappus is as timely to us now as it was to his young correspondent a century and a quarter ago. For we begin this year carrying many questions. How can we be safe? What of the future of our country? How can we maintain and promote social cohesion? What is the most effective way we can address not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racism and social distrust? How do we live with the unpredictability and fragility of life, evidenced even in the New Year’s Eve tragedy in Switzerland and the spate of drownings here in New South Wales?
These are not abstract questions. They arise from the real anxiety, the real wounds, and the real uncertainty with which we finished 2025 and with which have begun this new year. We begin this year as pilgrims: searching, watching the horizon, looking for signs that might guide us toward hope, toward wisdom, toward a way forward.
That is precisely how the Gospel presents the Magi, the wise men who come from the East today. They are seekers—outsiders, foreigners, scholars of the stars—those who read the signs of the times and dare to follow them. They, too, are pilgrims of their time.
And what do they find at the end of their long journey? Not a throne. Not a strategy – not even an inquiry. Not an answer neatly wrapped in power or certainty.
They find a child.
This is the revolution at the heart of the Epiphany.
The goal of the Magi’s search, the meaning of the star, the revelation to the nations, is not an idea but a person—and not a powerful one, but a vulnerable one. God’s light to the world is disclosed not in Herod’s palace, where fear, suspicion, and violence already rule, but in a poor house, in the arms of Mary, in the fragility of a child. The Epiphany tells us something profoundly unsettling and profoundly hopeful: that God chooses to be found in unexpected places and in unexpected persons.
The Magi had to leave behind not only their homeland, but their assumptions. They had to be willing to be disappointed by Jerusalem and surprised by Bethlehem. And that remains the challenge for us. We look for security in strength, for unity in control, for solutions in dominance or exclusion. But God’s answer comes to us in another key entirely.
Isaiah speaks today of light dawning over darkness, of nations drawn not by force but by radiance. Saint Paul reminds us that this mystery is for all peoples—Jew and Gentile alike—no one excluded, no one invisible. And Matthew shows us how this mystery is recognised: by kneeling, by offering gifts, by allowing one’s journey to be changed.
This has deep implications for the questions with which we began.
If we ask how we can be safe, the Gospel does not first offer us walls or weapons, but relationship, trust, and the courage to protect the vulnerable.
If we ask about the future of our country, Epiphany tells us that its moral compass will be revealed by how it treats the smallest, the stranger, the child, the unborn, the most vulnerable.
If we ask how to promote social cohesion, we are shown a gathering around Christ that crosses cultures, races, and religions—Magi from the East kneeling alongside a Jewish mother and child.
If we ask how to confront anti-Semitism, racism, and social distrust, Epiphany insists that God has irrevocably bound himself to real human flesh, to a particular people, to history itself—and therefore to the dignity of every human person.
If we ask how can we live with the uncertainly occasioned by life’s sheer fragility, Epiphany shares with us that it is here where God is with us most powerfully.
The 20th century Catholic social activist, Dorothy Day captured this truth with piercing clarity when she wrote in 1945:
“If everyone were holy and handsome, with ‘alter Christus’ shining in neon lighting upon them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her nor is it Christ’s way for himself now when he is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.”[2]
This is the lasting epiphany: Christ continues to be disguised. Disguised in the poor, the wounded, the displaced, the misunderstood. Disguised in those who do not fit our categories or confirm our fears. Disguised in the very people we might prefer to overlook or avoid.
To follow the star today is not simply to admire the child, but to learn to recognise Christ where we least expect him—and to allow that recognition to change the route we take home. Like the Magi, we are warned in a dream not to return by the old roads of fear, violence, and exclusion.
As we begin this year as pilgrims in search of resolution, the Epiphany does not give us easy answers. But it gives us a direction. It invites us to kneel before the mystery of God made small, to offer what we have, and to trust that light—quiet, vulnerable, persistent—still shines in the darkness.
And that light, the Gospel promises us today, has not been overcome.
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 4th letter.
[2] Dorothy Day, “Room for Christ,” The Catholic Worker (December 1945)
