Lectionary Commentaries for January 6, 2026
Epiphany of Our Lord

In the context of God’s long-standing presence with Israel (Matthew 1:1–17), God has initiated the conception and commissioning of Jesus (1:18–25). Jesus is commissioned to manifest God’s saving presence (1:21–23). Here in chapter 2, he is born into a contested world that sets the scene for the whole gospel and is marked by contrasting responses of homage and violence. 

First on the scene are the magi, the often controversial, priestly-political, star-gazing figures from the east. They come to pay homage to Jesus. But good intentions go awry with foolish performance. They ask a very dumb question in Herod’s political center of Jerusalem: “Where is the one born King of the Jews?” For so-called “wise guys,” this is an extraordinarily naïve question. 

Why is the question about a newborn king so personally and politically frightening for King Herod and his loyalists (2:3)? Because in the Roman Empire, Rome alone appointed legitimate provincial kings like Herod. At times, though, unsanctioned popular kings emerged. Rome executed them as illegitimate and treasonous.

Herod’s fear is that either Rome has replaced him as ruler (but has forgotten to send him the email) or that he has a popular uprising on his hands.

The rest of the chapter reveals Herod’s character and sets out four of the strategies he, as a typical ruling tyrant, employs to maintain power and self-beneficial privileges. Herod is constructed according to the pattern of “the kings of the earth” of Psalm 2. He resists God’s “anointed,” and God laughs him into oblivion (Psalm 2:2–4). 

First, Herod summons his allies in the ruling coalition (Matthew 2:4–6). While we think of chief priests and scribes as religious figures, they are much better understood as societal-political leaders (see Sirach 38:24–39:11). Roman governors appointed chief priests. Herod inquires about the birthplace of the Messiah. His allies respond by citing a passage from Micah 5:2 (Matthew 2:5–6).

We must note two things about this exchange. First, the Micah passage makes no reference to a Messiah, nor to Jesus. Rather, it refers to Assyria’s destruction of Samaria in 722 and its anticipated attack on Jerusalem. Out of the ruins, it anticipates a new beginning with a new Jerusalem and a new David from Bethlehem (Micah 5:1–6). 

The Gospel reads the Micah passage through Jesus-tinted glasses to identify Jesus as the Davidic ruler of a people free from imperial power. That is, the Gospel creates an analogy between Assyria’s imperial power and Rome’s imperial power to affirm the victory of God’s purposes.  Subsequently, the Gospel interprets Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE as divine punishment on its leaders (Matthew 22:7), yet in an astonishingly bold vision, it envisions Rome’s empire as doomed for destruction at Jesus’ return (Matthew 24–25).

The last line of the citation (“who is to shepherd my people Israel”) comes from 2 Samuel 5:2. It employs the very common image of “shepherd” for leaders. We can think of the condemnation of Israel’s elite, in Ezekiel 34, for ruling harshly and selfishly in failing to provide food, clothing, shelter, and safety for the people. Various Roman authors identify emperors as “shepherds.” Within the Gospel, Jesus describes the people as being “sheep without a shepherd,” styling the Jerusalem-based, Rome-allied, oppressive and exploitative leaders as “not-shepherds” who look after their own interests but fail to care for the people (9:36).  

Second, it is important to remember that there was no widespread, standard, uniform expectation of a messiah. There were diverse expectations about different types of messiahs with different job descriptions. The Gospel aligns with hopes from some for a return of a Davidic ruler (1:1). Here in 2:5–6, the Jerusalem leaders speak the Gospel’s perspective in linking Jesus with Bethlehem, the place where David was anointed king (1 Samuel 16).

Having consulted his allies to gain this information, Herod takes up a second strategy (Matthew 2:7–8a). He summons the magi and turns them into spies. Allies and spies. He dispatches the magi to Bethlehem to locate the child. They are to report his location to Herod. 

Why? To his two previous strategies of allies and spies, Herod now adds a third strategy: lies. He informs the magi that he “too may also go and pay him homage” (2:8b). The subsequent narrative reveals the lie. He wants to kill Jesus, not worship him.  

In the midst of this assertion of power, the magi both comply and resist. They go as commanded, find Jesus, and pay homage with gifts. Herod’s hate cannot stop them from honoring God’s Anointed One. 

The magi’s gifts have been interpreted in various ways in the church’s history. Some have seen them as statements about Jesus’ identity as king (gold), priest (frankincense), and the crucified (myrrh). Others have seen them as representing practices of discipleship: faith and mercy (gold), prayer and love (frankincense), good works and mortifying the flesh/purity (myrrh). 

And then the magi defy Herod. They do not return to him, as ordered, to report Jesus’ location. Rather, being warned in a dream, they return to their homeland “by another way.” Dreams recur through Matthew 2 (verses 12, 13, 19, 22) as a means of divine intervention in protecting Jesus by guiding people for his well-being. 

The “other way” that the magi take refuses Herod’s agenda. It thwarts the tyrant’s will. It refuses cooperation.   

Thwarted, Herod takes up his fourth strategy, infanticide—his ruthless, vicious attack on the infants of Bethlehem and its environs (2:16–18).

Allies, spies, lies, infanticides. Four (rhyming!) strategies of tyrants, then and now.  

All will not be well in this clash of sovereignties between the empire of Rome and the empire of God. God will not be able to prevent Herod’s murder of the infants. Later, Jesus too will die. The promised establishment of God’s empire has not (yet) been completed in full. The “other way” requires perseverance, faithfulness, courage, and community. 

At the time this poem was composed, Jerusalem was a conquered, depopulated city struggling to reestablish itself but apparently destined to remain on the edges of history, a backwater of the great Persian empire.¹ This poem is addressed to that city.

With its rousing opening line, “Arise, shine, for your light has come,” it encourages Jerusalem to see itself differently. Her God has appeared; she is now bathed in God’s glory, while all other nations, including, presumably, her enemies, are shrouded in darkness.² Commanded to lift her eyes and look around, she sees these nations streaming from the darkness toward her city’s light (verse 4). With her children and their nurses leading the procession, she sees vast caravans of kings and camels from north, south, and west, all bearing precious gifts.

This is a beloved text for so many reasons. As a child, I was one of thousands of girls in my denomination who memorized the first line of Isaiah 60:1 as the motto of our girls’ organization, a sort of mission-focused equivalent to the Girl Scouts. For many Christians, the reference to kings bearing gifts of gold and frankincense has so shaped our memory of the wise men in Matthew 2 that we remember them as kings, not wise men following a star, as Matthew portrays them.³ Isaiah 60:1–6 reminds us of what the kings and camels bring to the Christian celebration of Epiphany: They are the emblems of God’s self-revelation as the light of all the world.

Scholars have long noted transformations in Isaiah 60:1–6 of such biblical motifs as divine epiphanies and the tributes of the nations. Notably absent is military conflict, as caravans and kings come to Jerusalem voluntarily. Moreover, the steadily shining light of divine presence differs markedly from the often-destructive lightning flashes of older storm theophanies (see, for example, Judges 5:4; Psalm 29; Ezekiel 1).

Until recently, it was suggested that these developments indicated the author’s detachment of concepts of salvation from historical events as he projected them into a distant future.⁴ More recently, Brent Strawn has suggested that the ahistorical imagery of Isaiah 60:1–6 is more likely the result of an acquaintance with Persian ideology, which envisioned a world at peace through the voluntary submission of the nations to the Persian king and his god, who is represented in Persian iconography as the winged sun-disk. Isaiah 60 appropriates and subverts that ideology in its portrayal of Jerusalem as the center of the cosmos, with the God of Israel supplanting the god of Persia as the light of the world.⁵

As preachers contemplate this text in the liturgical context of Epiphany, they may wish to experiment with the various points of view made possible by the text. The initial line invites hearers to stand where Jerusalem stands. From this viewpoint, it becomes possible to ask where Christians fit into the story, since nearly all of us are gentiles and therefore, as St. Paul would say, members of the family of God by adoption, not by birth. What would it be like for those of us who so often feel like insiders to this story to see ourselves making our way out of the darkness of what we thought was the center of the cosmos to an utterly new (and strange) source of safety on the margin of things? What kinds of revelatory destabilization might result?

Preachers might also wish to consider the presence of Jerusalem’s children at the head of this procession. One might ask how the poet thought to include them since, after all, the children are not (or should not be) possessions like gold or frankincense that foreigners can give away.  They are Jerusalem’s children, after all; they already belong to her.

The image of children at the head of the procession is probably an allusion to an earlier verse in Isaiah 49:22, in which kings and queens serve the children as “foster fathers” and “nursing mothers.” Submitting to the command of God, they bow to the ground before Jerusalem to lick the dust of her feet. Isaiah 60 scrubs away that humiliation but, nevertheless, includes the children as if everything else hinges on their return. As a metaphor, the nations’ return of Jerusalem’s children conveys a form of restitution or reparation for a city on the verge of disappearing from history and signifies their willing participation in the city’s restoration to wholeness and vibrancy.

The metaphor works as well as it does because it evokes the suffering not just of the children but of human mothers and families enduring the helplessness of forced family separation. The power of this image sheds light on a grim fact of human life, ancient and modern. According to data collected by UNICEF, children are disproportionately and unjustly affected by conflict and war. As of the end of 2024, nearly 50 million children made up more than 40 percent of the world’s population displaced by conflict and violence.⁶ And these are the ones who survived the conflict. Jerusalem sees her children coming home, and I wonder: Who among the nations will bring our children home?

Notes

1. For the broad consensus that Isaiah 60–62 forms the nucleus of Third Isaiah and is to be dated to the Persian period (circa 520–450 BCE), see Brent A. Strawn, “‘A World Under Control’: Isaiah 60 and the Apadana Reliefs from Persepolis,” in Approaching Yehud: New Approaches to the Study of the Persian Period, Semeia Studies 50 (Atlanta: SBL, 2007), 86. For the historical context of Jerusalem in the late sixth to mid-fifth century, see Christopher M. Jones, “‘The Wealth of Nations Shall Come to You’: Light, Tribute, and Implacement in Isaiah 60,” Vetus Testamentum 64, no. 4 (September 2014): 615. For the literary analysis of Isaiah 60 and its historical context, see Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40–66: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 295–298, 352–358.
2. Jones, “Wealth of Nations,” 618–619.
3. John F. A. Sawyer, Isaiah Through the Centuries, Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 364.
4. See, for example, Westermann, Isaiah 40–66, 356–357.
5. Jones, “Wealth of Nations,” 618–621, citing Strawn, “World Under Control,” 115–117.
6. “Displacement,” UNICEF Data, accessed October 9, 2025, https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-migration-and-displacement/displacement/.

The Greek meaning of “epiphany” is to reveal or uncover.¹

Yet in the Christmas cycle, Jesus is “uncovered” or “revealed” twice.  Luke “reveals” the identity of the baby in the songs of the angels, so we celebrated Jesus as Lord 12 days ago. Then, today, we join the wise men for the celebration of Epiphany, or the “revealing” of the baby as the King of the Jews.

Is there a difference between “Lord of All” and “King”? We could easily dismiss this as semantics, but there is an important distinction. As Lord, Jesus is understood as apart from us, something different, with only God and the celestial beings. The title of King moves into the realm of humans. It is about politics and power and communities and individuals. Remember, it was not Jesus as Lord that threatened Herod and the Romans and the Jewish leaders. It was the declaration of Jesus as King that ultimately led to the cross.

So, if today is about the politics of Jesus as King, there is no better psalm than Psalm 72. This psalm is understood by most scholars to be a coronation hymn for the king of Judah. It speaks of the prayers of all of the people for the king and the importance of understanding the king’s role in relationship to his God and the people.

The psalm opens with a plea, “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son” (verse 1). The king is to administer God’s justice and righteousness, not his own. This defines the relationship between God and the king. The king is to be God’s representative or conduit on earth. The ruler is a servant of the Lord, not a political god unto himself.

The psalm continues with wishes for the king’s reign, but these are not about political treaties or great infrastructure or law and order. The wishes are for the king to judge in righteousness and with justice for the poor. The psalm is concerned with how the king governs the people with the same words used in verse 1: “justice” and “righteousness.” The wishes are not action items or a political platform, but a view of the world and one’s people. In other words, it is about the king’s heart from which springs action.

Verse 3 connects the righteous reign of the king with “mountains yield[ing] prosperity and the hills, in righteousness.” This is a view of all of God’s creation living in harmony, and both the land and the people prospering. God is in control, and the king manages the kingdom as God’s agent.

Verse 4 is the heart of the job description of the human ruler. “May he [or she] defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.” The king’s job is to ensure that the poor and needy are given care and concern and that he defends them with force if necessary. He is not to wage war for booty or territory but only against those who threaten the weak.

Pearl S. Buck wrote in The Good Earth, “The test of a civilization is the way it cares for its helpless members.” Quotes like it have been attributed to others. Did the idea come from the Bible, or is this simply the measure of a responsible society, regardless of nationality or religion? Either way, these words in Psalm 72 make it the responsibility of the king, since he is the ruler, to care for the helpless; by extension, it also becomes the responsibility of all the people to do the same.

Verses 3–7 provide wishes for the long life of this king and that he be like the rain falling on the grass. In the arid regions of Judah and Israel, the winter rains bring life and are necessary for the land and the people to prosper. The rain is a blessing from God. The king is to be the same: God’s blessing to the people.

In verses 10–11, kings of other nations come to Jerusalem to pay homage to the king. The usual reason for a king to bow down to another king is as an acknowledgment of the latter’s power and privilege. A king bows to another king because he has been defeated or is a vassal.

But Psalm 72:11–12 states, “May all the kings fall down before him, all nations give him service, for he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and needy and saves the lives of the needy.” The kings bow before him not because of power, or military strength, or wealth. They bow before the king because of his just ways. Note that most English Bibles separate the adoration of the kings from the cause of their adoration. Verse 11 is actually a dependent clause of verse 10. It is the reason the king is honored.

Each leader of Judah failed to live up to this job description. Human self-interest and power often cloud our vision. Eventually, Jesus was the only one who could fulfill these words. But the intent of the psalm does not end with King Jesus; it stands as a call to all of God’s people. Ours is not a religion focused only on the spiritual realm, but on the flesh-and-blood world. It is political because it is our duty to help the weakest among us and to ensure a just society and nation.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for January 6, 2019. The opening has been adapted slightly to fit Lectionary Year A, rather than Year C.

Most of us are familiar with Epiphany as a significant event in the church’s liturgical calendar. It happens at the year’s beginning, is celebrated on January 6—traditionally the 12th day of Christmas—and commemorates the visitation of the Christ child by the magi, who, according to tradition, bore gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. These men are characters in, undoubtedly, one of the most famous episodes concerning the Nativity in all of Christendom. It speaks of men, traditionally, three—possibly due to the three distinct kinds of gifts—thought to be trained in the reading of the stars and hence called wise, who came to see Jesus.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds that one of their ancient rulers, King Bazen of Axum, was one of the magi who, prompted by a supernatural astrological event, searched for a king and visited Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, much to the chagrin of King Herod. Herod, the ruler of the Roman outpost of Judea, governed the area, commingling his political authority with the signs, symbols, and festivals that the Jewish people held as sacred. He infiltrated the temple system and even used his power to select the high priest. The Roman Empire, under the rule of Caesar Augustus and his cadre of handpicked subordinates, reigned supreme in that region. Yet the magi showed up. 

As they followed a star, their epiphany—or revelation—was that God had sent a king amid the chaos and corruption of Roman-occupied Judea. It was as if their visit made them eyewitnesses to the messianic words of Isaiah, who wrote in the beginning clause of the sixth verse of his book’s ninth chapter, “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests [“government shall be”—King James Version] upon his shoulders.” That God had an answer and plan for the lack of care, compassion, and concern for all of God’s people by the nation’s leadership was a divine revelation, marked by wise men who, with limited permission from the earthly king, visited and brought gifts to the sovereign toddler. 

This is a different epiphany than the one Paul speaks of in Ephesians 3:1–12. The apostle, whom Dr. Fredrick Douglas Haynes homiletically calls “the gospel-globetrotting tentmaker from Tarsus,” is addressing the Ephesian church and offering commentary on God revealing Godself to humanity. The context of the Pauline epiphany, however, is different from that celebrated today. Here, Paul seemingly attempts to offer an apologetic defense of his call to be an apostle to the gentiles, who were heretofore excluded from the promise of God. However, through an epiphany in which God revealed Godself, Paul is empowered to preach “the mysteries of Christ” to the gentiles, making them joint heirs with the people of Israel and inviting them to have a believing faith in Jesus Christ.  

Perchance, two things can be true at the same time, and both lines of thought find importance and relevance, and give us hope today, at a time when governments seem to care less about the well-being of all their citizens, championing the rights of some while relegating others to the margins of the lost, the last, and the least. Where governmental shutdowns and the policing of citizens on domestic streets produce unrest, anxiety, and fear throughout the land. 

Could it be that we can find hope and a measure of assurance in the Lord’s grace, in the epiphany that God cared enough about God’s people to send revelation in the personhood of Jesus of Nazareth, on whom divine authority rested, as Sovereign? One that comes with power and influence to bring God’s will to pass on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Furthermore, is it also possible for us to find a deep significance in God’s revelation to Paul and his commission to preach, with equal invitation, the gospel of Jesus Christ to the gentiles? Could it be that the reason God chooses self-revelation is to invite those who are different from us? Maybe the burden of epiphany rests on God because humanity cannot be trusted to carry it out. 

Could part of the fallenness of the human condition be that we are too self-centered to share God’s revelation with everyone? Perhaps God knows us well enough to realize that we only reveal God to people we like, who think and act like us, and that a broader scope of revelation is beyond our grasp: “I mean, come on, God, do you really want to reveal yourself to the gentiles, the poor, women; Black, white, or Latinx people; to immigrants, and the differently abled; even gay or trans individuals?”

This, my friends, is the power of Epiphany. It is a grand break-in, and the culprit is the Divine. It is the Creator caring so much about their creation that a personal visit is needed. It is neither a requested nor a negotiated visit; no permission was granted, nor was the visit scheduled to accommodate humanity, which is bound by chronological time. No, an eternal decision was made for Heaven to kiss Earth on our behalf as God revealed Godself to humanity. Be it to enact justice and eradicate the pervasive inequity that seems to be everywhere, or for the Grand Lover of us all to call us equally into relationship with both God and others, we cannot know for sure. However, one thing we can know in this Epiphany season is that God loved humanity enough to reveal Godself to us, and that, friends, is worth celebrating. Amen and Ase’.