The Cost of Standing Still — Epiphany and the Change Imperitive
- Rev Glen Wesley
- Jan 6
- 6 min read
A star in the night sky. A nervous king pacing the rooms of his palace. Travellers choosing which road to take home.
Epiphany — this moment of revelation and change — is often described as a feast of light.
Stars. Wisdom. Revelation. But if we listen carefully to the story, Epiphany is just as much about what people do when the light appears — and what they do to avoid being changed by it.
The Gospel reading from Matthew 2 (Matthew 2:1–12) places us before a stark contrast. Not between belief and unbelief, or good and evil, but between two responses to the same revelation.
The light comes.
Everyone sees it.
And not everyone is willing to follow where it leads.
Herod: defending a dangerous normal
Herod is often presented as the villain of the Christmas story — and rightly so. He orders the massacre of children in Bethlehem in an attempt to eliminate a perceived threat (Matthew 2:16). That violence should never be softened.
But Matthew is careful to show us something unsettling: Herod is not ignorant, he is not confused, He is not cut off from religious knowledge. He knows the scriptures and where the Messiah is expected to be born (Matthew 2:4–6). He even uses the language of worship.
What Herod cannot do is imagine a world in which he is no longer at the centre.
The light threatens the system that keeps him secure. And so he works tirelessly to maintain the status quo — even when that status quo is already deadly.
This is one of the hardest truths of Epiphany: sometimes what we defend as “normal” is already doing harm.
Herod’s violence is extreme, but the instinct beneath it is familiar. We cling to systems, habits, and arrangements that no longer give life — because change feels more dangerous than the damage we already know. Epiphany exposes that instinct.
Where do we recognise ourselves in that reflex — the urge to protect what we know, even when we sense it is no longer giving life?
The light does not create the violence. It reveals it.
Jerusalem: troubled, but still
Matthew adds a line that is easy to miss: “When Herod was troubled, all Jerusalem was troubled with him.” (Matthew 2:3)
Jerusalem does not order the killings. But neither does it resist.
This is the quiet middle ground of the story — the space many of us recognise in institutions, churches, and communities. Close enough to power to feel its anxiety. Aware that something is wrong. Uncertain what faithfulness would require.
Jerusalem represents what happens when fear spreads socially. When disturbance is shared, but responsibility is diffused or even offloaded. It is a stark mirror to our own times.
The city is troubled — but it is unchanged.
The Magi: worship as reorientation
Then there are the magi.
They are outsiders. Foreigners. Astrologers, not theologians. They do not arrive with certainty, they arrive with and searching attentiveness.
When Matthew tells us that the magi come to “worship” the child (Matthew 2:2, 11), the word he uses (προσκυνέω, proskyneō) does not primarily describe singing or reverence. It describes orientation — the direction of one’s body, one’s allegiance, one’s life.
Worship, in this story, is not a feeling. It is bodily and directional: kneeling, turning, moving oneself toward another. To chose which way one is facing.
This matters, because Herod uses the same word. “I too want to worship him,” he says.
Matthew is not naive about religious language. He shows us that worship can be spoken without being lived. True worship, in Epiphany, is not found in correct words, it is found in willingness to be reoriented.
Leaving gifts — and leaving lives behind
The magi offer gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matthew 2:11). These are often romanticised, but they are not decorative. They are symbols of status, wealth, and identity. They represent the world the magi come from — the life they have known.
In offering them, the magi are not just honouring the child. They are releasing something of themselves, leaving behind symbols of their former lives.
This mirrors another moment in the Gospel story. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, she leaves behind her water jar (John 4:28).
The woman put down her water jar and went into the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who has told me everything I’ve done! Could this man be the Christ?” They left the city and were on their way to see Jesus.
The jar is practical. Necessary. Familiar. A symbol of her life. But after encountering Christ, she no longer needs to carry it in the same way.
Both stories point to the same truth: encountering Jesus involves letting go of what once defined us.
Not because those things were evil, but because they are no longer sufficient.
“They went home by another road”
The final line of the Epiphany story is its quiet climax: “They returned to their own country by another road.” (Matthew 2:12)
This is not a travel detail. It is a theological statement.
Matthew uses the language of “way” not just to describe geography, but direction of life.
The magi are changed — not loudly, not dramatically, but decisively.
They do not confront Herod.
They do not overthrow the system.
They simply refuse to participate in it.
They choose a different way.
Sometimes faithfulness does not look like confrontation. It looks like non-collusion — the quiet refusal to cooperate with what harms, even when resistance is unseen.
Subversion does not have to be loud.
Change is not optional
Matthew is writing to a community of Jewish Christians — people who love their tradition, their scriptures, their story. He is not dismissing those things.
But he is saying something difficult and necessary: encountering Jesus requires change.
Not cosmetic change.
Not emotional change.
But directional change.
The light of Christ refuses to leave us where we are. It challenges the preservation of harmful systems simply because they feel familiar. And it unsettles any form of worship that does not lead to reorientation.
This is not because God delights in disruption. It is because salvation itself is a movement — from fear to trust, from control to surrender, from preservation to life.
Herod stands still, and destroys to remain so.
Jerusalem hesitates, and is troubled but unchanged.
The magi move — and go home transformed.
Epiphany now
Epiphany asks us an honest question — not only personally, but publicly.
We live in a time marked by sharpening partisan division, the resurgence of nationalism, the normalising of authoritarian and fascist instincts, and a widening gap between those who have much and those who struggle to survive.
These forces thrive on fear, on the protection of status, and on the insistence that the world must remain organised for the benefit of the few.
In that sense, Herod is not only a figure of the past. He represents any system — political, economic, or religious — that works relentlessly to preserve its own power, even when that preservation costs human lives, dignity, or truth.
Epiphany does not allow us to pretend neutrality. To see the light and refuse to be changed by it is already a choice. To benefit from unjust arrangements and call them stability is already a form of allegiance.
The magi offer us another way. They do not seize power. They do not defeat Herod. They simply refuse to cooperate with a violent order — and they reorder their own lives in response to what they have seen.
That is where the Gospel presses us now.
What systems are we being asked to loosen our grip on?
Where have we mistaken familiarity for faithfulness?
What would it mean, in a fractured world, to choose a different road — one shaped by justice, humility, and shared life rather than fear and control?
Epiphany is not about seeing the light. It is about trusting it enough to follow — even when it leads us away from what feels safe, powerful, or profitable.
That is not an optional extra of faith. According to Matthew, it is the very shape of salvation.
The question, then, is not whether we see the light — but whether we are willing to follow it far enough to be changed.
So, where will the light take you this year?
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