Our People

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord

Our Lady Star of the Sea, Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
6/1/2008

Seldom are old nursery rhymes mere nonsense. They generally refer to specific, historical matters. For example, Baa Baa Black Sheep is a satire on the Plantagenet wool trade. Little Jack Horner was steward to a sixteenth century bishop of Glastonbury. Mary Mary Quite Contrary was a defamation of Queen Mary I and Pussycat pussycat about a cat in court of her sister, Elizabeth I. Ring-a-Ring o Rosies recalls the Great Plague. Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat refers to Parliament’s refusal to finance Charles I’s Spanish campaign. Jack and Jill went up Hill tells of the beheading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette whose head came tumbling after... Some literary historians are convinced that the song The Twelve Days of Christmas was also an Elizabethan nursery rhyme, set as carol.

Certainly there are twelve Liturgical Days of Christmas - six from Christmas to New Year’s Eve and six from New Year’s Eve to Epiphany and in many cultures the gift giving continues to today. On face of it, the Christmas gifts told in the carol are rather strange. I don’t know how many of you got potted pear trees for Christmas, but if you got partridges, turtle doves, French hens, calling birds, gold-ringed pheasants, geese and swans as well, you must have quite a menagerie now at home. Unless, of course, you stuffed them with the pears from the pear tree and cooked them all for your exotic guests, the milkmaids, dancing girls and leaping lords with their orchestra of pipers and drummers!

What on earth - or in heaven - is are those gifts for the Twelve Days of Christmas all about? The common view is that this was a kind of sung catechism for children in the recusant period, when the Catholic faith could not be openly taught or safely recited. The song remains to this day a guide to that which is most central to our Catholic faith. In a sense you might say it covers all bases as to how and where to find God: if our three kings had only known, it might have saved them a lot of star-gazing and camel-train travel.

The Twelve Drummers Drumming refers to the twelve propositions of the Apostles’ Creed. Children might be interrupted while singing the song and asked to name these Twelve Drummers. They are:
(1) We believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth
(2) We believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord
(3) Who was conceived by power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary
(4) Who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, buried and descended to the dead
(5) Who rose again, ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father
(6) Who will come again to judge the living and the dead
(7) We believe in the Holy Spirit
(8) The Holy Catholic Church
(9) The communion of saints
(10) The forgiveness of sins
(11) The resurrection of the body and
(12) Life everlasting!

If that is the Faith given to us at Christmas, who delivered it? It was, of course, the Pipers Piping, the eleven faithful Apostles – Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip and the others. So in these two verses we are told the sure place to find our faith: in God’s precious gift of the Church and her faith Tradition, built upon the apostles and handed down the generations, even in dangerous times when Catholics had to learn the Faith by secret rhymes and mnemonics.

What else has God given us? Well, on the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth days he gave us directions on how to live that Faith in the day-to-day. If we meet Christ in his Church and in our Creeds, we respond as Christians in our moral lives. And so the Seven Swans A-swimming are the seven sacraments, those reliable sources of grace by which God gives us his power to do great things and to do ordinary things well. The Eight Maids A-milking signifies the eight beatitudes. The Nine Ladies Dancing are the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. And the Ten Lords A-leaping  refers to the commandments. I won’t list all those for you today: I invite you, when get home, to test yourselves or each other!

So we have the Apostles and their successors to teach us and the Creeds to guide them; we have the commandments, beatitudes, spiritual gifts and sacraments by which to live that teaching. Yet like children we search around the Christmas tree for more presents and, sure enough, God has given us also the natural world and natural reason, for the Six Geese A-laying are the six days of creation. What’s more, he has given us the Word of God: for at the centre of the Jewish Scriptures are the Five Golden Rings or five books of the Torah; and at the heart of the Christian Scriptures are the Gospels of those Four Calling Birds, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the Three French Hens of faith, hope and charity told in the Epistles. Together these make up the Two Turtle Doves of the Old and New Testaments.

By now we have our Epiphany Faith, more or less: humanity brought Christ three Christmas gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for his birthday, but He brought us so much more: the gifts of revelation in the Scriptures and the Tradition, in the Sacraments and Creation, in the Saints and saintly lives. But there was one last gift, or one first, given on the First Day of Christmas, on Christmas Day: A Partridge in a Pear Tree. This is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Mary, God-with-us, God-saving-us, the Word Made Flesh and Splendour of the Father.

But why on earth do we call Him a partridge in a pear tree? According to medieval tradition, a mother partridge feigns injury or even accepts injury to herself, so as to decoy predators from her helpless nestlings. As Christ was to sigh before the end of His life: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You kill prophets and stone those sent to you! How I long to gather your children together as a partridge gathers her chicks under her wings!” (Lk 13:34). And He said this on the way to His pear-tree, for A Partridge in a Pear Tree is Jesus on the Cross.

At the Epiphany we recall not just the finding of the Infant King of the Jews and his receipt of birthday gifts from three wise men, but our re-birthday through that Epiphany and the way we are constantly showered, every day of every year, with natural and supernatural gifts, to feed our faith and enable our works. And each and every gift, to each and every one of us, is given to us by the Divine Lover, what On the Twelve Days of Christmas my True Love gave to me…