Worship - 4 January 2026

Summary of this week's theme

Someone asked me recently whether Jesus had a sense of humour. I hope so. The way he told stories - full of exaggeration, hyperbole, and occasionally ridiculous characters - certainly suggests it. And perhaps that humour runs deeper still. To repeat a line from the film Wake Up Dead Man: ‘the one thing every holy man knows: God has a sense of humour.’

Take the book of Jonah, which appeared in the daily readings last week. Beneath its serious truth about human nature, it is unmistakably comic - almost farcical at times. Or consider the Magi. If that isn’t divine humour, I’m not sure what is. These visitors to the Christ child are emphatically outsiders: Gentiles, not Jews. And how do they find Jesus? By following a star. Astrologers, then - practitioners of a form of divination explicitly condemned in Deuteronomy. Yet God uses precisely these unlikely figures to proclaim that this child is a gift for all. Once again, God refuses to leave decisions about who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ in human hands.

There is also a grim irony at Herod’s expense. We are told he was ‘frightened,’ though other translations say ‘troubled’ or ‘disturbed’ - a broader word, suggesting a swirl of emotions. Fear, yes, but perhaps also anger, curiosity, irritation, even a fleeting sense that his life was brushing up against something far greater than himself.

That same disturbance appears elsewhere in the Gospels, whenever the holy breaks into ordinary reality. Herod, like the Magi, is troubled - but unlike them, he responds with violence. His brutality is a refusal: a steely ‘no’ to the prospect of loss of control, humility, and self-recognition that the birth of Christ demanded.

The Magi, by contrast, accept the disturbance. Their journey is not one of uncomplicated joy. They go to the wrong place. They do not rejoice until they finally arrive. Their wisdom lies not in certainty, but in saying ‘yes’ to being unsettled.

Mary, too, says yes. She opens her door to strangers who look and sound out of place, receives their strange gifts, and lets them go when their part is done. In welcoming them, she opens her home - and her child - to the world.

On this Epiphany, we are invited to do the same: to welcome the troubling wisdom that arrives from unexpected places, to resist drawing boundaries too tightly, and to remember that God’s humour often carries a serious grace. God’s doors are, like Mary’s, open to all comers, even disturbing ones. Because being disturbed may be the beginning of something mysterious and wonderful