At the beginning of the third chapter of the Book of Malachi, there is a promise: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of hosts.”

Today we celebrate the day when this promise was fulfilled: Jesus, who was forty days old, was brought to the temple – in order to offer two sacrifices according to the Law of Moses: one for the ritual purification of His mother and the other for the redeeming of Jesus as the firstborn of Mary.

The Gospel of Jesus’ first public miracle – the turning of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana – was originally, in the Ancient Church, one of three events celebrated on Epiphany. With this miracle, Jesus manifested His divine authority, but not only that: by turning water into wine, He showed that He had come to make everything new. Everything, meaning above all us, human beings, who without His saving touch would be doomed to die in our sins and perish.

“Let love be without dissimulation,” writes St. Paul in today’s Epistle. True, perfect love cannot be anything other than without dissimulation, but since we are only able to experience love when it is expressed either in words or actions, it is not uncommon for what appears to be love to be selfishness or even malicious cunning.

The Gospel for the first Sunday after Epiphany tells of how the twelve-year-old Jesus stayed in the temple in Jerusalem and there manifested His divine authority: “All that heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers." It was the same astonishment as twenty years later, when all the people “were astonished at His doctrine: for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

The Gospel for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day is related to the Gospel of the Epiphany, which tells of the visit of the Wise Men from the Orient to Jesus and the subsequent story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocent of Bethlehem. The heartless King Herod, having heard from the Wise Men about the birth of the Messiah, decided to eliminate his supposed rival. Those who paid with their lives for his ambitions were innocent children, as almost always happens when a tyrant, fearing the loss of his power, goes on a rampage. Collateral damage, as it is called…