Thread by @OctavioEsqueda

🧵🔥 from Hispanic Theologian Justo Gonzalez with a prophetic voice in 2021 about #Epiphany and our times: "Tomorrow is Epiphany – the “Three Kings’ Day,” we used to call it when I was a child. The “Magic Kings" would bring us gifts on this day, for we had no Santa Claus. 1/

Nor did we have fireplaces through which they could enter. But, being magicians, they could make themselves as small as bees and crawl in under our doors!
Unfortunately, now I have lost my innocence. No longer do I believe that the Kings bring gifts. 2/

Instead, I read the story as it appears in the Gospel of Matthew and I find something both relevant and disturbing. It is a story of three supposedly wise men who are naïve enough to go to Jerusalem, where Herod reigns, asking about anything a new king that has been born. 3/

It is also a story about supposedly faithful biblical scholars who know where the child is to be born, and they tell Herod. The result is the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt 4/

As such, the story is painfully relevant to our days, for still today we have a star-gazing religion that is willing to ignore the caging of innocent children. And we also have sycophantic religious leaders who are perfectly orthodox and know their bibles... 5/

...and yet don’t seem to care about the many “flights into Egypt” of our day.
But, while I have lost my innocence, I have not lost my faith. I still know that the babe born in Bethlehem is more powerful than all the kings of the earth – 6/

– be they in Moscow, in Teheran, in Washington, or in Brasilia – and that the very gates of hell will not prevail against him. 7/

o him – and not to any power on earth, be they of one party or of another, be they of the right, of the left, or of the center – be all glory, laud and honor!" 8/8