I guess that most of us enjoy a good murder! Not a real one, of course – and there have been far too many tragic and shocking deaths in the last few months, including those two London teenagers just this week – but the fictional murders we read in books or watch on television, carried out in ever more ingenious and gruesome ways and investigated by detectives such as Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. 

Now, these stories don’t aim to give us insights into the pyschology of killers. They are really a contest between authors and their readers, with authors inserting a few well-hidden clues (together with some false trails) and readers trying to puzzle out the solution. The whole thing only works properly when authors stick to the rules: so the actual murderer must be mentioned early on in the story, only one secret room or passage is allowed, no as-yet-undiscovered poisons are permitted, there must be due warning of the use of twins or doubles, and the detective must not themself commit the crime.

All this means that the stories of the “Golden Age of detective fiction” tend to be rather formulaic. They often take place at house parties in secluded country manors although they can also occur on trains, steamers or tropical islands. Communication with the outside world is often frustrated by snow or storms, non-functioning telephones or the ship being far from land. The detective must be either a brilliant amateur or else a cynical policeman who doesn’t get on well with his superiors and constantly breaks the rules. And, very often, a changed will lies at the very heart of the story – if, indeed, it has been changed.

Well, you know what eventually happens. The characters are brought together in the drawing room or saloon. Slowly and methodically the detective sets out their case: everyone present appears to have had a motive for killing the deceased, and the detective’s suspicions seem to fall first upon one person and then another, each protesting their innocence. With a final flourish, the true murderer is exposed: they then admit to the crime, commit suicide or are arrested by policemen who’ve been fortuitously waiting in the wings. The surviving players breathe a sigh of relief, return home or continue their holiday.

The correct word for that final revelation is, of course, “denouement”. Although the word has come to mean the final resolution of a plot in a drama or a novel, its literal French meaning is an “unknotting” or a “disentanglement” – that might seem more appropriate to a ball of wool after a kitten has been playing with it than to a detective story! And it strikes me that “denouement” isn’t a million miles away from another word that is on our minds today, the word “epiphany” which means a “sudden manifestation, revelation, disclosure or perception of something”, often supernatural or divine. And it is of course applied to the Magi, the Wise Men who visited Jesus, because they were the first Gentile people to recognise or understand his significance.

Today the word “epiphany” can be used in a secular way as well as a spiritual one. This may be due to the Irish novelist James Joyce, who used epiphanies as a literary device in many of his short stories; we could call them “Oh, my, I never realised!” turning points in the plot. It’s often believed, too, that many scientific discoveries are made in sudden epiphanic moments, such as when Archimedes worked out what happened when objects float and jumped out of his bath shouting, “Eureka!”, or when Isaac Newton figured out gravity after an apple fell on his head, or when Alexander Fleming realised that the annoying penicillin mould on his Petri dish was killing bacteria. Of course what actually happens is that the person concerned has been thinking about the problem for a long time when an unexpected event seems to trigger a solution. In any case, that first moment of revelation usually has to be followed by a great deal of hard work!

In the passage we read earlier, St. Paul talks of God’s “mystery” which has been revealed to humanity. Now God, of course, is not a detective story writer and Paul wasn’t saying that Christians have to work their way through a series of clever clues in order to understand Jesus! In   No; in the Bible, a “mystery” isn’t a puzzle to be solved but something which cannot be known unless it is revealed. And what Paul is saying is that unaided human minds, however clever, can never comprehend God simply by logic: there also has to be an “epiphany” or revelation, which can be an instantaneous “click” or a process of understanding.

That makes a lot of sense, as Christianity is basically a revealed faith. I don’t mean that it’s irrational or mindless; in fact I believe that it is intensely rational, that it is based on historical facts, and that it is capable of standing up to intellectual scrutiny. Nevertheless, we come to faith, not because we have worked it all out for ourselves from first principles, but because God took the initiative to make himself known to humanity. If he hadn’t done that, we would still be in the dark. And his clearest revelation comes in the story of Jesus which begins at Christmas: his birth, his life, his ministry and teaching, his death and resurrection. This revelation was witnessed first by the shepherds and the Magi; they wouldn’t have understood everything they were seeing – but, then, nor do we, after twenty centuries of insights and study. We need God to open our eyes and minds just as much as they did.

But there’s a problem. We know that only a small minority of people seem to “get” the meaning of what God has said. Jesus himself knew that, which is why he said that his parables were plain to some people but totally impenetrable to others. I don’t know why this should be the case and I certainly can’t accept any view which suggests that God has foreordained some to understand his revelation and others to remain in ignorance. Perhaps it has more to do with the way we each receive new ideas: do we still possess a childlike naïvety or have we become so sceptical that our minds are closed to fresh thoughts? After all, Jesus himself said that the only people who will enter God’s Kingdom are those who receive it like children.

I honestly don’t believe that humans can ever really understand God; we all struggle to make sense of him and are left with many questions. For instance, who can really understand an eternal God who has neither beginning or end? Not me. Who can understand the infinity of God: that he exists in a dimension beyond our space and time, yet is fully present everywhere? I can’t. Who can understand the power of God, that there is nothing he cannot do? Again, not me. But my lack of comprehension does not bother me; in fact, I’d be worried if I did manage to understand everything about God! For that would make him so small and puny that there’d be no point believing in him. We all do our best to understand God with our limited human minds.

But I certainly do believe in a God who wants to reveal himself to humanity, who wants to make his secret or mystery known to people. And that basically happens as people encounter Jesus. But how will that encounter take place? It’s obvious that God isn’t going to project wonderful 3-D holographic images onto the clouds for everyone to see, nor divinely intervene in every TV transmission or invade the internet to make his voice heard! That would be nice, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen. For God usually reveals himself today just as he has done for 2000 years: he does it as Christians explain the Gospel in ways that people can easily understand and which they can relate to their lives, and as they live the life of Jesus day by day.

Of course the Wise Man saw Jesus “in the flesh”; but even then all they actually saw was a baby. It was God’s revelation, through that unlikely star and their pagan religion, which gave them understanding. People today may initially encounter Jesus with a conversation or by reading the Bible; but it is still God, acting through circumstances which may be unexpected or bizarre, who opens their minds to who Jesus really is. We believe that God has spoken to us through his Son; let’s declare that to the world so that Jesus is a mystery no more.