“Epiphany” is a Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “showing.” On the Church calendar, the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the visit of the Wise Men to the Holy Family in Bethlehem. The meaning of the feast—and the whole Epiphanytide season—is that of God’s revelation, His manifestation of Himself through Jesus Christ.
We Christians are used to hearing stuff like that: “God’s revelation of Himself through Jesus Christ.” That’s the kind of stuff clergymen are supposed to talk about; it’s the kind of stuff we become accustomed to hearing. And because we are used to saying or hearing it, it becomes ordinary, commonplace, almost pedestrian. It almost becomes “unepiphanylike,” in the sense that the epiphanies of God lose their impact.
We are bombarded with new epiphanies every day. This automobile is fantastic! Your mouth has never felt so good! After tasting our beer, no other beer will ever satisfy your thirst! Beautiful twenty-year-olds in bikinis pose beside outboard motors and we discover we really need an outboard motor (and, so, an outdoor motor boat to go along with it). We focus so on these tawdry epiphanies of our daily lives (nothing wrong with automobiles, toothpaste, beer or twenty-year olds in bikinis) because the Great Epiphany the feast celebrates has faded. We think we understand It, so we pigeonhole It somewhere. We do that because we think we understand God.
The Creeds and the Scriptures tell us something of our essential beliefs about God, but they don’t talk much about God Himself—Who He Is. They tell us what God has done. In that admirable passage from the Prayer Book catechism: He is our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. We don’t so much know about God, as we do what God has done for us.
That’s why Epiphanytide has such fascinating potential. In Christ, God not only reveals what He’s done—or, for us today, what He’s doing—but Who He Is. The Gospels appointed for Epiphanytide (which continues until Septuagesima Sunday, and the beginning of our Lenten preparations) give us glances—no more—of something of God. In Christ, God wants to share Himself with us, as much as we are capable of receiving Him.
St John of Damascus, the great Christian writer of the 8th century, says “there are some things we can say about God, for example, that He is good, eternal, all-knowing, and so forth, but these things do not describe Who He Is. They compare Him Who is the foundation of all to His creation. We say He is good, but we know only the goodness of men. The same is true of His eternity and knowledge. We apply the words of men to Him Who is the Word of God, we seek to circumscribe by the minds of men Him Who created the mind of man.”
God is unknowable. The great mystery and wonder of our faith is that He seeks to make Himself known to us in Christ. “He became like us,” St Athanasius the Great said 1700 years ago, “so we could become like Him.”
Epiphanytide is not just remembering long ago what God did in Jesus Christ. It insists that God still is “manifesting forth His glory” in the lives of His people today. That’s what He’s doing in your life and mine, if we would but notice.
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From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers
“Abba Anthony pondered the depth of the judgments of God and asked, ‘Lord, how is it that some die when they are young, while others continue on to old age? Why are some poor and some rich? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?’ He heard a voice answer him, ‘Anthony, keep your attention on yourself; these things are in the keeping of God. What you do not know, you do not need to know.' ”
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