Epiphany: The God Who Confronts (1)

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”                                                                                                                                                                                      Mary Oliver

Poet Mary Oliver gets it just right. The three seasons in the first great cycle of the church year, the Christmas cycle, is rounded off by Epiphany Day and season that follows. It parallels Pentecost in the second great cycle, the Easter cycle. The diagram below captures the relationship:

Advent/Christmas/Epiphany

Lent/(Holy Week) Easter/Pentecost

If we have paid attention in the darkness to glimpses of divine light in Advent, and were astonished by God’s entry into human life as one of us at Christmas, we will be motivated and prepared to tell the world about it. Thomas Merton puts it well:

“We who have seen the light of Christ are obliged, by the greatness of the grace that has been given us, to make known the presence of the Savior to the ends of the earth ... not only by preaching the glad tidings of His coming; but above all by revealing Him in our lives.... Every day of our mortal lives must be His manifestation, His divine Epiphany, in the world which He has created and redeemed” (Thomas Merton (cited at http://www.stpaulsmishawaka.org/html/docs/epistles/2011/January%202011%20epistle.pdf).

The usual understanding of Epiphany runs something like this: Epiphany celebrates Jesus Christ’s revelation to the world as God’s self-revelation. In particular, this revelation is to the world of what has happened at Christmas makes clear God’s intention for good for the peoples he has created in and through Jesus Christ. The visit of the pagan magi to worship the infant Jesus and the use of light in their story signals this and serves as an anticipatory fulfillment of the great Old Testament prophecies of the nations coming to Israel to receive God’s blessing (eg. Isa.2:2-4).

The word “epiphany” itself comes from Greek word meaning “appearance” or “manifestation” of God. It also can means the visible manifestation of a god or the ceremonial visit of a ruler worshiped as a god (Companion to the Book of Common Worship [Geneva Press, 2003], 94-95).

That’s all good and correct as far as it goes. But I don’t believe it goes far enough.

We need to anchor our thought about Epiphany, as about all the seasons of the church year, in the historical-narrative reading of the biblical story I sketched in the beginning of this series.

Each gospel lets us know pretty quickly that Jesus’ revelation to the world is received well by some and not so well with others. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (Jn.1:5). His revelation to the world provoked opposition as well as welcome. That renders this revelation a confrontation. Again, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Epiphany forms the triumphant declaration that the divine counter-revolution against the disorder, decay, and destruction the revolution of sin caused had begun. The chief agent of this divine movement is here and revealed to the world. A star has led three pagan magi to him. But still, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

This one is baptized by John in the Jordan River. Outside the land. By the one announcing the onset of God’s New Exodus – the true return of his people to their land to form the Abrahamic Israel God wanted to bless the world. That’s Jesus ministry, the front of the war which he was called to wage. The center of the entire struggle. The nexus where the decisive battle will be fought. Over Israel. For the sake of the world. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The war he fought was for Israel to be Abrahamic Israel – bearer of the blessing and destiny of the world.

-not the Israel that colludes with Rome to establish a nation shaped in the image and reflecting the values of the Empire (the Sadducees),

-not the Israel that seeks to hoard God’s gifts and establish an identity that separates it from the rest of the world (the Pharisees),

-not the Israel so zealous for its own purity that it withdraws from the world to wait and ready itself for the Lord’s return (the Essenes), and

-not the Israel so zealous for God’s honor and reputation that it’s willing to take up arms and kill the hated Roman oppressors (the Zealots).

The Israel Jesus wanted and fought for was an Israel that looked like him. For he is not only the chief agent of God’s counter-revolution against sin, he is that counter-revolution in person. It looks, walks, and talks like him.

As the one faithful Israelite, the one who fulfilled Israel’s side of the covenant with God, Jesus attracted the attention of the authorities and representatives of all these other ways of being Israel because his way contrasted with and constituted a rejection of all of them. The accounts of his life and work in the gospels are an account of this warfare. That’s the content of the season after Epiphany to the season of Lent which carries Jesus’ story through its final dramatic stages and up to his crucifixion.

Future posts on Epiphany will spell this out a bit. For this post, it is enough to see that the historical-narrative of the biblical story informs (or ought to inform) our understanding of Epiphany enough for us to grasp that this revelation of Jesus Christ to the world is for some a revelation of the light and grace of God (the Magi) but for others, especially most of the power-brokers of his time, it was like waving a red cape in front of an angry bull.