The Epiphany
January 6, 2020
[Don’t miss the “March of the Kings” by British composer Vaughan Williams, a great piece of Christmas music for the Epiphany.]
IN Calvinist America (remember, the Puritans didn’t even celebrate Christmas), the Christmas season doesn’t last much past the busy season of preparation and shopping. It’s a festive time before Christmas, but it doesn’t leave much room for the observance of Advent. Then there’s just one week of celebration between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s kind of topsy turvy. Discarded trees appear on curbs right after New Year’s Day. There is no room in packed calendars and work lives for one of the greatest feasts in the Christmas calendar, the Epiphany on January 6, which marks the day when three highly cultured philosopher kings came from the East to Bethlehem. Their systems of thought now exhausted, these intellectuals were drawn by a mysterious revelation to search for a child who was a manifestation of divine light. And they found a helpless baby. Here was no symbol or sign. Here was Wisdom itself. Here was no illumination of the mind alone. Their hearts were enlightened too. Their search ended, they fell to their knees and adored.
Today, as Eastern mysticism and the cult of “mindfulness” spread in the West, let’s remember that these ideas are not new, but very ancient. This road was traveled by the Magi.
G.K. Chesterton wrote, in The Everlasting Man:
It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages.They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales, but the truth of things; and since their truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. (The Everlasting Man, Ignatius Press; p. 176)
Here is more from Dom Prosper Guéranger’s Liturgical Year:
The Feast of the Epiphany is the continuation of the mystery of Christmas; but it appears on the Calendar of the Church with its own special character. Its very name, which signifies Manifestation, implies that it celebrates the apparition of God to his creatures.
For several centuries, the Nativity of our Lord was kept on this day; and when, in the year 376, the decree of the Holy See obliged all Churches to keep the Nativity on the 25th December, as Rome did – the Sixth of January was not robbed of all its ancient glory. It was still to be called the Epiphany, and the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ was also commemorated on this same Feast, which Tradition had marked as the day on which that Baptism took place.
The Greek Church gives this Feast the venerable and mysterious name of Theophania, which is of such frequent recurrence in the early Fathers, as signifying a divine Apparition. We find this name applied to this Feast by Eusebius, St. Gregory Nazianzum, and St. Isidore of Pelusium. In the liturgical books of the Melchite Church the Feast goes under no other name.
The Orientals call this solemnity also the holy on account of its being the day on which Baptism was administered, (for, as we have just mentioned, our Lord was baptised on this same day.) Baptism is called by the holy Fathers Illumination, and they who received it [are] Illuminated.
Lastly, this Feast is called, in many countries, King’s Feast: it is, of course, an allusion to the Magi, whose journey to Bethlehem is so continually mentioned in to-day’s Office.
The Epiphany shares with the Feasts of Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost, the honour of being called, in the Canon of the Mass, a Day most holy. It is also one of the cardinal Feasts, that is, one of those on which the arrangement of the Christian Year is based; for, as we have Sundays after Easter, and Sundays after Pentecost, so also we count six Sundays after the Epiphany.
The Epiphany is indeed great Feast, and the joy caused us by the Birth of our Jesus must be renewed on it, for, as though it were a second Christmas Day, it shows us our Incarnate God in a new light. It leaves us all the sweetness of the dear Babe of Bethlehem, who hath appeared to us already in love; but to this it adds its own grand manifestation of the divinity of our Jesus. At Christmas, it was a few Shepherds that were invited by the Angels to go and recognise THE WORD MADE FLESH; but now, at the Epiphany, the voice of God himself calls the whole world to adore this Jesus, and hear him.
