Epiphany—The Inauguration of a Season
You may be as surprised to find an article on Christmas in the January Mountain Spirit as you were to discover an Easter one in May issue. The explanation is the same for both cases. The feast did fall in the previous month, but the season itself continued into the next one. The feast of Christmas begins on the day itself and lasts until January 6, the feast of the Epiphany. That’s what the old carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” is all about. (I have heard that the twelve gifts are deeply symbolic, but I am skeptical about that.)
The Anointed One, A Task-Focused King
The season, then, begins with the Christ Mass (where we got the name), the celebration of the Eucharist on the feast of Our Lord’s birth. “Christ,” incidentally, is the English transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for “Anointed,” which we transliterate “Messiah.” In the Old Testament those said to be anointed were those set aside by God for a particular task, usually priests and kings. In the time between the Testaments the term came to refer particularly to a supernatural figure through whom God was expected to intervene in history on behalf of his people. Those expectations furnished the first Christians with some of the categories through which they tried to understand who Jesus was.
The trouble is that none of the categories were equal to the reality. The one who came nearest to expressing the full truth was the author of the Gospel According to St. John in his opening words, which are read as the gospel a time or two during the season of Christmas. The term he uses is Word, which seems to mean the same thing as Wisdom does in Proverbs 8:22-36, where it is personified to refer to the divine agent in creation.
In the Johannine Prologue, we read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1-3). This leads us to the glorious climax, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (1:14, NRSV).
Rather than this exalted status, often at Christmas we think of the Babe born in a manger. And certainly Christ was born as an ordinary human being. This is part of what God the Father and God the Son went through to reclaim an estranged human race – and the Holy Spirit was involved as well. John also says this perfectly in the best known and loved verse in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
In their stories of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke give us their way of proclaiming the identity of Jesus. That is the way to understand the story of the Visit of the Magi, those oriental astrologers whom Matthew depicts at Jesus’ birth. His revelation to them is considered to be his Epiphany, a supernatural manifestation to these representatives of all non-Jewish humanity (called “gentiles” in the King James version, using a Latin word meaning “foreign nationals”).
The Sundays
Here is where the Good News comes to us; we are told in this beautiful story that the Anointed Savior expected by God’s chosen people is our Savior, too, the Savior of all humankind. This is the Epiphany celebrated on January 6. It inaugurates a season that lasts until Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. The Sundays in this season are called Sundays after the Epiphany, not Sundays in Epiphany. The first one of these is also called “The Baptism of Our Lord,” recognizing that Jesus’ identity was also manifested in that event.
The remaining Sundays are part of what Roman Catholics call “ordinary time,” a designation they share with the Sundays after Pentecost. Indeed, the number of Sundays after the Epiphany varies with the date of Easter and the readings for the later ones that may not get read in a particular year at that time are then picked up and used in Sundays after Pentecost that fall earlier in those years. While white or gold are used for vestments and hangings from Christmas to the Baptism of Our Lord, we will then turn to the green of the growing season that makes up ordinary time.
Thus in two short weeks we will move from the sublime to the everyday. And each of these sorts of time is good in its own particular way. +