The First Sunday after the Epiphany
Fr.
David Curry
Christ Church in the Hall,
January 8th, 2006
(Quiet Day – Vancouver ’06)
“Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind.”
The twelve days of Christmas end
with the Feast of Epiphany, the last and great festival of Christmas.
Epiphany is, as it were, the Christmas of the Gentiles, for in the
journey of the Magi-Kings, the birth of Christ is made known to all the
nations of the world. As a 17th century Anglican divine, Bishop
John Cosin of Durham puts it: “[Christmas] has been indeed a feast of joy
to us all this while … but our fullness of joy comes not [until] now, for
the Angelic tidings of joy came first to the shepherds, to Israel, to those
near at hand, but upon this feast it is omni populo (to all people), news
which the star brought to all the world, and to us too, that now salvation
was come unto the Gentiles”. Joy increases to fullness of joy and light
blazes forth into fullness of light.
Epiphany means more than just the
ending blaze of Christmas, however. It also inaugurates a season of
teaching, the season of Epiphany.
The word Epiphany means
manifestation or shining forth, and refers to the manifestation of God’s
glory in the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus. Epiphany raises our minds from
the paradise of Bethlehem to the heaven of Jerusalem. In a way,
we move from meditating upon “His coming in the flesh that was God”
to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; in short, “to turn
ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above” (Cosin). For
that reason, too, the Epiphany season abounds with the stories of the
miracles of Jesus, told, however, as teachings about the divinity of Christ,
the very thing which grounds all worship.
The manifestation of the divinity
of Christ is Epiphany’s theme. In the words and deeds of Christ, God is
revealed and revealed in ways which open out to us the true nature of God.
What is made manifest is not something arbitrary, tyrannous and willful. No.
Epiphany in every way is pregnant with purpose, the purpose of God. Epiphany
celebrates in St. Paul’s words, the making known of “the manifold wisdom
of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus
our Lord”(Eph.3.11). Thus, the First Sunday after the Epiphany signals
the manifestation of Christ as the Wisdom of God, the epiphany of the
divine wisdom, the true source of all teaching and every learning.
Education is often about the
discovery of things which were previously hidden from our view. Here, in the
only Gospel story that treats the boyhood of Christ, Jesus is found in the
temple at Jerusalem, “sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing
them and asking them questions”. The initial picture is Jesus as the
student but “all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and
answers”. Jesus the exemplary student is also Jesus the Teacher among
the teachers.
These teachers have the humility
to be astonished, to be amazed and full of wonder. As Jesus will say to an
anxious Mary and Joseph who had “sought [him]”, as Mary said,
“sorrowing”, so, too, he says to us “wist ye not that I must be about
my Father’s business?” Which only heightens the wonder.
It is a curious phrase and one
which is variously rendered as being “about my Father’s business” or
“in my Father’s house”, έν τοίς τοϋ πατρός μου, in any event,
underscoring the connection between the boy Jesus and the heavenly Father in
the place of teaching, the temple at Jerusalem. It suggests something of
God’s will and purpose for us.
Epiphany makes known to us the
twofold purpose of the coming of Christ. He comes to reveal divinity and
to redeem humanity. He is the eternal Word made flesh, true God and true
Man, as orthodox Christianity rightly and firmly insists. As Athanasius, the
Father of Orthodoxy says, “without forsaking what He was, namely God, he
became what He was not, namely man”. Divine wisdom is fully present at
every stage in the true course of his real humanity, the unchanging in the
midst of the changing, from the unspeaking babe in Bethlehem to the
agonizing words of the crucified Christ at Calvary. “Jesus increased in
wisdom and stature”, humanly speaking, that we, too, may grow up into
wisdom provided we are attentive to Christ.
Like Mary and Joseph, we, too,
must find him in the temple with the priests and doctors of the Law, the
place for those who seek God. And what could be more appropriate than that
he should be in their midst in the study of God’s Holy Scripture? He who
reveals divinity among those who would have divinity revealed? What could be
more fitting than that a school boy’s innocent simplicity and directness of
insight should be the vehicle of the manifestation of God’s wisdom?
And yet, there is the astounding
wonder of the thing precisely because it runs so completely counter to our
expectations. “Be not conformed to this world”, St. Paul says in a
similar fashion, for Christ’s coming runs counter to all human expectation,
to all worldly calculation. It confounds our schemes and designs, as it
must, for it all about grace, God’s grace and our engagement with him.
Epiphany shows us that God is the teacher through the wonderful paradox of
the child Christ among the doctors.
Christ’s coming opens out to us a
new vision and a new perspective. He opens out to us the kingdom of God, the
place of human perfection, and he opens out to us the form of our
participation by grace in that kingdom. In no small measure, it has to do
with our being taught. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”,
St. Paul says.
This, too, is a wonderful phrase.
It signals the hope of transformation through our being changed and our
being changed fundamentally in terms of our outlook, in terms of our
thinking. This renewal of our minds requires our attentiveness to God’s
revelation of himself, to the means of his engaging us through the words of
Christ in the witness of the Scriptures and through the sacrament of his
body and blood, the revealed and given means of his being with us. This
renewal of our minds requires our turning away from “being conformed to
the world”. Conformity, as something static and confining, contrasts
with the dynamic of our being transformed by our attention to the high
things of God unveiled in our midst. The vain pursuit of every passing fad
and fancy afflicts contemporary culture and alienates us from the dynamic of
God and thus from ourselves and one another. To be transformed means to
attend to Christ in the places where his Word is proclaimed and his
Sacraments celebrated. Only so can we be what we behold in Christ.
“You must therefore seek him
there in the Temple, seek him in the Church, where you will find the Word
and the Wisdom of Christ”, as an older wise man and theologian, Origen,
once said. Nothing could be more profoundly counter-culture even as it
shapes and defines cultures. Ultimately, we are what we contemplate. We
become what we behold. The Church must be the place where we behold Christ
in his revelation of himself to us; only so can we find him in one another.
“Trasumanar”, transhumanised, as that wise poet, Dante says, coining
a word in Italian to capture the wonder of our being transformed into what
we shall be according to will and purpose of God.
The collect for the First
Sunday after the Epiphany sets the logic for the Epiphany season and for
our lives. We seek the wisdom of God that “we may both perceive and know
what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to
fulfill the same”. There is a kind of logical priority given to our
reasoning, the sense of the logos of God undergirding all rightful
action. That sensibility goes to the very meaning of education, to the idea
of our being led out of the prisons of ourselves in conformity to the
whims and dictates of our world and day and our being led into the
wisdom of God which alone is transforming. Only by contemplating the wisdom
of God made manifest in Christ, in his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments
celebrated, can we hope to grow up into wisdom. The meaning of the Epiphany,
it signals the journey of our lives to God and with God.
“Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind.”
