by CCW | 13 January 2019 15:00
“There came a voice from heaven”, Mark tells us, just after Jesus “com[es] up out of the water” “baptized of John” in the river Jordan, and sees “the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him”(Mark 1. 10). The Baptism of Christ is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ, thus an epiphany, too, of the Trinity. As such The Baptism of Christ[1] is an integral feature of the Epiphany; its propers provided for within The Octave of the Epiphany (BCP, p. 119).
Epiphany is the season of teaching, hence the imagery of light. Advent, too, is the season of teaching with an equal emphasis upon the imagery of light. The difference is that Advent focuses on the Light of Godcomingdown to our world of darkness; Epiphany focuses upon the Light of Godnowin the world. The emphasis is on the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The “voice from heaven” is the Father’s voice which proclaims “Thou are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”(Mark 1.11). This is the beloved “servant, whom I uphold, mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth,” God says in Isaiah, the one upon whom “I have put my spirit” (Isaiah 42.1).
On the one hand, the servant here is Israel in her divine vocation as “a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles” tasked “to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42.6,7). Powerful images that signal human redemption as grounded in God. On the other hand, the servant is the Son in whom the Father is “well pleased” because the vocation of Israel is only fulfilled in Christ.
The Gospel for The First Sunday after the Epiphany, which this year is also The Octave Day of Epiphany, is the unique story of the boy Jesus engaged with the doctors of the Law in the temple at Jerusalem, “sitting in their midst,” “both hearing them and asking them questions”(Luke. 2. 46). It is a scene of wonder. “All they that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers”(Lk. 2. 47). It is unique in one way because it is the only story in the New Testament about the childhood or boyhood of Christ. But it is uniquely important in another way. Here is Jesus as Divine Teacher and human student. It is an epiphany about who Christ really is. His question to Mary and Joseph highlights his mission and divine identity. “Wist ye not” – did you not know? – “that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Lk. 2. 49). Some translations have “in my Father’s house.” Literally, it is “the things of my Father.” In any event, it is a telling phrase which points to the temple, to the church, as a place of teaching. Teaching and learning, and living the teaching that is learned. That is the Epiphany in us.
Human redemption pertains to the whole of our humanity: soul and body, heart and mind. Yet Epiphany speaks particularly and urgently as Paul tells it to our “be[ing] transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” without which, it seems, we cannot “present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is [our] reasonable service” (words which shape the post-communion thanksgiving prayer of our liturgy, BCP, p.85) and without which, it seems, we cannot “prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.” And without which, too, it seems, we cannot be the Church as “one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Romans 12.1-5). Things are being made known to us about God himself which in turn illuminate things about ourselves, about the relation of knowing and doing, as the Collect suggests. There is an intellectual richness to the teachings of the Epiphany but only in relation to the whole of our being.
As Simone Weil, the remarkable philosopher of compassionate humility, says so well, “whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being”. Epiphany challenges us about teaching and learning, a teaching and learning that constantly circles around the mystery of God in Christ. It means wrestling with the readings, wrestling with the ideas that are presented to us in the witness of the Scriptures credally understood. Epiphany as the season of teaching turns on the important matters of interpretation. It is all about how we read.
The story of Christ’s baptism, for instance, has been the focus of controversy with respect to the understanding of Christ. Some, for instance, have read the story as signalling the adoptionof Jesus as God’s Son, as if only at this point did Jesus become God’s son. Adoptionism, as it is called, an early Christian heresy, fundamentally denies the Incarnation of Christ, the idea that Christ is both God and Man; “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,” as the Nicene Creed puts it about his divinity, yet “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,” and “made man;” or “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,” as the Apostles’ Creed states, both statements about the truth of his humanity. And as the Athanasian Creed puts it, “Who although he be God and Man, / yet he is not two, but one Christ;/ One, however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh,/ but by taking of Manhood into God … not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of Person.” Strong theological teachings, and yet so rarely taught, these creedal statements capture more fully the biblical witness to the whole Christ. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him.” The only-begotten Son means eternally begotten. The Son is always the Son of the Father who in the mystery of Christmas becomes the Son of Mary, our Saviour.
“Without forsaking what he was,” namely God, “he became what he was not,” namely, man, as Athanasius so powerfully says. That provides a much more radical understanding of God and of our humanity, a deeper insight and a greater intimacy which belongs to the fullness of human redemption. Such things deepen our understanding of the mystery of God and of the manifestation of that mystery in Christ. “‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,/ But, that God should be made like man, much more” as John Donne puts it. But with Epiphany we turn from the wonder of the God who becomes human to the wonder of God himself. We turn to the teachings of God, to revelation, to a focus on the God who became human, rather than on the humanity to which God has condescended.
Epiphany inaugurates the pilgrimage of illumination which is a necessary feature of our redemption. We are drawn into the teachings of God that transform our lives “by the renewing of [our] minds” about the things of God. What is wanted is that we should find Christ and be found in him. Where? “They found him in the temple,” and so may we, if only we will learn and think. Only then what is said about the Son might also be said of us. For that will be our adoption as the children of God.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany I, 2019,
Christ Church, Windsor & St. George’s, Falmouth
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