by CCW | 7 January 2024 10:00
Epiphany concentrates our minds upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity. The word means manifestation; it is the idea of things that are made known to us. God makes himself known to us through the Word and Son of the Father.
This is why this story, read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and often within the Octave of the Epiphany, is so important. It reminds us that the Epiphany story of the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, is at once the completion of Christmas and the beginning of a new journey, a new orientation. The Magi-Kings, to be sure, came to Bethlehem by way of Jerusalem but “they departed to their own country another way,” being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. In a deeper and more spiritual sense, they are changed by what they have seen. There is a transformation of intellect and heart. T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Journey of the Magi, intuits that deeper transformation. “We returned to our places,” he has them say, “but no longer at ease.” The phrase becomes the title of Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel, No Longer at Ease, which treats the collision of cultures between Europeans and the tribal world of the Igbo peoples of Nigeria. Something changes irrevocably. There is no going back.
With Epiphany there is a double journey: a journey from Anatolia to Bethlehem and a journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. They are the two centers of Christian contemplation, the two centers of an ellipse around which the Christian understanding moves. It is, above all else, a journey of the understanding. It is all about teaching. What is the teaching? It is altogether about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ. What does that have to do with us, we might ask? The essential divinity of Christ has everything to do with us because the truth and dignity of our humanity is found not in ourselves but in our life with Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” St. Paul powerfully reminds us. “Be not conformed to this world,” for that is atheism in its many and varied forms, from the aggressive and antagonistic to the melancholic and wistful, from the dogmatic to the confused.
Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th will be marked in Halifax by the book launch of the two books by Fr. Robert Crouse, the outstanding teacher and scholar who was the inspiration and mentor of so many priests and people across the world. St. Paul’s words in today’s Epistle were among his most favourite and most frequently quoted passages. For him they captured so much of what belongs to the pilgrimage of the soul to God, the pilgrimage of the redemption of human desire, and especially with respect to the confusions, conflicts and concerns of contemporary culture. The transformation of our minds upon the things of God made known to us contrasts with our being conformed to the bad infinity of the endless and competing claims of the world.
Epiphany is full of the things of God, the teaching about God and about our thinking God. In that teaching we discover the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It is simply this. We are made capable of the things of God. God seeks to redeem us from the folly of ourselves. The truth of our humanity is found in our being with God.
This is why the story of the child Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is so significant. It marks the fullest justification of the ancient religion of Israel and of Christianity and, by extension, Islam while at the same time recalling the philosophical desire to know. The teaching is entirely about the things of God, indeed, about the very idea of God himself. For Judaism, that idea of God in himself is concentrated on the Word as Law; for Islam it is concentrated on Word as the will of Allah; for Christians it is focused on the Word made flesh. Epiphany would recall us to the matters of divinity, to the necessity and the self-sufficiency of God without whom our lives are really empty and nothing; life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare puts it in Macbeth.
But, as the proper preface for Epiphany and its Octave teaches, “Christ our Lord who in substance of our mortal flesh, manifested forth his glory, that he might bring us out of darkness into his own marvellous light.” Epiphany as doctrine is all about the light of God in the midst of the darkness of our hearts and world. It is all about the teaching, the teaching that focuses entirely on the things of God made manifest to us.
What are those things? Our churches and our culture show a certain antipathy towards doctrine and matters intellectual; this is the crisis, a despair of thought and a despair of thinking God. There are no practical solutions to theoretical problems and all of the disorders of our world and day revolve around deeply spiritual and intellectual questions about what it means to be human and to live in community with one another. In the religious and philosophical traditions that sense of our common humanity and its communal expressions of life depend radically upon who we are in the sight of God and our communion with God which is the condition for every form of human community.
The Athanasian Creed, for instance, speaks to our emptiness and despair. “He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity,” thinking about God in the forms of God’s revelation via the Scriptures and our engagement with them. It means thinking about God in terms of positive and negative thought, the dance of cataphatic and apophatic theology that corrects and counters all and any attempts to take God captive to ourselves which is the idolatry of human presumption. God makes himself known to us not for us to possess him like a thing but because we are made for God. The truth possesses us and not the other way around.
There is the necessary interplay between what can be affirmed about God and what must be negated about God who is always beyond and other. The second half of the Athanasian Creed focuses on the creedal moments in the life of Christ. He is God and Man, not two but one Christ, “one, however not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of manhood into God.” Therein lies the meaning of Epiphany as doctrine. It points us to the things of God which belong ultimately to the end and purpose of our humanity. To put it rather simply, there are things which God wants us to know.
This is, I think, the point of Jesus’ rhetorical question to Mary. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” It is about something more than the concerns of family. It is the only story of the boyhood of Christ and as such the first Gospel speech of Jesus.
The first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, too, sets down some of the essential attributes that belong to thinking God, thinking the things of God made manifest to us by reason and revelation, on the one hand, and by our reasoning upon revelation, on the other hand. Its first sentence is, I think, a wonderful summary of philosophical thinking à la Plato and Aristotle, for instance, and of what belongs as well to the theological traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible.
These are the great attributes that belong to God who transcends the things of the world as the principle of all created things. They are really statements about the things of God, what Jesus calls “my Father’s business,” or the things of “my Father’s house”. Both translations are possible and suit the context of the Gospel where Jesus is found in the temple among the doctors of the law as student and teacher, we might say, as human and divine respectively. It is about the things which are to be taught and learned. The second sentence of the First Article extends and expands the first to express what belongs to the essential Christian teaching of God as Trinity – something which the Octave of the Epiphany also highlights in the Baptism of Our Lord, the story of Christ’s baptism in Jordan understood as the manifestation of God as Trinity in the Father’s voice, the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon Jesus the Son. As the Article puts it:
In unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
This powerful teaching concentrates what we see in both the Epistle and the Gospel. For the Father’s business is that good, and acceptable and perfect will of God which is the condition of our life in Christ. For we, “being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” We embark upon the journey of the understanding about our Father’s business. Like Mary and Joseph we may not at first understand this saying but it is the point of the Epiphany journey: to bring us more fully into what God wants us to know. Such is the journey of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 1, 2023
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