“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Epiphany is a Greek word that has carried over into other languages such as English. It is derived from a word that refers to what appears; in other words, to what is manifest or made known. In the Christian understanding, it also refers to the festival of Epiphany understood, as the Epiphany Collect makes clear, to the idea of “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” That remarkable story is wonderfully complemented by the readings for The First Sunday after the Epiphany.
This is challenging to our culture and world. Why? Because the whole idea of Epiphany, both the concept and the event, is so emphatically and primarily intellectual and spiritual. The emphasis, as today’s Collect makes clear, is on the primacy of knowing: Grant that we “may both perceive and know what things we ought to do” and “may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same.” The Epistle and Gospel both turn on the primacy or centrality of knowing as essential to our life in Christ, captured most fully in Paul’s words, “be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
It is a significant phrase. “The renewing of your mind” was one of the favourite and most frequent passages of Scripture used by Fr. Crouse in many of his sermons and papers. It speaks powerfully to a fundamental and essential feature of our humanity as indicated by Aristotle and Augustine, to name but two figures in the history of thought and spirituality. “All human beings by nature desire to know,” Aristotle notes. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” Augustine famously begins his Confessions, launching the journey of the human soul to its patria or end in God’s eternal loving and knowing of all things. As Aquinas observes, “God is the beginning and end of all created things, especially rational beings.” Knowing and our desire to know are essential to the understanding of what it means to be human. “Know thyself,” the Delphic Oracle proclaims. It means to know who we are within the order of the Cosmos or, to put it in Christian terms, Creation, and thus to know ourselves through our relation to God, the beginning and end of all things.
Epiphany in every way highlights the idea of things that are made known and as such are to be learned because they are taught. The Epiphany story of the Magi-Kings expresses the universal desire to know that impels the long and arduous journey of the proverbial ‘come-from-aways,’ the Magi from Anatolia, referencing either Asia Minor or perhaps Persia. We don’t really know much about them neither their names nor how many. All of that belongs to holy imagination in song and carol, in art and story. What is clear is that they represent the idea that all come to Bethlehem, that what unfolds and appears in that lowly scene is omni populo, for all people, something universal. The Magi-Kings are not Jews, but Gentiles, a generic term that refers to those who are from outside of Israel. Yet their coming belongs to the mission and purpose of Israel to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” as the Nunc Dimittis from Luke makes clear. Something is made known that is universal, for all. The gifts of the Magi are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning” that teach us that Christ is King, God and Sacrifice and such he is to be worshipped and adored by all.
The idea of universality belongs to the creative tension between the particular and the universal in many other religions and cultures. We come to the latter through the former albeit in various ways. I like to think of the different forms of universality among the religions of the world more in terms of complementary universalities rather than opposing or competing universalities. Siddhartha Gautama, who becomes the Buddha, meaning the enlightened one, steps outside of the comforts and luxuries of his pleasure palaces to encounter human suffering in its various forms. He confronts the universality of human suffering. That launches an inquiry into how to deal with that reality. It means the rejection of Hinduism and the development of the various schools of Buddhism that undertake to deal with dukkha, suffering. How that is treated is very different from our western cultures because it insists on the negation of the self in the radical doctrine of the ‘non-you’ as one of the four noble truths. The self is an illusion; there is no ‘you’, and the world, too, is an illusion. The idea is that desire is the cause of suffering. Getting rid of desire means getting free of the self.
Losing oneself to find oneself is an ancient idea and a Christian one, too, to which Buddhism is at least connected in some way. “The renewing of [our] mind” suggests the recovery and restoration of something which has been lost. That is where the mystery of the Epiphany comes into play as making explicit what is made manifest in the Christmas mystery. But it is not simply an appearance in contrast to reality. Rather it makes known in the flesh of our humanity the ultimate reality of God. That is the deep meaning of Christ’s nativity. It makes known to us what belongs to the ultimate truth and good of our humanity; our truth and good as found not in the abstract autonomous self, the false myth of our times, but in God. The whole of the Epiphany, feast and concept, builds upon this by emphasizing the things of God that are revealed to us “in the face of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord,” the one “who, in the substance of our mortal flesh, manifested forth his glory, that he might bring us out of darkness into his own marvellous light,” as the Epiphany Proper Preface puts it (BCP, p.79).
What is manifested is what is taught to us about the ultimate end and purpose of our humanity. Nowhere is that more profoundly illustrated than in this morning’s Gospel. Luke’s unique and famous scene tells of the boyhood of Christ who was taken to Jerusalem “when he was twelve years old,” and, unbeknownst to Joseph and his mother, “tarried behind in Jerusalem.” They, like all anxious parents, immediately go seeking for him. “After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions… and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” That alone is significant. He is found in the temple. Is this not the real purpose of our churches? To be the place where Christ is to be found?
This is wonderful enough, it might seem. Christ appears here as both student and teacher. Theologically this belongs to the doctrine of Christ as true God and true man which in turn is the teaching that informs “the renewing of [our] mind” on the things which God wants us to know and which we have lost and forgotten. It leads in the Gospel story to what is even more wonderful and profound: the dialogue between Jesus and Mary. This highlights the very point of Epiphany in all of its senses. There is their seeking him, “sorrowing,” as she says, and there is his response. “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” There is something which we are meant to know.
He comes with a purpose. He is found in the temple, the place of teaching and learning, because there his purpose is manifested, taught and made known so that it can be taken hold of by us. Such is “the renewing of [our] mind” upon the things of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ and through the universal desire of our humanity to know what ultimately belongs to our truth and goodness in spite of human sin and ignorance.
‘The Habits of the Heart,’ a book by Robert Bellah and others, undertakes a deep dive into the modern soul, particularly of America. The title is taken from Alex de Tocqueville’s observations on early nineteenth century America in his treatise, ‘Democracy in America’ (1835-1840). He observed at once the animating strength of American individualism as rooted and grounded in communities with strong moral and ethical principles and yet feared the dangers of that individualism if removed from what gave it substance and meaning. ‘Habits of the Heart’ follows upon de Tocqueville to examine the contemporary forms of the self in the forms of ‘utilitarian individualism’ and ‘expressive individualism’; the first as largely shaped by the managerial and technocratic culture which privileges material self-interest and power, the second as largely defined by the therapeutic culture that promotes the sense of self-esteem and self-fulfillment as primary. Yet there is an ambivalence about both contemporary forms of individualism, an ambivalence owing to a sense of incompleteness and emptiness. There is an implicit recognition that both approaches are arbitrary and empty because they come down to little more than what suits me.
There can be no going back to some imagined golden age, to a nostalgic form of communal and social life that assumed the interdependence of all upon each other. But there can be exactly what Paul speaks about as “the renewing of your mind” upon the idea of human worth and dignity that is grounded in what is substantial and true. That is the point of Epiphany. It is the counter to the utilitarian and expressive individualism that senses its own emptiness and isolation; the empty and isolated self, as it were, in its nihilism. Epiphany makes known the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in the Church, understood not as a secular institution trotting out the empty mantras of an empty culture, the churches not as dying but dead, but as the body of Christ which lives from its head in the words and teachings of Christ who is God with us. Christ in this story is “found in the temple” but only by those who seek him, seeking him out of a sense of our own emptiness and incompleteness. There can only be “the renewing of our minds” because of what God makes known to us and which belongs to the deep desires of the human heart.
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 1 in the Octave, January 12, 2025