Feast of the Epiphany
Today’s assigned readings
Isaiah 49:1-7, Revelation 21:22-27, Matthew 12:14-21
Dear Friends,
And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”
Isaiah 49:3
Today is the feast of the Epiphany or, as it is called in the Eastern Traditions, the Theophany. S’praznikum! Russian for “Joy of the Feast!” It’s quite useful for any holiday! (Purists will tell you it transliterates, more correctly, to “S Prazdnikom” but in use, it’s more of a jovial shout, and it comes out “S’praznikum!” at least from my favourite native Russians.)
Theophany is a very cool word for, unlike our “Epiphany” which simply means “manifestation”, theophany means quite clearly “manifestation of God.” Which is what Christians celebrate today.
In the West this is the celebration of the arrival of the Magi to Bethlehem, where they worshipped Jesus. Unlike the shepherds on Christmas night, and unlike Mary and Joseph - and everyone else involved in the story so far - the Magi are Gentiles. While we know nothing of how many of them there were, or what their names are, or even where they came from - in fact everything we tell about them is simply legend - the legends we tell about them are terribly important. Not because they are necessarily true in an historic sense, but because they are True in a mythological sense.
At its fullest, the Myth of the Magi speaks of wise men from three differnt parts of the world (although those parts vary, depending on who’s doing the telling). Thus, in the adoration of the Magi we see the entire world coming to the feet of Messiah in prayer.
In the Byzantine East, this feast goes even further, for it is seen as a celebration not of the Magi but of the Baptism of Christ. The theological image normally offered for this is that Christ-God enters the waters where everyone else has been entering for the washing away of their sins. God’s glory in Jesus passes into the waters and he takes on himself all the sins there as his own mystical robe. Leaving for us - who enter the water of Baptism - his own robe of glory to take up as we come out of the font. It’s a very powerful image.
Every Theophany in Orthodox churches around the world, the priest blesses water with a cross. Ideally this is “living water” in a lake or river or ocean, such as here, on the San Lorenzo River. But sometimes location and space require just a small font of water, symbolic of the whole world.
When the rite is over the water is considered to have been restored to the purity it enjoyed in creation - it is considered more than “Holy Water”: it is really water now, as God intended it to be. This water gets passed around in cups and golden ladles, stored in water bottle and sprinkled on everything: people, cars, houses. In most Orthodox communities this water is carried into every home in the parish and used for annual rites of House Blessing. (Last year, my community had a progressive luncheon after Liturgy, and went from house to house blessing and feasting. It was a wonderful day.)
This feast, on January 6th, was the original winter feast: Christmas and, later the Purification on 2 February, and the Circumcision on 1 January, all evolved out of this one. In the Armenian and Syrian traditions (Coptic and Ethiopian, too?) this day is Christmas. The Nativity, the Magi, the Baptism are all celebrated on this one feast - although they all do it on their own calendars and it’s not necessarily, on our (Gregorian) 6 January.
In all the churches this day is a celebration of the Incarnation without equal. Christmas makes a point, this day embellishes it to its Baroque fulness. Christmas is the statement of a theme but this day is the fugue in full form. The nativity is a theological point. Epiphany is a theological treatise.
It’s not enough that God has become one of us. We must know what it means.
You can already see - in the Byzantine water rites - the development of the problem I spoke of last week:
[A]t times [Byzantine Theology gets] so focused on Christ-God that it seemed like Jesus-the-Guy who went through a voice-change and puberty and acne and probably tried to figure out why he suddenly had back hair… This guy gets lost in all the Gold Icons and hymnography.
…The God I meet in Jesus-the-Rabbi is more like the earthy, Semitic deity I’d expect in Judaism. This God is *not* the God I ran into in Eastern Orthodoxy. That deity was so far above all humanity that proper theology had to make some near-gnostic statements about Jesus’s death. “Well, the Body died… but God the Son didn’t. He was still on the Throne with God the Father… where he always was and always will be…” Argh. No…
God died.
Felt Pain.
Went through puberty. Wet Dreams. Burped. Passed Gas after too much hummus.
Or this isn’t working.
And that Dead, Farting God introduced me to the warm, loving, Semitic deity
Where is Jesus, the Infant, in all of this theological fugue? At the point where the Magi got there, when Jesus was roughly two years old, was Jesus potty trained? Or was he, as so many third world children do, even today, still running around naked, without any long robes at all, so he could use the bathroom without messing up his clothes?
Did he know he was God? Was he at all? Or was he just a Jewish kid, that later knew something about God he had to tell the rest of us?
The gospel passage today from St Matthew cites a passage from Isaiah using the Greek version, the Septuagint, rather than the Hebrew one. The Greek version of this passage mentions Gentiles twice. The Hebrew not at all. The Church sees “my servant” as a prophetic shadow of Jesus. The Jews see “my servant” as Israel - which is a more literal reading of all the “Servant” passages in Isaiah.
But at one point I think everyone can agree: LXX, Masoretic text, Eastern and Western Christians, Byzantine, Syrian, Nestorian, Catholic and Protestant, Jews and Gentiles.
That one point is this: The God of Israel has home to all of us.
Even before I became a Wiccan in the 1980s, this one problem stumped me: how did the tribal deity of one, out-of-the-way people in the fertile crescent trick the entire world into worshipping him? You see movies like this all the time: an explorer arrives on some island tribe, or some hidden jungle village, and there, in the midst of that little place, is one shrine to one deity with a name no one has ever heard outside of that one village or off that one island. How does that one deity in that one temple in that one out-of-the way place get to be the God of the Whole World? How do we get from specifics to universality?
Today, theologically, we get a lot of answers from the Christian side. There are more answers in the Qur’an, if you ask me. As other writers have shown, there are more answers in the Tao te Ching. And as Martin Palmer and others have shown, you can find answers in many parts of the East
The Hebrew text of Isaiah says that the “islands” and the “coastlands” (both rendered as “Gentiles” in the Greek) wait for the teachings of God’s servant, Israel.
The corners of the world await the revelation of the deepest meaning available to us: Epiphany, Theophany.
We can get lost in the specific theologies and myths that we have developed over centuries, but I think we miss the point. That one temple in that one corner of the world, that one Tribal deity is, somehow, the God of the whole world. In his light (no matter what name we use) we are to establish Justice, Salvation/Healing/Wholeness and Hope.
Much love,
Huw