Yesterday, January 5, is traditionally the last day of Christmastide (the “twelve days of Christmas”). While driving around town, I saw a man busily taking down outdoor Christmas lights and decorations. I idly wondered if he knew that it was “Christmas is over,” or whether it was just a convenient time for him to get around to doing it.
Today, then, is January 6, long celebrated in the West as the “Day of Epiphany.” I was surprised when I accessed my Yahoo! home page early this morning and saw that “Epiphany” was listed in their top ten items “trending now.” Since even regular churchgoers seldom pay much attention to Epiphany as a sacred day (or “feast day”), I didn’t realize that the internet world would make any particular note of it.
One of the reasons I like and have always made personal emphasis on Epiphany is probably pretty unique (my dear younger daughter would say, “odd”). Without any hard data to make my case, I nonetheless think that “epiphany” is one of the relatively few words to make it through the millenia, from classical, ancient Greek…to ancient Roman Latin…to old, Middle English….right into modern English….with virtually no change or variation in both spelling and meaning. “Epiphany” today looks and means as it did centuries before the Birth of Jesus of Nazareth – it is “a revealing, a making appearance, a manifestation.”
As an almost two-thousand-year-old Christian observance and celebration, Epiphany commemorates the account of Matthew 2 of the visitation of the Magi, the Wise Men, the “Three Kings of Orient” to the Holy Family, to pay homage to the Child Jesus, born “king of the Jews.” According to Matthew (the only one of the four gospels to mention the Magi), “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.” Also from Matthew’s account and hints, the timing would have been roughly a year (+ or -) after the Birth.
Which brings up the irony, of course, of all those “manger scenes” that sprout up during the holiday season – some even before Thanksgiving. According to that pesky Bible, the Wise Men wouldn’t have been at the manger. Today, 01/06/2011, would be the day to bring them out and arrange them before the Holy Family. Now I’ve never known anyone to do that – not even in the more traditional, “liturgical” churches.
Even I – stickler for accuracy as I confess to be – don’t do that. The three gifts and their bearers have been up on my big fireplace mantle – along with Joseph, Mary, and the Babe, and a young shepherd boy with a sheep over his shoulders – for weeks now. There are traditions, and there are traditions…. and it has long been the harmonizing tradition to group them all together throughout the Advent/Christmas season. At least I’ll wait until after today to take them all down and back into their protective boxes for another year.
The name “Epiphany” and its long-preserved meaning of “making an appearance, being revealed” comes from the ancient concept and tradition that the Magi’s visitation represents the first revealing of the Son of God to the larger, non-Jewish, Gentile world. Among other things, it was intended to lift up the understanding that despite the quote attributed to Jesus himself – “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15) – the Savior born in Bethlehem is the Savior of all persons, all peoples, all the world.
There is, of course, a more general understanding of this resilient, ancient word that has nothing to do with Jesus, Holy Family, the Wise Men, and the thrusting of all of them together at a stable and manger. In keeping with centuries-old understanding and meaning before the author of Matthew wrote, probably late in the first century AD, an “epiphany” still means “revelation” or “manifestation”….as in “made obvious, readily perceived,” a flash of insight, truth suddenly grasped, an “eye-opener,” if you will.
A small, somewhat trivial, personal example might be that I had “an epiphany” when it first dawned on me that all those traditional manger scenes were simply wrong, that the Magi would not have been there! A much great epiphany was certainly the day that I realized, within my “heart of hearts,” that the young woman I enjoyed friendship with was actually the one I loved above all others, and wanted to make my life’s partner. Typical, she had that figured out long before. Always has been who-knows-how-many steps ahead of me, plodder that I am.
Just what January 6, the Day of Epiphany, might reveal to you, dear reader – if anything – is entirely up to you. But beyond the insight that the manger scenes are just inaccurate, to me Epiphany is about love and adoration, hope and promise….for all humankind, for all the world.
(Next post: the different kinds of love in the well-lived life)
The Rev. Dr.'s Musings on Nature, Life & Belief 
There was at least one year where I put the Wise Guys on the other side of the living room and moved them a bit closer each day, not placing them next to the manger until the 6th. 😉
Well done, very appropriate. (It would have been a long journey, anyway; so good that you indicated their progress.)