If you think Christmas is long gone, think again. In old Christian tradition – we’re talking 1,800 years old – the Christmas season began on Dec. 25 and ended 12 days later, with the Feast of Epiphany on Jan. 6.
To put it another way: Those famous 12 days of Christmas end tomorrow, and there’s more to it than 12 drummers drumming.
Epiphany – the name comes from a Greek word meaning “revealing” – is a multilayered holy day, celebrating several events in the life of Jesus. Some early Christians observed the day as Christmas, but more commonly it commemorates the visit of wise men from the East, the so-called magi, described in the Gospel of Matthew. (In some parts of Europe, tomorrow will be called “Three Kings Day.”)
For many Christians, it recalls Jesus’ baptism. Some also mark the famous wedding in Cana, where Jesus worked his first miracle, turning water into wine, as told in the Gospel of John.
“It’s all of the above,” said the Rev. Randy Stice, associate pastor of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Johnson City. “Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the nations of the world. In each of those events, Jesus was made manifest in different ways to different groups, at different times. So the feast invites us to be mindful of the ways in which he manifests himself to us today.”
The central theme of Christian teaching says that, in Jesus, God came in the flesh and made himself known to the world, and so it’s no wonder that Epiphany was a festival of first rank from the early days of Christianity, observed long before Christmas.
“Historically, (Epiphany) has been seen as second only to Easter,” according to Stice. “It is actually the apex of the Christmas season. Christmas Day marks … the beginning of the climb toward this moment of great revelation.”
With a laugh, he notes that the Catholic Church starts singing carols on Dec. 25, just as everyone else is winding them down.
“Now that the baby has come, we start singing,” he said. “With Epiphany, the baby born at Christmas is revealed to the world as Emmanuel, God with us.”
That theme resides as strongly in Eastern Orthodox traditions, where the day is called Theophany, “the revealing of God,” and celebrates Jesus’ baptism.
“The importance for us is that is when the holy Trinity appeared for the first time directly, with the voice of the Father, the Son in flesh and the Spirit appearing as a dove,” said the Rev. Neal Hughes, deacon at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Mission.
But Orthodox theology says that Jesus’ baptism spoke about the earth as much as about heaven: Jesus’ going into water was a sign that God was blessing his creation.
“Think about it,” Hughes said. “Water is primary, elemental. The Holy Spirit brooded over the water at creation. Water is referred to constantly in the Old Testament as foundational, cleansing. Israel was saved through the Red Sea. There was Noah and the ark. What percentage of water are our bodies?” (Answer: at least 60 percent, according to numerous sources.)
So Jesus’ baptism showed that “all the created order is sacred,” he explained. “Everything we see is to be blessed.”
That was not a small point in the first centuries after Jesus, when popular philosophies cast doubt on whether the physical realm was even real, much less whether it was good. It’s not a small point now, when global warming is pushing its way to the top of governmental agendas and some Christians are debating how much they should care about the environment.
“Some people take world as a commodity, but the world is sacred in Christ,” Hughes said. “All Christians are priests, and so part of our function is to bless everything that our senses experience. That’s something we’re to do all the time, but since human beings forget like crazy, we have to be reminded.”
That makes tomorrow a red-letter day in the Christian calendar – a final gift of the season, reminding people that God created the world and then blessed it by his presence. And so should we.
First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 5 Jan. 2008.
