Epiphany

Word of the Week

When I was a boy, we used to keep our Christmas tree up and our outside lights still shining at least until what we knew as “Russian Christmas,” namely, the Epiphany.  I wasn’t sure what that had to do with Russians or with calendars, but I liked the tradition.  Colored lights – keep them on!  I knew, from the carol, that there was something called the twelve days of Christmas, and later I learned that the twelfth night was one of especial joy and celebration.  That’s why Shakespeare named one of his merriest comedies Twelfth Night – not because it has to do with the feast, though he was deeply fond of Christmastide and of Easter, but because of the sheer fun.

It’s a happy coincidence that we in the northern hemisphere get to celebrate Christmas and Epiphany in the darkest days of the year.  The light shines out all the more gloriously.  Let’s think about it.  When the priest Zachariah, the father of John, was finally able to speak again after nine months of silence, he uttered a poem he may well have been composing in his mind all that while. For his son was going to prepare the way of the Lord, who in the womb of Mary was already in the world, though the world did not know it.  Christ, the “dayspring from on high,” would “give light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.”

That phrase, give light, or shine upon, is, in Greek, epiphanai: and there you have one of the most important words in Scripture.  I don’t want to heap a lot of linguistics on you, not today, dear readers!  Just a little.  What was the first thing God created?  Not muddy old matter, not earth and water, but light, Hebrew ’or.  Now, Hebrew’s a great language for verbs.  You can turn that noun into a verb that means to give light to something else, that is, to shine on something, to make something shine, and that’s the verb that the Greek verb translates.  Christ is our light, which means not just that we see his glory shining, or even that by his light we see all that we see, but that whatever in us shines is Christ’s doing.

An epiphany is a glorious appearing, a light-filled manifestation.  The proud Greek emperor Antiochus IV called himself Epiphanes, meaning the brilliant one.  He’s the cosmopolitan and pluralistic emperor who, believing with a shrug that all gods were basically the same, set up in the Holy of Holies, in the temple of Jerusalem, a statue of Zeus.  That abomination caused the Jews to rebel under the leadership of Judah the Hammer, and if you know anything about Hanukkah, you know that the Jews got rid of that statue, purged the Temple, and rededicated it to the Lord, in a feast of lights.  The light of the Brilliant One was extinguished, and the light of God shone forth again.

I’ll be talking more about Epiphany next week, but you should know that whenever in the New Testament you find the words appearing or appearance referring to Christ, it’s an epiphany that the author is thinking of, and not just the first one, when he appeared to the shepherds and then to the wise men following a star from the east, but the final and all-fulfilling one, in the great day of the Lord.

The root of our word, Greek phainein, to shine, to appear, is to be found in plenty of English words that come to us by direct borrowing or coining from Greek, or by words borrowed into Latin first and then into English.  A phantasm is something spooky that glows or gleams, like the phosphorescence over a swamp.  “That’s fantastic!” we say, and we’re not talking about ghosts, but about something bright and amazing.  We have our own Germanic cousins of that word, too.  The Dream of the Rood, an ancient and stunning poem about the Cross, calls it a beacen, that is, a beacon, like a light of salvation shining out over the dangerous waters of life.  And then there’s Celtic: if you’re ban in Ireland or Scotland, you’re a blond.  I was one too – till I was about four years old.  My hair’s going silver now, but that’s a different thing.