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Epiphany
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It seems to me that we live in a world that gets more full of owls every day — people who haven’t exactly got Brain but Know Things. Long, long ago, 600 years before Christ, the Angel of the Lord told Daniel that, in the end times, ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased’ (12.4). And what a description of today that is, isn’t it? We scurry here, there and everywhere, and all the time, from dawn to dusk, we are bombarded with information — through papers, magazines, books, radio, television, and now through the Internet — and our knowledge is increased.
But is that knowledge the right sort of knowledge? Is there another kind of knowledge which we should be acquiring but aren’t — or are not acquiring at the rate we should be acquiring it? I refer to the knowledge of God.
Anyone who remembers their Penny Catechism — the 1898 Catechism of Christian Doctrine — will remember the following exchange ...
Q: Who made you?
A: God made me.
Q: Why did God make you?
A: God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.
God made me to know him. But do I? And how well?
My thoughts started heading in this direction when I read this passage from John’s gospel ...
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, “A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.’ Then John gave this testimony: ‘I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, “The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.’ (John 1.29-34).
I was struck by something that John the Baptist said to his followers that on the face of it was simply not true. His followers had never met Jesus, and pointing Jesus out to them now, John says, ‘I myself didn’t know him.’
But, you see, he did. John and Jesus were cousins. It is true that they lived about 50 miles from each other, but it is inconceivable that they had never met over their thirty or so years of life. It was, after all, John’s mother to whom Jesus’ mother had gone as soon as she knew she was pregnant. It was John’s mother who, in her pregnancy, had felt John leap in her womb as Mary arrived. It was John’s mother who burst into prophetic song about the child that Mary was to bear. Can we really believe that Mary never repeated the journey to Elizabeth’s home in the hill country of Judea, taking Jesus with her? Did Elizabeth never pay a return visit to Nazareth with young John? Were there never any family occasions when they all met up? At Joseph’s funeral for example?
No ... John knew Jesus and Jesus knew John. And we don’t need to speculate about it. Matthew’s gospel makes it clear. So why did John say that he didn’t know Jesus? The clue lies in the Greek. The word John uses for to know is eidenai — to know a truth — not gnonai — which is to know a person. William Temple says: ‘The Baptist had known the Lord in boyhood. No doubt he had in some measure learnt to appreciate him. But he had not known him for what he was.’
Quite right. And it was only as John baptised Jesus that he received a revelation — an epiphany — of who Jesus was — the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
I looked up the word epiphany in the dictionary. This is what I found ...
‘A revelatory manifestation of a divine being; A spiritual event in which the essential nature of something appears to the subject, as in a sudden flash of recognition; A revelation or experience of insight.’
‘Epiphany’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to show something to someone’. An epiphany is when God shows to us some fresh truth about himself as Father, Son or Spirit. And it was an epiphany when John the Baptist suddenly saw that his cousin Jesus was none other than the long-expected Messiah, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah who, as a sacrificial lamb, would take upon himself and carry away the sins of the world.
There are many other epiphanies in Scripture. It was an epiphany when Mary held up her new-born son to the magi who entered her house in Bethlehem with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. It says ‘they worshipped him’. Why would they worship a peasant boy? Because, in a flash of recognition, they saw God within the peasant boy — they were shown his essential nature, his divinity. They had a revelation of the truth about him.
It was an epiphany when Simeon looked on the same baby and said to God in words familiar to many from the Nunc Dimittis: ‘My eyes have seen your salvation’.
It was an epiphany when Jesus asked his disciples who they thought he was and Peter blurted out: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ Jesus said as much. ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my father in heaven.’
It was an epiphany when Jesus appeared to Thomas and showed him the nail marks in his hands and the hole in his side. Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’
It was an epiphany when, on the road to Damascus, a light above the brightness of the sun shone on Saul and knocked him from his horse, and a voice from heaven told him, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.’
But it is equally an epiphany when you or I discover something new about God. I don’t mean when we learn another fact about him of the sort that might be useful in a Bible quiz. I mean when God reveals to us some fresh truth about himself that becomes part of our personal experience.
Scripture is full of names for God. There are scores of them! Abba, the One who is Able, the Last Adam, Adonay, the Advocate, the Almighty, the Alpha and the Omega, the Amen, the Ancient of Days, the Angel of the Lord, the Anointed One. I could go on and on.
But as I was musing on the subject of this talk, it struck me that every name of God reflects an epiphany. Simeon calls Jesus ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’ and ‘the glory of Israel’ as the result of an epiphany. John calls Jesus ‘the Lamb of God’ as the result of an epiphany. Peter calls him ‘the Christ’ as the result of an epiphany. Thomas calls him ‘my Lord and my God’ as the result of an epiphany.
And Paul ... well, Paul has more names for God than I can count. And they too are the results of epiphanies. When Paul calls Jesus ‘the Power of God’ it is because that is what he has discovered Jesus to be. Put Jesus in people’s lives and amazing things happen. When he calls Jesus ‘the Wisdom of God’ it is because he has seen how Jesus turns unlearned and ignorant people into people of great understanding and insight. When he calls God ‘the Father of Compassion and the God of all comfort’ it is because that is what, in his adversities, he has discovered God to be. When he calls God ‘He who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine’ it is because he has found God to be that sort of God in his own personal experience.
Maybe we thought epiphany was only about a revelation to wise men and a revelation to John the Baptist. It is not. Without a personal epiphany there is no such thing as a Christian. Heart knowledge of God and of his Son Jesus Christ and of his Holy Spirit only comes about as God shows himself to us. We may not think of it as a showing. We may think of it as our discovery, but a showing it is. And our personal epiphany is meant to be a them rather than an it. It’s not meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Our Christian life is meant to be a succession of epiphanies through which we grow in our knowledge of the Lord.
Zophar, one of Job’s comforters, asks Job: ‘Can you by searching, find out God’. The answer is no. We can only find out God — acquire heart knowledge of him — if he reveals himself to us. We can only find out God through epiphanies.
But it seems that the more we search, the more we hunger, the more we ask, the more epiphanies we get. ‘Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened’. God is not reluctant to reveal himself to us. Through Jeremiah, he looked forward to the day when ‘my people will all know me from the least to the greatest’ (31.34). But he rarely reveals himself more to those who have locked up their hearts and minds. Those who’ve put their spiritual feet up, and settled down to snooze contentedly in whatever knowledge they already have of God.
In Philippians 3.10, almost at the end of his life, Paul makes one of the most staggering, startling statements you will find in all of scripture. He says ‘I want to know Christ’. Can you believe it? Paul — the great apostle — the one who has almost single-handedly established the church from one end of the Roman empire to the other — the one who has eaten, slept, drunk and lived Christ for the last 30 years — sits in his prison cell awaiting execution and says, ‘Oh, I do so want to know Christ!’ Had he gone out of his mind? No, not at all. He meant that, as he himself had once written, ‘now I know in part’. I do know Christ, but there is so much more of him to know. And I will not be satisfied with the knowledge I have. I want another epiphany ... and another ... and another.
That is where each of us should be. Knowing the Lord, but knowing that we don’t know him, and wanting to know him more. Wanting another epiphany ... and another .... and another. May God grant them to us.
