A Real Epiphany

Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
-Isaiah 60:3

Hey friends. Happy New Year! I’m glad to be back to your inbox, and I hope the beautiful/exhausting/overwhelming/sacred holiday season held moments of real value for you. But now Jesus has been born. And once again we have to figure out what on earth we’re going to do with him.

On the church calendar, this past Tuesday was a day called “Epiphany.” It’s always on January 6th, and it is the day that commemorates the Magi coming from the east and recognizing Jesus as king. Magi were scholars who read the stars and advised their foreign kings. They were the first Gentiles (non-Jews) to experience the revelation of God in Jesus, and the first to respond faithfully to it. For most of us, they are our spiritual ancestors: the first outsiders to find the hope that God was bringing into the world through Jesus.

It’s not only about the Magi seeking, though. God was the one who revealed the star, who brought the curiosity, and who led them to Jesus. In many ways, Epiphany is the moment that God says, “This is who I really am, and I am for everyone in the world, not just a select few.”

For the Magi, encountering Jesus the King was the culminating moment of a major journey. It involved asking questions, reflecting, getting out of their comfort zone, and going on a long and unnerving trek across many lands. There was a leaving behind of comfort and autonomy, and entering a land that they were unfamiliar with, to see a child king that would change their very understanding of power and reality. You can bet that if they made a journey like that, they walked away changed forever. In fact, we can see the spiritual double meaning in Matthew 2:12: “They returned to their country by another way.” It wasn’t just that they were warned to avoid Herod. It was that after encountering Jesus, they could never return the same.

I find it amazing that the name of this holiday so deeply embodies our own journey as well. An epiphany, in common language, is a moment when all sorts of clues finally come together and we get an “aha” moment. We realize something, and it usually changes us. And while it often seems like it’s only a moment, it’s actually the culmination of a long, hard-won journey. It requires a peeling back of layers within ourselves, or looking at something in a new light, or asking difficult questions and wrestling with the implications.

You arrive at an epiphany. You release wrong assumptions and you put lots of things together, and you end up in a new place thinking, “Well, that’s what this whole thing has been about all along.”

That’s what it takes in our own lives (again and again) to experience the epiphany of Jesus, too. I’m finding that in the US right now, it’s often a particularly challenging journey—fraught with slow, hard nights and deep wrestling. To seek out Jesus as true king requires a willingness to move into some discomfort in order to leave some things behind, even without all the answers. We walk like the Magi, who left their familiar lands, drawn by God, even though they weren’t sure what they would find.

Pastor and author Brian Zahnd points out that some of the things that Epiphany calls us to leave behind are things that keep us comfortable and close to power. Lies that keep others beneath us. Lies about God and his kingdom that are particularly hard to let go:

“What are these lies? I can’t tell you. You love them too much. You have to see these lies as lies for yourself. But I can tell you what will happen when you see the lies… 
When you see the lies, you’ll no longer be at home in Babylon.”

That’s epiphany. I know I have a long way to go in leaving things behind and discovering the Epiphany of Jesus. But I do know, without a doubt, that I am no longer at home in Babylon. Most days I feel like a stranger in this country I was born in, not understanding how we can treat people with arrogance and hatred and cruelty and then talk like Jesus is on our side. What a lie. I need the humble king to be my light.

Thankfully, even wrong beliefs about God’s very character are things that we can let go of when the Epiphany of Jesus is revealed to us. When we finally realize that Jesus is exactly what God is like, that Jesus has always been what God is like, and that Jesus is what God will always be like—we arrive at a different sort of peace and begin a different sort of journey.

The epiphany of Jesus will always bring us toward genuine worship, deeper faith, more robust hope, and a consistent ethic of love. It’s not about knowledge or certainty. It’s the hope that God has come and God looks like Jesus, and God has come to bring good news to all—now and forever. That realization may indeed be the culmination of a great journey. But it’ll just be the beginning of an even greater one.

Jesus, bring us to new clarity as we follow you.

Peace,
Keith