God’s Shining Forth: A Reflection on Epiphany and Genesis 1.1-5

Yesterday was the great feast of Epiphany, which is celebrated on the thirteenth day after Christmas. It’s a feast with a strange and murky history, but I think it’s instructive for this whole midwinter season. It seems that Epiphany, which means ‘shining forth’, was originally a general midwinter feast that, at the darkest time of the year, celebrated the many ways God ‘shone forth’ in Christ. (In the East, it’s known as Theophany, more explicitly ‘God’s shining, or revelation’. But Christians found there was just too much to celebrate and so its different aspects — the three biggest being the birth of Jesus, the visitation of the Magi, and Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan, but there are more — got spun off into their own separate feasts. Christmas got spun off to December 25, which happened to be when Roman society was already celebrating a midwinter feast about a sacred birth, and in the West, the visitation of the Magi went to the feast of Epiphany itself and the Baptism of Jesus the following Sunday, and in the East, the visitation of the Magi went to December 25 with Christmas, and Epiphany was dedicated to the Baptism. All this is to say that this year, with Epiphany falling as close as it can to the Sunday after, it seems like a great opportunity to think about this festal season as a whole, about this whole thing of God shining forth in the darkness.

I’m apparently not alone in thinking this way, since today’s lectionary readings start with these words from Genesis:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1.1-4)

In the darkness, God calls out light. This is even more poignant in the Hebrew mindset than it is in ours. For, when we think about God speaking into the darkness of the void, we think of God speaking into the infinite nothingness of space. But for them, the darkness was not space but water, not nothing but a chaotic, unpredictable, disordered, and terrifying something. And light is God’s first step in bringing order into this chaos. There’s another interesting detail that stems from this primordial chaos: the text assumes that the light is already present, but it can’t do its job because it’s all muddled up with everything else. God doesn’t call light out of nothing, but separates it from the darkness, revealing light as light and allowing it to shine for the first time. And in doing so, the light also reveals the chaotic darkness for what it is for the first time.

As a reminder, this is not a scientific text, nor does it aim to be. This is myth, poetry, and theology. And by allowing it to be so, we allow it to do its job — to function like the light in these verses from Genesis, revealing what is good, true, and beautiful in the world and in our lives, and, by contrast, what is evil, false, and ugly in them. Because, no matter how dark and messy the world may seem — and these are very dark times — there is goodness in it. And, no matter how lily-pure our self-justification paints ourselves, the truth is that there is evil in us too, what our tradition calls ‘sin’. To accept this is not ‘self-flagellation’, but simply honesty. We are all battling the same struggles with ego, selfishness, acquisitiveness, scarcity, despair, and so on, as everyone else.

And, as Christians, we believe that this revealing work of God came into its fullness in and through Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth and ministry we celebrate during these dark Winter days around and after Epiphany. As John’s Gospel puts it:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.1-5)

Beyond the specific significations we place on any particular date, this is the true spirit of Epiphany: “The light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not” — has not, will not, cannot — “overcome it.”

All of this touches on how the theme of light is my favourite way of understanding the liturgical year: It begins with Advent, when we wait in the dark, then at Christmas light arrives. It shines out into all the world at and after Epiphany, then in Lent, we turn that divine light in on ourselves and allow it to reveal what is hidden — good and bad — within. Then at Easter, the light triumphs after its darkest moment, before it empowers us at Pentecost to bring God’s light — now our light — into the world through the rest of the year.

And that is ultimately what it’s all about. God sends the divine light into the world so that it might shine too. God gives us the divine light that we might shine too, with Christ’s light that becomes our light.

May these darkest days of the year be filled with light. May we never shy away from it, but embrace it, allow it to reveal what must be revealed, and be willing to shine out into our dark world, just as we remember God’s shining out this time of year.

Amen.