Epiphany is my favourite season of the Christian year. There is a richness to the season and some powerful themes emerging from the incarnation of the Word of God that the church is able to proclaim effectively in the public square.

The word ‘epiphany’, which we have adopted from the Greek language, means ‘revealing’ and ‘unveiling’. When we have an encounter with someone or something we call it a ‘manifestation’.

In the Western Church we most often associate the Epiphany with the story of the wise men, the Magi, arriving in Jerusalem to greet the young Christ-king. God is being ‘unveiled’, ‘made manifest’, to Gentiles from a land far away from Judea.

In the Eastern Church the Epiphany has a much wider story base. It’s as much about the revealing of the Son of God at his baptism at the hands of John the Baptist, and also the wedding at Cana in Galilee where Jesus is declared as having ‘first manifested his glory’.

In Epiphany we relate the evident unity of the whole of humanity through our shared experience across the globe to the call for peace and justice and the equity of all nations. This is why the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is in the season of Epiphany. This is why we preach about and pray for the missionary task of the church which ultimately is about bring humanity together as one in all its diversity. This is why it’s a good opportunity in Epiphany to pray regularly for the church’s interfaith work and also for our local colleagues who lead the other faiths in their many responsibilities.

There are some lovely Epiphany hymns that we can recall. One is by Christopher Wordsworth who draws the baptism and the wedding at Cana into our Epiphany orbit:

Manifest at Jordan’s stream,
Prophet, Priest, and king supreme;
And at Cana wedding-guest
In thy Godhead manifest.

The early Victorian hymn writer James Montgomery captured the universal dimension of Epiphany in some of the word from his carol, Angels from the Realms of Glory:

Though an infant now we view him,
He shall fill his Father's throne,
Gather all the nations to him,
Every knee shall then bow down:

This sums up the Epiphany vision that we will enter into on the twelfth day after Christmas and which will continue to root our worship right up until the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on 2nd February. We have an opportunity with all the troubles the world faces at this time to make the universal vision of Epiphany meaningful for ourselves and our communities.

The Very Revd Peter Robinson
The Dean of Derby