After the hype of Christmas, many of us enter the new year with a bit of a post-party letdown. As a mom, I’ve often felt surprisingly sad while packing up the Christmas décor in our house (even though I can’t wait to vacuum the carpet under the tree). The celebration is over: the radio stations return to their usual tunes, the smell of fresh-baked cookies fades from our kitchens, the sparkly lights around town start to disappear. Now, we hunker down for the rest of winter.
In the last few years, Epiphany has become an important day for me. On January 6, when the twelve days of Christmas are over and my home returns to its pre-holiday normalcy, we celebrate the Magi’s arrival to worship Jesus. This may seem like a sneaky “bonus” day of Christmas—most modern nativities suggest the Magi stood next to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth—but the gospel of Matthew implies that these mysterious travelers did arrive on the scene until well after Jesus’ big birthday celebration.
For me, the Feast of Epiphany is a reminder that by the time the Magi found Jesus, he and his family were just doing the hum drum stuff of family life. The mundane matters too, and God is there. In other words, God’s glory doesn’t only manifest in skies full of angels, but also in ordinary homes after the party is over. In the unadorned house of a poor child, God reveals his glory to the nations.
As we settle into these dark winter months, Epiphany can shape our perspective in two ways. First, it blesses us with the promise that God’s light shines—not only in the moments or places we might think to look, but in the seemingly forgotten parts of our lives. Into our winter doldrums, our failed New Year’s resolutions, our anxious, ordinary days, Jesus comes. He is the gift we rarely expect and have never deserved.
The second way Epiphany changes us is in our posture toward others. Just as Jesus has shined on our least likely moments, he has come to “lighten the Gentiles”—to reveal himself to, and sometimes even through—the very people we tend to disqualify. Like foreign, pagan astrologers. Like poor, immigrant families. Like the infant child of an unwed mother. The unimportant and unseen places of the world are, in fact, precisely where we should be looking for him.
In the opening chapter of A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley laments, “Why did I walk through crowds of fellow beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the wise men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!” During Epiphany, we can learn to see by the light of the blessed Star, in whatever poor homes it shows us—beginning with our own.