Column: Pilgrim's Progress: Brian Morris: An Epiphany
A man once said to a workmate: ‘I’ve just had a most remarkable epiphany!’ His friend replied: ‘I had one once; but the wheel fell off!’
Today, we use ‘epiphany’ to describe the moment when we discover something which unexpectedly changes our perceptions; which, very often, takes us in a different direction, and can make us a better person. And it’s also a festival which the church celebrates twelve days after Christmas.
It’s traditionally associated with the visit of the wise men to Bethlehem. We don’t know who they were; it was some five or six centuries later that they became known as Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar, and even later before they were referred to as ‘kings’, and they only appear in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story.
According to Matthew, they were astrologers, possibly from modern day Iraq or Iran, who, in studying the stars, noted a new star – possibly a comet - that suggested a person of royal importance had been born. After following the ‘star’, they reached Jerusalem, and went to the royal palace of Herod, only to discover that no such birth had occurred. Herod’s advisors reminded him of the words of the prophet Micah, some eight centuries before, of a ruler to emerge from Bethlehem, and he passed the information to them.
And so they went to Bethlehem – six miles south of Jerusalem – and offered their gifts to a young child, whose family, because of the overcrowding at that time, had made a stable their temporary home. And, warned in a dream not to report back to Herod what they had discovered, they returned straight home.
Perhaps seeing something new, and having the courage to follow it, in ways that can change our lives, is the best Christmas present any of us could wish for!
Brian Morris
St John’s Church, Wakefield