Memorial of St. John Neumann, Bishop
A friend of mine used to get a serious case of the Christmas blues. January 2 brought on the hardest time of the year, as she considered New Years the end of “the holidays.” A few Januarys ago she decided to stop fighting it and, as she put it, allow the season to fade away naturally. Try as she might, she couldn’t shake it. Christmas (for her anyway) was over and in the midwest all we had to look forward to were months of the chill and ice and the dread of winter.
Using the traditions of the 12 Days of Christmas helped her for a time. A practicing Catholic, she seemed unaware that our Christmas season, since the liturgical reforms of the 1960s, ends at the Baptism of the Lord (on January 11 in 2026). So not only Christmas but Epiphany, too, was longer than she understood.
Epiphanymas! All this week, the Gospels focus on various epiphanies. Today, we hear of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and his on-going message of the “Kingdom of Heaven.” Matthew tells us that, after his Baptism in the Jordan and Temptation in the Desert, Jesus left Nazareth and made Capernaum, a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee, his base. Thus he targeted the very land, originally given by Joshua to the tribes of Zebuulun and Naphtali, as the place to begin reversing the tragedies of Israel’s history by restoring the 12 tribes in the New Covenant. To the far north, lost tribes Zebuulun & Naphtali, were the first tribes to be ravaged and hauled away by the Assyrian invasions in 732 B.C.E. (2 Kings 15:29).
Isaiah 9:1-2 foretells a “latter time” when God will restore to Galilee what had been lost. The region will see a “great light,” — the epiphanic light of Jesus Christ. Epiphany means “manifestation.” An epiphany is a manifestation because it signifies a sudden revelation, or "making known," of a truth, a spiritual reality, or a divine presence. It's used to describe events like the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Jesus, or the miracle at Cana, where Jesus is revealed to the world, a moment of sudden, often profound, insight or realization that changes one's perspective, changes one’s life.
Christmas blues? How are we keeping Epiphanymas?
-Timothy J. Cronin