The Ordinariness of Epiphany

I was so eager! My first child was going to be born, baptized, introduced to the world as a child of the covenant; enter into this unknown world in flesh and blood. The expectation for what my child’s life would be like, whom she would marry, the books she would read, the songs she would sing; everything came to mind as she was being introduced into this new world. After her birth, people began to arrive with gifts—flowers, encouragement, prayer. Each person walked in with warmth and joy.

And as familiar as that experience is to parents and family members, so is the Epiphany Season. Epiphany marks the ordinary season of the church. And “ordinary” is not synonymous with unimportant. In fact, “ordinary” for the church is synonymous with “Watch and see what happens when Christ enters the world.”  A child changes things. It changes everything around the home. The gifts of the sages from the East came at a time when Mary was recovering. She knew who this child was. Her expectations for this little babe was a motherly expectation. Even though the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh came, the child was not going to be reared in a royal palace, but in an ordinary Jewish home. He would study learn and grow, and his appearance would be quite…ordinary.

Epiphany is an ordinary season. Though our Lord would live an extraordinary life, we must remember that his childhood, his appearance into the world as a child, his appearance to the Gentiles, was rather ordinary. He cried, slept a lot, and needed much attention like any other infant. Far from the ostentatious boastfulness of royal births, this little babe was introduced to the world and guests in the most ordinary of places and circumstances.

The ordinariness of Epiphany is a way of saying, “Look: a king is born in an ordinary  way!” So too, our lives are to be marked by a profound ordinariness. We enter this season expecting that the God/Man would ordinarily work in our lives through his means and fulfill in us what he promised to do as a Man on earth and even now as a Man in heaven.

Let us pray:

O God, deliver us from the evil of avoiding the ordinary and strengthen us to see that in the ordinary tasks of living, caring, sharing, growing, equipping and discipling, we are showing the world what it means to be followers of the Christ who became man, Amen.