The Baptism of Christ and Epiphany

Sermon

The Baptism of Christ and Epiphany

7 January 2024

The Reverend Dr Matthew Bullimore, Chaplain, Corpus Christi College Cambridge

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

Epiphanies are usually positive – those Eureka moments. But, as I know and I’m sure you do, an epiphany can be less happy, a surprising revelation of something unwanted or darker.

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Christ – which is a moment beautiful and profound at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is declared to be the divine Son of the Father, the beloved. The Spirit rests upon him, his divine friend. The waters of baptism are hallowed, made ready for us, that we who pass through them may be adopted as children, beloved children.

It is a happy day, a new revelation of God’s love, the love of Father, Son and Spirit flowing out into the world, flowing around us.

But the epiphany comes in a dark world, the light shines in the darkness. It will not be so long before Jesus speaks of a baptism of fire which he must endure. And St Paul will remind us that our baptism, whilst a baptism of resurrection, is also a baptism into Jesus’ death.

All of our epiphany stories have this edge to them. They speak of joy, of light. They reveal ever more brightly the light that is coming into the world. But yet they are lights shining in a darkness. The Magi come with the gift of myrrh that speaks of a death. Their naivety stirs a tyrant, and Mary, Jospeh and the Christ child become refugees fleeing infanticide.

Even the Wedding at Cana, another great Epiphany moment, with all the celebration, the excess, the wine, the glory, will find itself sullied and obscured by the darkness. The divine Bridegroom will be jilted, abandoned. Given sour wine to slake his thirst. Made to drink of a cup of suffering. The light is shining in a darkness that seeks to extinguish it.

Some might say we need the darkness for their to be the light. How can light shine but in darkness? But this is not the way of Epiphany. Light can shine in the light, glory can be added to glory. There is nothing necessary about the darkness or the gloom.

The darkness is an intrusion on the light, not the other way round. Light is the first thing created. Darkness is what obscures it.

Perhaps, though, we do tend to think of Epiphany as the light coming to shine in a dark world. It is the rescue mission from all that besets us. The people who walked in darkness see a great light, the ones who lived in deep darkness on them the light has shined. And this is true to an extent. The light of Christ does now shine in a darkened world.

But the darkness is an intrusion on the light. The light shines in the beginning of creation. Darkness is given a place, a proper place, it belongs to the night, a time for rest and sleep and recreation. And the light is good. The world is good. It is illuminated by the light of the world, right from the beginning.

But darkness impinges. It is unmoored from its rightful place. It takes on new forms in pride, hatred, fear, misery, violence. And the light of Christ comes to dispel that darkness.

But that shining of the light cannot only be a rescue from darkness. It is a recreation. It is the truth of things shining out again anew, shining up through the cracks, breaking out once more to flood the world.

The world’s light is reflected. Just like the moon reflects the light of the sun, so the world shines with the light of God’s Son. Shines from the beginning, and now shining again, shining anew

The world is a place of light, of goodness, of joy. It is a place of novelty, imagination, surprise. It always was. A place of creation and diversity. A world that was made to praise its creator and share in his light and life.

And now Jesus irrupts from within the world. He is a creature, a man, flesh and blood, dust of the earth, but also God the Son, the Light itself. In Jesus the creation is personally united to its creator. He is not a reflection of the light, he is the Light of the world, walking among us, sharing our life. This is a new Epihany.

Jesus recalls us to the fact that the world always was an epiphany. It always has been. And now the surprise, the novelty, is that the Light dwells amongst us.

During Epiphany we are recalled to the very nature of the world, an expression of God’s loving creation. A wondrous theatre of light and life. And it lets us see the world as it is, newly created in Jesus.

As Jesus goes down into the water of baptism and rises again, the Spirit resting on him, the Father declaring his love, we are invited into a new world. One constituted by light and love. We are invited to be taken up into the very life of God. We are asked to shine with his light for others.

And this invitation happens in a dark and forbidding world. So this is an invitation to keep faith, to look at the world anew, to search for the light coming through the cracks, to let ourselves shine with his light.

God knows, the world is a dark place at the moment. But the light that bathed the world in the beginning now shines amongst us. It shines in the darkness. We are drawn into the light and asked to remain steadfast. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 

Amen.