John
Dear Friends in Christ,
A few final Christmas greetings may still be straggling in, but it is unlikely this week’s mail brought you any specially designated cards wishing you a merry Epiphany. Even though it is the famed “Twelfth Day of Christmas” (always falling on January 6), we generally don’t make a big deal out of Epiphany. Truth be told, it’s probably not even in most people’s consciousness when they offer up the generic phrase “Happy holidays.”
Yet there was a time in the church’s history when “The Festival of the Epiphany” was a bigger holiday than Christmas. And, we might add, for some pretty legitimate reasons.
Why? The name itself comes from a Greek word which means “manifestation” or “showing forth” and has to do with revealing something important. Whether outwardly celebrated or downplayed, Epiphany has always been that special day the Church historically sets aside to reflect upon two great critical truths of the Christian faith. The first: Jesus Christ is nothing less than almighty God. The second: Jesus came to be the Savior not of a particular nation or ethnic group, but of the world.
Both of these Epiphany truths come through loud and clear in our Gospel lesson for today. The fact that Jesus is worshiped indicates that He is more than just a cute baby; He is the Savior-God who condescended to break into our time and space. The fact that those who worshiped Him came from a distant land indicates that He is the Savior-God for all people regardless of their background or ethnicity.
This double message of Epiphany and what it means to us personally is concisely stated by Jesus in our text. In fact, we could rightly describe these words as being
JESUS’ EPIPHANY MESSAGE TO US
consisting of
1. A declaration 2.
A guarantee 3. A desired response
Our text takes us to a conversation Jesus is having with a group of people, many of whom were religious leaders and most of whom were becoming increasingly irritated at the message Jesus was preaching. What Jesus says next was only going to add fuel to the fire of their distaste for Him. It was statements like this that eventually pushed them over the edge in their hatred toward Him and led, humanly speaking, to the crucifixion.
“When Jesus spoke again to the people, He said, ‘I am the light of the world.’” This is one of seven declarations Jesus makes in the Gospel of John that begin with the two words: I am. Each statement is followed by some great word picture or description.
However the primary significance of each “I am” statement is the declaration Jesus is making about Himself. Whenever Jesus begins with these two little words He is matter-of-factly saying that He is God – which is the first great truth of the Epiphany message.
This insight would have been picked up immediately by those
who were listening to Him at the time; those who had Old Testament ears. It takes us back to the Book of Exodus. Do you recall God’s description of Himself
when He appeared to Moses in the burning bush?
When Moses asked God what His name was, God answered, “I am
who I am.” In Hebrew letters
this is the basis for our word “Jehovah.”
The point being that here and all the other places Jesus is making it perfectly clear that He is not just some upstart rabbi with new ideas and clever phrases; He was and is the great “I Am” – God Himself made flesh. He is “Immanuel” – God with us. So we are confronted once again with this amazing truth: God actually walked among us 2000 years ago. With His words He declared this; with His miracles He proved it.
And the reason He came was to provide the world with light. “I am the light of the world” Jesus says. This is a very appropriate description. After all, what does light do? It illuminates an area. It chases away darkness. It allows us to see clearly…
In a spiritual sense, this is exactly what Jesus is all about. He came first and foremost to set us free from the darkness of sin and unbelief. He came to conquer the Prince of Darkness, Satan, and by His death on the cross rendered him powerless. Satan can tempt us and he can annoy us, but he can’t claim us as his own. Because we are children of the light. This is the guarantee our Savior gives us: “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
Think of what this means to us personally. We don’t walk in “darkness” but have “the light of life.” Through the work of the Holy Spirit, who, as we confess in our creeds, “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” we have been illuminated so we don’t stumble around in the darkness of despair but bask in the light of the truth.
But that cannot be said of everybody. This past year a movie/documentary came out with the title “Supersize Me.” It had to do with a guy who wanted to see (and record) what would happen to his body if every meal he ate for a month came from a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. If you surmise the experiment didn’t end all that well, you’d be correct.
I mention this because of one very revealing scene. In an attempt to show how far reaching this chain was in its advertising efforts, the producer gathered a group of kindergarten students from a local school. He showed them three pictures and asked each child if he or she recognized them. The first was George Washington. Some knew who it was. The second was Jesus Christ. None (maybe one) knew who it was. The third was Ronald McDonald. Everyone knew who it was.
What conclusion can we draw from this? There are many who walk in darkness. Maybe you know some of them. Maybe you work with some of them. There are those who will exhaust themselves looking for fulfillment and answers in all kinds of toys and diversions and causes, but at the end of the day they face what always comes at the end of the day: an intense emptiness and loneliness.
We who have been delivered from such darkness must pray fervently that the light of Christ will shine on them as it has on us. Because Jesus is not our private light. He is “the light of the world.” This is the second great emphasis of the Epiphany message…
Therefore, we must ever be mission minded. We must work hard so those who walk in darkness will be exposed to the light of Christ through our personal witness and our support of mission work. As a congregation and a church body we must look for new and creative ways to carry out the Great Commission. And doing this all in a state of extreme gratefulness that we are not counted among those who still walk in darkness.
So the personal application of the Epiphany message is this: We have seen the light. We know Jesus is the Son of God, our Savior. We are His followers. By the grace of God we are the ones who possess “the light of life” – fulfilled life in the present and eternal life forevermore. This is Jesus Epiphany guarantee to us.
“Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
Let us now take up this question: What does it mean to follow Jesus? Volumes have been written on this subject. But in a nutshell, this is what Scripture tells us:
In its most fundamental sense to “follow” Jesus means to believe He is the very Son of God He claimed to be and to trust Him as our Savior from sin. This means recognizing our unflattering natural condition – sinful – and our greatest need – forgiveness. And this is our greatest need. At the moment of our death everything else we attach importance to on this earth – family, food, shelter, livelihood, etc. – will slip away and be meaningless. Everything except the forgiveness of our sins.
Therefore to follow Jesus means first and foremost to understand and embrace through faith the Gospel message. It means to recognize the need for and rejoice in the execution of God’s plan of salvation whereby He punished His Son for our sins.
Such recognition leads to a response. And the natural response is love. It is generally not difficult to love someone who has done a great deal for us; and no one has done more for us than Jesus. Loving Jesus translates into living to His glory and honor. It means gladly and willingly doing what He asks of us in His Word, because this is some small way in which we can demonstrate our love.
In other words, living our lives for Christ is not a command
to be followed grudgingly; it is a life style that is willingly embraced. Being Christian – followers of Christ – is
not something we do. It is something we
are. The doing flows naturally from the being.
To follow Jesus means to be His disciple. A disciple is one who sits at a Master
Teacher’s feet, learns from him, and then applies what is learned to one’s own
life. To be a disciple of Jesus, then,
means to actively and thoroughly acquaint ourselves with His Word. It means being a student. It means taking seriously Jesus’ statement
from His Sermon on the Mount: “Seek
first his kingdom and His righteousness…”
Not that discipleship will always be easy. In fact, it is often hard. Jesus once told us that if the world had
issues with Him, it will also have issues with us. He told us that the path of true discipleship
involves self-denial and cross-bearing. To
be a Christian often means to be misunderstood, misinterpreted and
dismissed. The Apostle Paul tells us
that we must “through much tribulation” enter the
Consequently, if we take our Christianity seriously we will find ourselves in conflict with much of what’s happening in the world. Ask the Christian college student who finds himself or herself swimming against the moral tide at a secular university. Ask the worker who is labeled because of his or her unwillingness to “bend the rules” or “get creative” to pad the bottom line. To be a follower of Christ in a world that doesn’t really know Him or care for Him is a recipe for conflict – or at best, misunderstanding.
Despite all that, to follow Jesus means joy. Joy is the mark of the early Christians we read about in the Book of Acts. Joy is the emotion that resounds from the Apostle Paul to the Philippians – even though he wrote this letter from prison not knowing whether he would live or die. And joy is what wells up in the heart of every believer as we simply contemplate the Epiphany message.
However, if we are truthful we will admit to not always reflecting that joy. Why is this? Perhaps because we let too many other things get in the way. Too often we see the temporal with its problems and setbacks as eternal and the eternal (meaning the glory that awaits us in heaven) as being essentially irrelevant to life.
The atheist German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once leveled this rather stinging indictment on the Christians of his day: “I would believe in their salvation if they looked a little more like a saved people.” An interesting observation – and one which asks us to look at the reflection of Christ that we are giving before a watching world.
But joylessness is a malady that can and will quickly change if we simply focus on the things that really matter. And what really matters is Jesus Christ, the light of the world, and our relationship with Him. Maybe that sounds simplistic, but it is the solution that our Savior offered the people of His day. And it is just as relevant for us today as it was for them back then…
Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. That is His Epiphany declaration to us today. Knowing Him means we will never walk in darkness but have the light of life. That is His Epiphany guarantee to us. Following Him ever more deeply and closely, that is the Epiphany response Jesus desires in us.
So let me end with a wish that may have been better understood centuries ago when the message of this day took preeminence even over Christmas. It may sound strange, but considering the emphasis of this day and how applies to each of us, it works if you think it through. Have a merry Epiphany. Amen.