The Roman Liturgy: Epiphany as the Manifestation of Christ’s Kingship
“This day is the Church joined unto the Heavenly Bridegroom.”
Epiphany – The Feast
The ordering of the Roman liturgical books might lead us to think of the year as starting with Advent and leading into Christmastide, a season lasting for the twelve days until Epiphany.
Following Epiphany, according to this view, we enter into a sort of “waiting-game” – broken up by Candlemas – until the great paschal cycle starts with Septuagesima.
In this paradigm, Epiphany appears as little more than a feast marking the end of Christmas, and inaugurating a period of “ordinary time.”
We can see why, perhaps, the reformers renamed the Sundays after Epiphany just that: “ordinary time.”
However, some liturgical writers see almost every detail here in a different (and much more interesting) way.
The Roman Liturgy – An ongoing series of standalone pieces about the liturgical texts, hope and the crisis in the Church
Septuagesima I: The Beginning of the Liturgical Year?
Septuagesima II: The Babylonian Captivity and the Crisis in the Church
Lent I: The Protection of God
Lent II: “What Think You of Christ?”
Lent III: Laetare Sunday and the Church
Passiontide I: The Silence of Passiontide
Christ the King: “Are you a King, then?” – Christendom and the Social Kingship of Christ
Advent I: The Advent Liturgy and the Apocalypse
Advent II: The Close Presence of Christ in Advent
Advent III: Advent and the Preparation for Victory
Christmas and Christ’s Triumph over Darkness
Epiphany as the Manifestation of Christ’s Kingship
Epiphanytide: Ordinary Time or our Entrance into Eternity?
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Advent and Christmas
We have already seen that in Advent’s liturgical texts, the Church calls again and again for her Lord to come to us. She promises her children that he is very close to them, and that he will arrive in glory, without delay – and that this anticipation inculcates a hope which should make us strong in the face of the ecclesiastical and civil chaos of our time.
The excitement and restlessness at his coming only increases as Advent progresses, especially on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day itself (and the following days), the Church’s liturgy declares war on the powers of darkness, and portrays Christ’s incarnation as the fulfilment of time, the inauguration of the messianic Kingdom – and may be seen to commemorate his final coming as well as his first.
Where does this leave Epiphany?
According to the writers which we have been considering in this series, the Epiphany is not merely a feast to mark the end of Christmas, and Epiphanytide is not just passing of the time until Septuagesima. Rather, they are a really very significant feast and season in themselves.
Indeed, they argue, this feast is much more significant than is commonly considered – it is the culmination of the annual liturgical cycle. In this, it also commemorates the final culmination of time, and the beginning of eternity.
What is an epiphany?
The word “epiphany” means an appearance or a manifestation.
The feast is popularly associated with the coming of the Magi to the Christ-Child, representing his manifestation to the gentiles. This is indeed a key focus of some of the Mass texts.
The Byzantine Epiphany liturgy famously focuses also on Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan, and the Wedding at Cana. But in fact, the Roman rite does not neglect these events in its liturgical texts either.[1]
These three events are deeply rooted in the history of the feast. For example, Dom Prosper Guéranger tells us that, in pagan Rome, the sixth of January “was devoted to the celebration of a triple triumph of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire” – and that the Church wished to substitute a triple triumph of Christ in its place.[2]
In each of the three mentioned events, the Lord manifests his glory. This glory is manifested in the adoration of the Magi; in the testimony of God the Father at the River Jordan; and St John himself says of the Wedding of Cana, “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.” (John 2.11)
But the liturgical texts of the feast suggest that the Church is using these manifestations to point to something else – something in which Christ’s real and full glory is definitively revealed.
This leads us to the same question we have been considering throughout: What exactly are we commemorating and celebrating in these feasts?
To answer this, we could consider some further implications of the word “epiphany.”
The liturgical writer Fr Johannes Pinsk suggests that in later Roman and Byzantine times, the phrase “epiphany of the Lord” referred specifically to the visit of the Roman Emperor to the cities and provinces of the Empire – accompanied by festivities, ceremonies and the granting of honours to his subjects.[3]
Pinsk sees it as striking that the primitive Church could have had such confidence, and pretensions to universal domination, that she could use this word in reference to Christ’s manifestation.
Perhaps it is in this light that we can make sense of what the Church presents to us in her liturgy.
The liturgical texts
The Introit of the Mass declares:
Behold, the Lord and Ruler is come; and the kingdom is in His hand, and power, and dominion.
V. O God, with Your judgment endow the King, and with Your justice, the King’s Son.
Certainly Christ’s glory is truly manifested in his humility as a child, but this text does suggest that the Church has more in mind than just Christ’s historical manifestation to the Magi.
Similarly, the reading from the Mass, taken from the Prophet Isaias, is clearly applied not just to Jerusalem, nor to the coming of the Magi, but also to the Church, which is the new Jerusalem:
Rise up in splendor, O Jerusalem! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you. See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; but upon you the Lord shines, and over you appears His glory. Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance.
This “epistle” (or rather, prophecy), Pinsk points out, is filled with “a concatenation of political formulations and conceptions”, and he concludes from this that the Epiphany “is the true feast of the kingship of Christ”:
“This feast aims not so much at a representation of virtues and pious exhortations as rather at a portrayal of the great triumph awaiting God’s politic in the ultimate structuring of the world.”[4]
The Mass texts are suffused with the language of light – not just of the Star guiding the Magi, but the light of Christ enlightening the world. For example, the Gradual reads:
Rise up in splendor, O Jerusalem, for the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
The Preface reads:
[W]hen Thine only begotten Son showed Himself in the substance of our mortal nature, He restored us by the new light of His own immortality.
Pinsk sums all this up, presenting Christ’s sovereignty over the world as an unstoppable force:
“He is in fact Lord of the world. The magi from the East do homage to him on behalf of the gentiles. The fact that his own people know him from the testimony of the prophets and are aware of his existence yet allow him to be persecuted by the earthly royal ruler who seeks to kill him – all this cannot stay the triumphal progress of the true King of Israel.”[5]
All this suggests that the feast is celebrating something more permanent than just Christ’s historical manifestation to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi – and indeed something more than any one individual manifestation of his glory.
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In fact, while Epiphany’s Benedictus and Magnificat Antiphons both refer to all three events – the former seems to point beyond the historical manifestations, to something permanent, present and eternal:
This day is the Church joined unto the Heavenly Bridegroom, since Christ hath washed away her sins in Jordan; the wise men hasten with gifts to the marriage supper of the King; and they that sit at meat together make merry with water turned into wine. Alleluia.[6]
In other words, the present celebration of past events is a witness to the future reality. In each of these three manifestations, we see that for which we longed in Advent – the second coming of Christ. Pinsk writes of the three manifestations of Christ’s glory:
“[I]n each of these events, something of the Lord’s Parousia is reflected. In celebrating them, the liturgy celebrates in a certain way, in anticipation, the glorious advent of Christ, just as in the Supper, Jesus accomplished, also in anticipation, his redemptive death on the cross.
“This is why Epiphany is the feast of the Church’s triumph through all the vicissitudes of her pilgrimage on earth.”
The Bridegroom and the Bride, and the eternal marriage feast
Unlike the visit of an earthly emperor, the Epiphany and Parousia of Christ are not passing occurrences – they are permanent, eternal realities, representing Christ’s definitive taking of the Church to himself as his Bride. Pinsk writes:
“It is properly Christ coming to take his Bride, the Church. It is once again the anticipated celebration of the marriage of the Lamb.”
This is expressed clearly in St Augustine’s Tractate on the Wedding at Cana, parts of which are read at Matins on the Second Sunday After Epiphany, which expresses the different ways in which Christ and the Church are united as Bridegroom and Bride. In the wider tractate, St Augustine writes:
“For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, You have kept the good wine until now, represented the person of the Lord. For the good wine — namely, the gospel — Christ has kept until now. […]
“Now, if Christ cleave to the Church, so that the two should be one flesh, in what manner did He leave His Father and His mother? He left His Father in this sense, that when He was in the form of God, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, taking to Him the form of a servant. (Philippians 2:6).
“In this sense He left His Father, not that He forsook or departed from His Father, but that He did not appear unto men in that form in which He was equal with the Father.
“But how did He leave His mother? By leaving the synagogue of the Jews, of which, after the flesh, He was born, and by cleaving to the Church which He has gathered out of all nations. […]
“[W]e are now permitted to seek Christ everywhere, and to drink wine from all the water-pots. Adam sleeps, that Eve may be formed; Christ dies, that the Church may be formed. When Adam sleeps, Eve is formed from his side; when Christ is dead, the spear pierces His side, that the mysteries may flow forth whereby the Church is formed.”
In other words, the past events commemorated in the Epiphany liturgy point beyond themselves, “and become” (as Pinsk writes) “permanent symbols which express, each in its own way, the mystery of the wedding of Christ with his Church.”[7]
Pinsk tells us how:
“The gifts of the Magi are the gifts of this wedding.
“The baptism in the Jordan appears as the sacred nuptial bath – still in use among the Orientals – in which the humanity represented by the new Adam washes its stains.
“At Cana, Jesus himself is the bridegroom who serves the Church, his Bride, and the guests the wine of the new Life.”
Nor are these ideas the imaginative creations of recent liturgical writers. They represent the doctrine of the Roman liturgy as expressed in the Benedictus antiphon for the feast itself, which we have already seen. Here it is again, giving the same interpretation to the historical events commemorated:
“This day is the Church joined unto the Heavenly Bridegroom, since Christ hath washed away her sins in Jordan; the wise men hasten with gifts to the marriage supper of the King; and they that sit at meat together make merry with water turned into wine. Alleluia.”
Preliminary Conclusion
In light of all this, we can see that the Church uses the commemoration of these historic events to celebrate “the fulfilment of the Advent promises of the coming of the Lord in glory and power.” Pinsk continues:
“[Epiphany] brings together, in a single perspective, the promises and their fulfilment and brings them together in a single celebration from Advent to Epiphany. This is what gives the Christmas cycle its unique beauty.”
But where does this leave us with the Sundays after Epiphany? Do they represent a waiting period, of variable length, before Septuagesima and the Easter cycle? And what does all this tell us about the start of the liturgical year – and about the Septuagesima-Lent-Easter cycle itself?
These will be the subjects of the next piece.
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Further Reading:
Fr Henry James Coleridge – The Return of the King – Discourses on the Latter Days
Fr H.M. Féret OP – The Apocalypse of St John
Dom Prosper Guéranger – The Liturgical Year
Fr Johannes Pinsk – The Cycle of Christ
The Roman Liturgy – an ongoing series of standalone pieces about the liturgy, hope and the crisis in the Church
An ongoing series of standalone pieces about the Roman liturgy, hope and the crisis in the Church
Septuagesima I: The Beginning of the Liturgical Year?
Septuagesima II: The Babylonian Captivity and the Crisis in the Church
Lent I: The Protection of God
Lent II: “What Think You of Christ?”
Lent III: Laetare Sunday and the Church
Passiontide I: The Silence of Passiontide
Christ the King: “Are you a King, then?” – Christendom and the Social Kingship of Christ
Advent I: The Advent Liturgy and the Apocalypse
Advent II: The Close Presence of Christ in Advent
Advent III: Advent and the Preparation for Victory
Christmas and Christ’s Triumph over Darkness
Epiphany as the Manifestation of Christ’s Kingship
Epiphanytide: Ordinary Time or our Entrance into Eternity?
[1] For instance, the first two responsories at Matins refer to Christ’s Baptism, and the Benedictus and Magnifcat Antiphons designate the Baptism of the Lord and the Wedding at Cana as the objects of this feast.
[2] Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year Vol. III, ‘Christmas – Book II’, trans. Dom Laurence Shepherd, OSB., St Bonaventure Publications, 2000, p 108.
[3] This essay draws on the observations of Fr Johannes Pinsk (1891-1957). Fr Pinsk was involved with the twentieth century liturgical movement in ways that many readers would consider regrettable. However, his 1933 essay ‘The Coming of the Lord in the Liturgy’ has a wealth of interesting information about Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, which I would like to share. It also contains some things which traditional Catholics might not appreciate. My purpose here is to present what is good, along with some comments, and so to help us pass a profitable Christmastide. Johannes Pinsk, ‘The Coming of the Lord in the Liturgy’, from Liturgische Zeitschrift Jahrgang, 1932-33 and reproduced in the Bulletin Paroissial Liturgique n. 1, 1938. This version is a DeepL translation from the Spanish version reproduced in El Que Vuelve, Vortice, Buenos Aires 2018. Due to the difficulty of locating a physical copy of this text and giving correct page numbers, I will not clutter the text with references to it – all unreferenced texts from Pinsk come from this article.
[4] Johannes Pinsk, The Cycle of Christ, trans. Arthur Gibson, Desclee Company, New York, 1966, p 214
[5] Ibid, 211.
[6] Divinum Officium
[7] St Augustine, Tractate 9 on the Gospel of St John. Translated by John Gibb. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 7. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701009.htm>.