Happy New Year! Happy Feast of the Epiphany!
I’d like to begin the new year by clearing up an important detail: we can all plan on a great year ahead, due to the fact that 2026 is an even number. And as we all know, even numbers are the best numbers. 2026 is unique in that it only has four factors: 1, 2, 1013, and 2026. This quality also makes it a semiprime number, which means that—besides 1 and itself—a number can only be factored by exactly two prime numbers (in this case, 2 and 1013). So, we can be ready for a one-of-a-kind year ahead of us, courtesy of the Lord, who created numbers.
Due to the print deadlines for the holidays, I’m writing this article a week before Christmas. So, I’m hoping and praying that, by the time you’re reading it, the intervening days will have included a white Christmas with snow on the ground and a wonderful New Year’s celebration for all. Since my first days as a priest down in Jackson, I’ve returned there each December 31 to ring in the New Year with friends and old colleagues. We have this tradition of everyone racing to eat twelve grapes within the first minute after midnight. Otherwise, we tease each other about enduring a year ahead of bad luck. It’s always fun—and especially funny—when someone among us doesn’t make the finish line. I’m actually looking this up now; Google tells me it’s a Spanish tradition from 1909, when they had an unusually plentiful grape harvest. Huh—learn something new every day.
This first Sunday of the New Year is always given over to the remembrance of the wise men from Scripture who came from the East to bring their gifts and their hearts of worship for the newborn King of the Jews. To me, the Feast of Epiphany is like a diamond in the rough. After all the beauty and luster and activity of Christmas and New Year, Epiphany can sometimes feel like a tired version of warmed-up leftovers—still good, but not the same as the feast. I’d invite us instead to take some time to polish and meditate on these mysteries. There’s still a lot of brilliance hidden underneath.
In Christianity, we say that the God of the universe is at the same time both transcendent and imminent. God is above and beyond all horizons of our minds, our hearts, and our human experiences. He has no equal; His Being transcends us in all manner. But God has chosen to unveil the mystery of His Being before us. He breaks into the understanding of our human knowledge and experience in ways we can comprehend and respond to. In other words, God has made Himself imminent to us, meaning unseparated from us. In the Epiphany, it is as if we stood on a beach gazing for millennia at the water’s horizon, and God, who was beyond its edge, sailed around the curvature into our view, eventually landing ashore at our very feet. He searched out Mary and Joseph. He searched out the shepherds. He searched out the wise men—those who gazed into the horizon of the heavens for the answer to all life’s longings.
We hear it spoken and see it written in our own day: “Wise men still seek Him.” Those who grow wise seek God because they read the horizons of their own lives and realize that the heart of God has been breaking over the edge and pursuing their shoreline the whole time.
Fr. Brian