“Please stop Christmas from leaving,” my toddler pled as each box of Christmas was sent back to its post-season resting place. Despite our best protests, the Christmas season as most of us know it has drawn to a close. All the preparations and fanfare of Christmas fade into the calendar of another year.

But the church calendar, which quietly honors another rhythm within the time-crunching world around us, offers the strange suggestion that we actually can stop Christmas from leaving. Six days into our new calendars, after trees have come down, lights are put away, and the ambiance of Christmas has dimmed to a faint afterthought, Epiphany is celebrated. Hardly dim in significance, the feast of Epiphany commemorates all of the peculiar events that first revealed the identity of Jesus in the world: the magi’s adoration of the Christ child, the manifestation of Christ at his baptism, the first miracle at the wedding in Cana, among others.

The arrival of the magi to the birthplace of Jesus was the first of many windows into the identity of the child born to Mary and Joseph. “After [the magi] had heard [Herod] the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route” (Matthew 2:9-12). As it had been foretold, nations came to his light and kings to the brightness of his dawn; they brought gold and frankincense and worshiped him.(1) A new mystery was revealed in Jesus, and the story continued to unfold before the world.

The Christian story on the feast of Epiphany is that this birth changes every ordinary aspect of life and death. We are a world with whom God is profoundly communicating. Like those who first journeyed to set their eyes on the child, we are invited to participate in a story that takes us beyond ourselves, even as it requires us to die to ourselves. But in so doing, Christ himself transforms our lives and our deaths, breathing something new where death stings and tears flow.

Jesus appeared on the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for 400 years. Into this wordless void, God not only spoke, but revealed the Word of God in the vicarious human standing beside us, crying with us, leading us home. Epiphany, like the birth of God itself, reminds us that into our ordinary days Epiphany comes, so that even death cannot stop a life shared with a God who becomes one of us. Because of this Christ, there was a first Epiphany and there will be more to come.

“No, please not the manger scene!” my son cried as I packed the last of the Christmas decorations. To his delight, I handed him back the box and immediately his eager fingers went about positioning the figures back in their respective places, each one lined up to get a glimpse of Jesus. The good news of the Christian telling of Christmas is that Christmas indeed will never leave us.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) cf. Isaiah 60:3, 6.

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