A strange thing happens. John the Baptist is out in the desert baptising people who have come to repent. And as they go down into the waters of the River Jordan, and come back up again, they are making a public statement - of two things: firstly, that they are ashamed of things they have done and secondly, that they want to set out on a new path and live in a different and better way.

And then lining up with all of these sad, shamed and repentant people, is Jesus, the man that we believe to be the son of God, the man that we believe to be completely free from sin, in other words the very last person on the face of the earth you would ever expect to come for baptism. He is not only lining up with people who know they have done shameful things, but is undergoing the humiliation of baptism out of a complete solidarity with them.

So what does this tell us? I think it's saying this: this man who is sinless himself is most at home in the company not of those who think they are good or worthy or deserving or pious, but in the company of those who know that they have done some pretty bad stuff.

And so it is that at that moment, as Jesus bows his head with the rest of sinful humanity, that all of a sudden the heavens open, the spotlights shine, and a voice from heaven tells us exactly who this Jesus is: here, in the lowest human experience, in the moment of repentance, God's beloved son is present.

Picture above: part of The Baptism of Christ, by David Zelenka, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

The word Epiphany comes from two Greek words: ‘epi’ meaning ‘upon’ and ‘phanos’ which is a light. So this is the time when we are invited to shine a light on Jesus, or in other words, to answer the critical question: “Who is he? Who is this child? Who is this man Jesus?”

The gospel reading for the Feast of Epiphany tells the story of the three Kings or Wise Men. In fact they were nearer to what we consider to be magicians, but they were wise enough to recognise the limitations of their craft. When they come to pay their respects to the baby Jesus in the manger, what they are doing is giving up, laying at his feet, the tools of their trade: gold, the symbol of secular power, myrrh, spices used to preserve a corpse, a symbol of the power to make something into what it no longer is, and frankincense a symbol of empty ritual and incantation.

So at Epiphany, the magicians, the secular finite powers, bow to the Son of God, giving up the tools of their trade. And why? Because there is nothing that magic has to fear more than true religion. True faith in God is not conned by myrrh, it is not impressed by the religiosity of frankincense and nor is it bought off with gold. True religion belongs somewhere else, it belongs to that which is meaningful, that which is eternal, and that which is infinite.

And how does this story shine a light on Jesus? It tells us that, though Jesus entered our world - his creation - at Christmas, he does not yield to its power. Of course there is much in this world that points us to God, yet the real God, the full & almighty God has been born in the baby Jesus. And we, with the magicians of the finite, can only bow down before him, and give up ourselves, to the one who will point to all that is beyond.

The picture shows the Three Kings arriving in Barcelona, January 2015.