In her short story Revelation, Flannery O’Connor writes of the great judgment:
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. … A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swing bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives.
Mrs. Turpin experienced an epiphany, what one writer calls “a sudden ‘seeing into the heart’ of a situation,” that often becomes “a moment of special intensity.”
Bill Leonard
Another insists: “The literary works of Flannery O’Connor often contend that religious belief can only be consummated by direct confrontation with evil, and for those uncommitted and unprepared, tragedy seems inevitable. For O’Connor’s religious ‘pretenders,’ a moment of religious grace — a revelation of Truth — often does come, but at a devastating price.”
In many of O’Connor’s stories, the central characters “experience a deep epiphany after being spiritually challenged by the darker side of human nature.” Such an epiphanic moment (I love that phrase) one commentator says, “refers to a moment in a story (whether narrative or drama) in which something suddenly becomes clear,” and “which in turn causes past events to appear in a significantly new light.”
An epiphany is what the Persian astrologers were said to have experienced when they found their way to Jesus after following “his star in the east,” perhaps Jupiter and Saturn in configuration. The Feast of Epiphany, first referenced in 361 A.D., in the Eastern Roman empire, refers to Jan. 6 as the date of the visit of the astrologers. For those Christians, the visitation was epiphanic because it revealed their recognized “manifestation” heralding an act of God in the world. Many Christians, especially in the Eastern Church, also find such epiphanic moments in Jesus’ baptism, and in the miracle at Cana of Galilee.
“Some of us get clowns for our kids’ birthdays. Jesus got magicians; we call them magi.”
These days, we Christians should tone down our collective arrogance about the primal orthodoxy of our old, old story. The early church paid considerable introductory attention to astrological signs, even using them to validate the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ of God. The church’s epiphanic tradition suggests Jesus is barely out of Mary’s belly when things started to get a little weird. Some of us get clowns for our kids’ birthdays. Jesus got magicians; we call them magi.
The incarnation takes place in a world where people commit astrology, read signs by the stars and take dreams literally. A grace-filled epiphany can descend on us through all kinds of strange circumstances. The coming of Jesus into the world is an event filled with unimaginable grace. It is also touched by life’s jagged edges, punctuated by political corruption that cost the lives of innocent children.
Which brings us to Herod and the dark side of epiphanic moments.
The magi weren’t all that wise when it came to politicians. They followed the star to Palestine “in the days of Herod the king” but didn’t have enough political savvy to be very, very afraid of him. Herod was mean as a snake, posted into Palestine by the expedient Romans who knew he would keep the peace at all costs, if for no other reason than to ensure his own power. Ruling as a Roman surrogate and claiming to be a Jewish convert, Herod took no chances where threats to his authority were concerned, even murdering his wife Marianne and their sons Alexander and Aristobulus when he feared a coup.
Matthew says after reading the heavens to document the coming of a new “king of the Jews,” the astrologers,” out of deference, naiveté or stupidity showed up in Jerusalem and ask for Herod’s help. Big mistake. The Gospel text does not mask Herod’s cool hypocrisy: “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
Is nothing new? How many “rulers” in our 2022 world are Herod-like figures, authoritarian paranoids mollifying a constituency but terrified that their regimes are ever vulnerable to an upstart usurper?
The magi finally discover the “babe with his mother” and gladly “pay him homage.” Hence the epiphany, what one source calls “a perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.”
“Epiphanies can change our perceptions.”
Epiphanies can change our perceptions. Suddenly the astrologers wise up, listen to their intuitions and dreams and head home in that great Gospel phrase, “by another road.” When evil is in our path, best to go looking for “another road” to freedom.
Herod, fooled by the stargazers, is “infuriated,” the NRSV says. And that’s when the darkness descends. Matthew writes: “He sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.”
Jesus is born, but in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “at a devastating price.” No one knows how many children died; the New Testament alone documents the heinous event. Some say only four or five — surely no more than 10 — as Bethlehem was a tiny village.
But whatever the numbers, the weeping was ceaseless. Unnamed parents, wailing inconsolably. Matthew’s Gospel recalls Jeremiah 40: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; refusing all consolation, because they are no more.”
Two millennia later, our world, our country, is no stranger to inconsolable parents. Dec. 14, 2022, marked a decade since a 20-year-old shooter massacred 26 individuals at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Twenty were students ages 6 and 7; six were their teachers. Who among us cannot recall the interfaith service that followed, and the grief-stricken cries erupting each time President Barak Obama read the name of someone’s lost little one or teacher.
“Just when we think the people and stories of the Bible are too distant from us, … yet another inconsolable voice is heard in Ramah, Kyiv, Newtown or Uvalde.”
Ten years later, there were 611 mass shootings in the land of the free and the home of the Second Amendment, a figure second only to the 690 that occurred in 2021. Just when we think the people and stories of the Bible are too distant from us, too pre-modern to fit our postmodern existence, yet another inconsolable voice is heard in Ramah, Kyiv, Newtown or Uvalde.
And we realize humanity still has a long way to go. Newtown and all the shootings before and after remain a painful epiphany of our abiding national dilemma. When will we experience an epiphanic moment that compels us to end, or at least to reduce, the body count, for Christ’s sake?
As the body of Christ moves from Dec. 25, 2022, to Jan. 6, 2023, can we overcome the curse of mad demagogues and AK47 shooters in our world and (re)discover this epiphanic moment: Death is real; human beings are ever so vulnerable; evil lurks around every corner; hope is a terrible gamble; but God’s grace won’t go away.
Flannery O’Connor said of her epiphany: “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. … This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.”
Then she added: “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”
And there it is: the enduring hope that Christ’s gospel involves those epiphanic moments when and where God finds us, and, somehow, we find God, “clean, for the first (second, third …) time in (our) lives.”
An epiphany of grace, hidden in plain sight.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
Related articles:
Remember that Epiphany ends with Herod’s terror | Opinion by Alyssa Aldape
To celebrate Epiphany, reject Herodian Christianity | Opinion by Kris Aaron
It’s hard to quit Herod, but we must worship another | Opinion by John Inscore Essick