What Is Epiphany, and Why Do Christians Celebrate It?

Epiphany celebrates God showing himself to the world in the child born at Bethlehem. Most churches keep it on 6 January: the West remembers above all the wise men who came to worship him (Matthew 2:1–12), the East keeps Theophany, the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and old tradition joins the wedding at Cana to both.

At the Epiphany the Church celebrates a God who lets himself be found, and lets strangers from far away find him. “Behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,” Matthew writes (Matthew 2:1), foreigners following a star. In them, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, the Gospel sees “the first-fruits of the nations, who welcome the good news of salvation through the Incarnation.” They came to Jerusalem to ask Israel where its king was born, and Israel’s Scriptures sent them on to Bethlehem. Then the same light falls on a river and on a wedding in Galilee, and each time God shows a little more of who this child is.

What does the word epiphany mean?

It means appearing, or shining forth: the word came into English through Latin from the Greek epiphaneia, built on a verb that means “to appear”, and the Church of England gives its meaning in one word, “manifestation”. The Orthodox call the feast Theophany, “the shining forth and manifestation of God.” Our everyday sense of the word, a sudden revelation, the moment we see clearly what was there all along, grew out of the feast, and the two senses sit close together. Who this child was had been true since the night he was born; at the Epiphany God let the world begin to see it.

Which Bible stories does Epiphany celebrate?

The feast remembers three times God let himself be seen in Jesus, and he chose ordinary places to do it: a family’s house, a river crowded with people, a village wedding. The Catechism holds all three in a single sentence: “the great feast of Epiphany celebrates the adoration of Jesus by the wise men (magi) from the East, together with his baptism in the Jordan and the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee.”

In the first, the wise men have come a long way looking for a king, and Matthew lets them find him at home, a small child with his mother in a house in Bethlehem. They kneel there, “and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). Then, warned in a dream, “they departed into their own country another way” (Matthew 2:12), and Scripture lets them go. If you are wondering how old the child was by then, that is answered in how old was Jesus when the wise men came, and the star that led them has a page of its own, what the Star of Bethlehem was.

Some thirty years later the child is a grown man, and he comes to the Jordan when all the people are being baptized (Luke 3:21) and goes down into the water with them. “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16–17). The Father speaks, the Spirit comes down, and the Son stands in the river, so that over one man among the crowd the whole of God is shown at once.

At Cana the wine runs out at a wedding, and Mary tells her son, “They have no wine” (John 2:3). Jesus has six stone waterpots filled with water, “And they filled them up to the brim” (John 2:7). John closes the story with the very word the feast is named for: “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him” (John 2:11). The first sign of his glory was given at a family celebration, over wine that had run out. A hymn by Christopher Wordsworth, printed in the Church of England’s Epiphany texts, holds the three scenes in two lines: “Manifest at Jordan’s stream, Prophet, Priest, and King supreme; and at Cana wedding-guest in thy Godhead manifest.”

Why do Orthodox Christians call it Theophany?

For the Orthodox the heart of the feast is the baptism, where the Holy Trinity is shown. The Orthodox Church in America puts it in one sentence: “Theophany is the Feast which reveals the Most Holy Trinity to the world through the Baptism of the Lord.” The troparion, the main hymn of the feast, turns the same faith into a song of praise: “When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan the worship of the Trinity was made manifest! For the voice of the Father bare witness to Thee, calling Thee his Beloved Son.”

From ancient times the day was also called “the Day of Illumination and the Feast of Lights”, and in the early Church the catechumens, those preparing to become Christians, were baptized at its evening service, going down into the water on the feast of the Lord’s own baptism. Water is still at the centre of the day. In the Great Blessing of Water it is set in the middle of the church among candles and flowers, or the blessing is sometimes done outdoors where water flows, and the hymns sing, “Today the nature of water is sanctified.” The priest plunges the Cross into the water three times, sprinkles it toward the four directions of the world, and blesses the people and their homes with it, and the faithful drink it. Some have called this a pagan rite, and the Orthodox Church in America’s teaching answers that the blessing is “the expression of the most central fact of the Christian vision of man, his life and his world.” Because the Son of God has taken human flesh and gone down into the streams of the Jordan, all matter is made holy in him, even the water we drink and wash in every day.

When is Epiphany?

For most churches Epiphany is 6 January, the day after Twelfth Night, and in 2027 that is a Wednesday. Where 6 January is not a holy day of obligation, the Catholic Church moves the feast to the Sunday between 2 and 8 January, and the bishops of the United States explain their own rule this way: “The traditional date of Epiphany is January 6, but in the United States it is celebrated on the Sunday between January 2 and January 8.” If you are an American Catholic, then, you will keep the wise men’s feast at Sunday Mass on 3 January 2027. The Church of England, too, allows the feast to be kept on that Sunday for pastoral reasons.

Our Orthodox brothers and sisters who follow the older Julian calendar celebrate Theophany on their own 6 January, which falls on Tuesday 19 January 2027 by the civil calendar, and the Armenian Church keeps the Nativity and the Theophany of Christ together on 6 January, birth and baptism on one day. So across the churches one feast is kept from 3 January to 19 January, as if the wise men were still arriving at different doors. In the Catholic calendar the Christmas season goes on past the Epiphany to the Baptism of the Lord, and how long the season lasts in each church is told in what Christmastide is.

Is Epiphany older than Christmas?

In the East it seems to be, which may surprise those of us who think of the Epiphany as a postscript to Christmas. In Orthodox teaching 6 January was at first “the one Christian feast” of God’s shining forth, taking in Christ’s birth, the wise men and the baptism together. The services of the two feasts are now laid out alike, and it was Christmas, in its services, that was “made to imitate Epiphany since it was established later.”

The oldest written witness comes from outside the Church, from a Gnostic group. Around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria wrote that followers of the Gnostic teacher Basilides “hold the day of his baptism as a festival, spending the night before in readings,” some on the fifteenth and some on the eleventh of the month Tybi. The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia reckons those days as 10 and 6 January, and reads Clement as implying that the Church itself did not yet keep the day. By its account the first certain reference to the Church’s feast comes in 361, and why 6 January was chosen “it is impossible to discover.” Even on that cautious reckoning, Christians have gathered on this day to remember Christ shown to the world for more than sixteen and a half centuries, and the night of readings Clement describes takes us back more than eighteen centuries. Think how far back that reaches: around the year 200, in Alexandria, people were staying awake through a January night to hear of Christ’s baptism, and in the same days of January the Church still keeps his feast.

Orthodox teaching reads the same evidence differently: it traces the feast back to Apostolic times and counts Clement as a witness to the Church’s own celebration of the Lord’s baptism. In the West, which kept Christ’s birth on 25 December, the Epiphany became, in the Church of England’s words, “an occasion to celebrate one element in the story of Christ’s birth, the visit of the far-travelled magi.” East and West came to the day by different roads, and both arrive at the same child.

How do Christians celebrate Epiphany?

Many of them bless their homes, and they write the blessing over the front door. In Catholic and some Anglican parishes chalk is blessed at the Epiphany and carried home, and the family writes the new year split in two with three letters between: 20 + C + M + B + 27. A leaflet from the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford explains the letters: “They are the initials of the traditional names of the three magi: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. They also abbreviate the Latin words Christus mansionem benedicat, ‘May Christ bless the house.’” The leaflet adds that the plus signs stand for the cross. Germany’s Catholic star singers write a star after the first half of the year, 20*C+M+B+27, and give their own meanings: the star is the one the wise men followed and a sign of Christ, and the three crosses stand for the Holy Trinity. For the rest of the year, everyone who comes to that door walks in under the wise men’s names and a prayer that Christ will bless the house. The United States bishops offer a household blessing for the day that asks God, who “revealed your only-begotten Son to every nation by the guidance of a star,” to “Bless this house and all who inhabit it.”

In Germany children carry the blessing themselves: around 6 January the star singers go from door to door across the country, bless houses and flats, write the blessing over the door with blessed chalk, and collect money for children in need around the world. The custom goes back to the Middle Ages, when boys dressed as kings went through the streets acting out the wise men’s visit to the child. In 1959 the German Catholic children’s mission society took it up again and gave it a new aim, the collection, and the society estimates that about 300,000 children and young people now take part each year. Think of that many children out on the streets in the first week of January, carrying a blessing to every door that will open to them and gathering help for children they will never meet. The wise men came a long way to one house; these children go out from their own houses to everyone else’s.

In German the day is Dreikönigstag, Three Kings’ Day, a title Matthew never gives the wise men, and in Mexico it is the Día de Reyes, the Day of the Kings, when children receive presents from the Three Kings and families share the rosca de Reyes, a ring of sweet bread with small figures of the infant Jesus hidden inside. Whoever finds one must provide the tamales on Candlemas, 2 February, so finding the child in the bread means feeding everyone else nearly a month later.

Chalk, bread and water are small things, and our doors are ordinary doors. The Lord who let strangers find him in a house in Bethlehem still comes to doors like ours, and we invite him into our homes and ask, in chalk over the door, that he bless them. The Orthodox sing it in the kontakion of the feast: “Today Thou hast appeared to the universe, and Thy Light, O Lord, has shone on us.”

Related reading

• How old was Jesus when the wise men came?
• What was the Star of Bethlehem?
• When are the 12 days of Christmas?
• What is Christmastide, and how long does it last?
• Why is Christmas celebrated on 25 December?
• When was Jesus baptized?