Epiphany
This Friday, the 6th of January, we celebrate Epiphany – the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth by the Forerunner John.
Epiphany concludes the special yearly period of the Twelve Holy Nights that take place between Christmas and Epiphany.
The hearts and minds of those who in the early centuries of our era understood the true import of Christianity turned to the Baptism in the Jordan of Jesus of Nazareth into whom Christ descended, Christ the Sun-Earth-Spirit. It was this — the birth of Christ — that was celebrated as a Mystery in the early Christian centuries. The insight for which we prepare ourselves to-day through Anthroposophy, through the wisdom belonging to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, flashed up in the form of vision from the vestiges of ancient clairvoyance still surviving during the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place; it flashed up in the Gnostics, those remarkable, enlightened men who lived at the turning-point of the old and the new eras, whose conception of the Christ Mystery differed in respect of form but not in respect of content, from our own. What the Gnostics were able to teach trickled through into the world and although what had actually come to pass in the event indicated symbolically by the Baptism in the Jordan was not widely understood, there was nevertheless an inkling that the Sun Spirit had been born at that time as the Spirit of the Earth, that a cosmic Power had dwelt in the body of a man of earth. And so in the early centuries of Christendom the festival of the birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the festival of Christ’s Epiphany, was celebrated on the 6th of January.
Source: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Christmas/19111226p01.html
Let us take a moment – only a moment – to recognize deep within ourselves the fullness of meaning that Jesus of Nazareth’s baptism and the Birth of the Light into the world. As a sponge absorbs water, let us absorb the fullness of Christ within our own being.