Discipleship and Mystery: Epiphany III, Year A

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”

The season of Epiphany is about light—about God making himself known. It is about revelation: not God as an abstract idea to be mastered, but God encountered—God disclosed—God shining into the ordinary spaces of human life.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and calls Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John. There is no argument. No explanation. No theological treatise. Only an invitation: “Follow me.” And remarkably, they do. They leave their nets, their boats, their livelihood, and step into something they do not yet understand.

Epiphany always precedes discipleship. Before we follow, we see. Or perhaps more accurately, before we understand, we are seen.

The summer before I attended college, I took my last family vacation with my mother, father, and brother. We went, as we had many times, to the Canadian province of Quebec. I was eighteen years old, and a convinced rationalist who thought he knew all there was to know about the world from the smattering of Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche I had read. I was the sort of joyless, smug teen you sometimes see reading Kierkegaard in coffee shops. I was basically a caricature of someone from a Woody Allen film—and that was very possibly the image I was trying to cultivate.

At one time, I had wanted to be a priest—specifically a Franciscan—but that desire had faded as I began to see Christianity as little more than myth and social control: a way of preserving the status quo, keeping the rich rich and the powerful powerful, while the poor and vulnerable were held in place by superstition and dogma. By my eighteenth year, the tepid Roman Catholicism of childhood had given way to agnosticism and open hostility toward organized religion. No argument, however clever, could have convinced me that God—as Christianity proclaimed him—could possibly exist.

But on that trip, in the quiet countryside of Quebec, something happened that I could not explain.

Toward the end of the vacation, we visited the shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, outside the city of Quebec. The shrine, which has been at the heart of Québécois faith for centuries, is associated with healing. My grandmother, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer, asked us to bring her back a medal blessed by one of the priests there. We were, in truth, obliged to stop.

While my family attended to their devotions, I wandered off into the darker recesses of the shrine. I sat near one of the side altars and simply took in the space. Until then, I had never been in a church so vast, so beautiful. The arches seemed to rise beyond human scale. And in that place—built by ordinary human hands—there was a palpable sense of something more. A sense of transcendence. Of holiness.

For the first time in my life, I became aware—not of an argument for God—but of God himself. Not as an idea, but as presence. As light breaking in. What I later learned to call the grandeur of God.

That moment did not immediately make me a believer. Conversion rarely works that way. But it was an epiphany. A disclosure. A light shining in a place I had assumed was dark and empty. I began to realize that I was not a solitary intellect wrestling the universe into submission, but one person among countless millions living within a mystery far greater than myself.

Isaiah gives a word to that experience. He calls it light.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

The Hebrew Scriptures also give us another word for this experience: kavod—glory. It literally means weight. God’s presence, when it is revealed, has substance. It presses in on us. It changes the atmosphere. It is not something we analyze; it is something we encounter.

The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The world is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend.” That is Epiphany in a sentence. God makes himself known, not so that we might master him, but so that we might be drawn into relationship with him.

That is what happens on the shores of Galilee. Peter and Andrew are not persuaded; they are summoned. James and John are not convinced; they are called. The light has dawned, and once it has, nothing can remain the same.

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, reminds us that this revelation always leads to a reordering of our lives together. Epiphany is never private. The light that reveals God also exposes our divisions, our rivalries, our misplaced loyalties. Christ calls not isolated individuals, but a community—a people shaped by his presence and oriented toward his love.

We can know Scripture by heart. We can master theology, liturgy, and tradition. But without awe—without the willingness to stand before the mystery of God—we have only accumulated religious trivia. The God who is light itself is present here. Not symbolically. Not distantly. But truly. The ground on which we stand is holy.

And because Christ has been revealed to us, we are called—as those first disciples were—to follow. To leave behind whatever nets bind us. To live as people of the light. To love one another, to serve the vulnerable, to welcome the stranger, to seek justice, and to bear witness to the God who first sought us.

Epiphany always leads to discipleship. We see the light. And then we walk in it.

I close with words from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew something about the world being charged with God’s presence:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

May we have eyes to see that light, hearts to receive it, and courage to follow where it leads.