God our creator,
who in the beginning
commanded the light to shine out of darkness:
we pray that the light of the glorious gospel of Christ
may dispel the darkness of ignorance and unbelief,
shine into the hearts of all your people,
and reveal the knowledge of your glory
in the face of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

For reasons I’ll explain during the long period of ordinary time in the summer, I’m generally not keen on festivals celebrating abstract concepts. For me, there needs to be an event that underlies the celebration.

Nevertheless, the Common Worship collect for Epiphany IV most clearly evokes not an event in the Gospels, but a passage in Paul. The allusion to 2 Cor 4:3-6 is unmistakable:

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Cor 4:3-6

But there is an event this passage calls to mind. As Epiphanytide draws to a close, the manifestation of Christ’s glory this collect calls to mind is our own conversion.

Since the 18th Century, there’s been a stereotypical ‘conversion experience’ that has been widely taken as the default in Evangelical circles. Either the convert is raised outside the faith or grows up going to church but never really ‘getting it’. After a crisis of some sort – conscience in the older versions, often something more broadly existential in more modern iterations – a powerful religious experience brings peace and a new vitality in the convert’s spiritual life.

My own experience of coming to faith actually follows this model pretty closely. But in general, I don’t think it’s been helpful. All too often, people have felt pressure to force their own stories to fit the mould. Certain people’s temperaments are more amenable to having those sorts of crises than others, and some people are temperamentally predisposed to worry that their own conversion story doesn’t match up with the archetype.*

Whatever your own conversion story might look like, whether you even remember a moment of conversion or not, Paul teaches that a manifestation of Christ’s glory has taken place in your life.

Scripture uses a wide variety of images to describe the inability of human hearts in our fallen state to turn to Christ. In this passage, Paul uses the image of blindness. Without a work of grace, we are unable to see, to grasp, the glory of Christ. Left to ourselves, we are unable to understand the events we have been reflecting on over Epiphany season as manifestations of Christ’s glory. We might dismiss them as mere stories or reduce them to moralisms. We may view Christ as an irrelevance, a fraud, or a threat to our liberty. We will never perceive him as manifesting divine glory. And as Paul tells us, we are not left to ourselves – powerful spiritual forces are actively at work to keep us in the dark.

For each and every Christian believer, a miracle commensurate with the creation of the world has taken place. As God calls light to shine out of darkness in creation, so in new creation God shines in our hearts to give us the knowledge of his glory in Jesus Christ. Whether we remember a particular moment when we first saw Christ’s glory or not, God has acted in history, in our lives, to manifest his glory to us.

As epiphany season draws to a close, why not take some time to think of things you find glorious about Christ – perhaps particular moments in your life when his glory has been especially evident to you. These moments, especially the moment God first enabled you to appreciate Christ’s glory, are manifestations of Christ’s glory. Minor ones, perhaps, for the world, but pivotal, saving moments for each of us.

The kind of experience Paul is talking about in this passage is definitive. In theological terms, he is referring to what we usually term regeneration. But the collect gestures towards the reality that our appreciation of Christ’s glory is also a progressive experience. For all of us, the darkness, both of ignorance and unbelief, still cling to our hearts. Much as Epiphany has afforded us the opportunity to dwell on Christ’s glory, as it draws to a close we pray that God would continue to shine more and more light in our hearts, that Christ’s glory would be ever clearer to us.

*This set conversion story also seems to presuppose that conversion in infancy or early childhood is either impossible or very rare. As such, it’s not really compatible with a Reformed understanding of childhood.