The Epiphany

Epiphany 2026

Once upon a time, there was a young woman. She was the daughter of a chieftain of ancient Britain. She married a visiting Roman officer and followed him to the Continent. Her husband divorced her for political reasons, but later she saw her son crowned Emperor. She was proclaimed Empress Dowager, became she became a Christian.

This is the story of the Helena, the mother of Constantine who became the first Roman emperor to become a Christian. Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, made her story into a novel because in her old age Helena did something wonderful, something extraordinary.

She had a dream in which a Jew from Jerusalem told her where the True Cross was hidden. So she journeyed to Jerusalem and directed the excavations that found what was believed to be the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified.

One of the chapters of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena is called “Epiphany”. It ends with St. Helena’s prayer to the Three Magi on the Feast of the Epiphany that we keep today.

Waugh narrates how everyone in Jerusalem thought Helena was strong and vigourous for her age. The old lady was positively indefatigable, they all said. But in truth she was very weary. Winter set in. The convent where she was staying was exposed, damp and chill. She had planned to spend her old age in Dalmatia – modern Croatia. She seemed to have come to the end of her questions. No one was helpful. No one was hopeful. At Christmas she had not the strength to ride out with the procession to Bethlehem. She went to communion in the convent chapel and that day allowed the nuns to make a fuss of her, spending the feast crouched over a wood fire which they lit for her in her room.

But by Twelfth Night she rallied and on the eve set out by litter along the five rough miles to the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem. There was no throng of pilgrims. [Bishop] Macarius of Jerusalem and his people kept Epiphany in their own church. Only the little community of Bethlehem greeted her and led her to the room they had prepared. She rested there dozing until an hour before dawn when they called her and led her out under the stars, then down onto the stable-cave, where they made a place for her on the women’s side of the small, packed congregation.

The low vault was full of lamps and the air close and still. Silver bells announced the coming of the three vested, bearded monks, who prostrated themselves before the altar. So the long liturgy began.

Helena knew little Greek and her thoughts were not in the words nor anywhere in the immediate scene. She forgot even her quest to find the True Cross and was dead to everything except the swaddled child long ago and those three royal sages who had come from so far to adore him.

“This is my day, she thought, “and these are my kind.”

Perhaps she realised that her fame, like theirs, would live in one historic act of devotion when she found the True Cross. “Like me,” she said to them, “you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and a new defiant light blazed among the disconcerted stars.

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculations, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

“You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

“Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room at the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life there was room for you too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

“Dear cousins, pray for me,” said Helena, “and for my poor overloaded son [the Emperor Constantine himself, who was still unbaptized]. May he, too, before the end find kneeling-space in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly…“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for [the learned, the oblique, the delicate] the complicated, doubting and impure. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

If there is a place before the throne of God for the Magi then perhaps there is a place for each of us too.

Lord God, humbled in the Christ-child in a manger, raised to glory on the cross, guide each of us to your perfect light.

Amen.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson,
St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 04/01/2026