This year Christmas falling on a Sunday affects the other feasts of the season. As the Epiphany is now celebrated on a Sunday, which is now two weeks away from Christmas, it replaces the Baptism of the Lord, which is transferred to Monday. So these two feasts when we remember how Our Lord was shown forth to the world, first through the (gentile) Wise Men at Bethlehem and thirty years later at the River Jordan, fall together. In fact in former centuries they were celebrated as one feast, one celebration of the revealing of Jesus.

Here is poet Malcolm Guite’s sonnet reflection on the Baptism, which he nicely calls “Epiphany on the Jordan”

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Spirit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river
To die and rise and live and love forever.

Fr Matthew