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Commentary from 

THE ANNOTATED

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Edited by JOHN HENRY BLUNT

Rivingtons, London, 1884

FIRST  SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY.

This Sunday commemorates the manifestation of our Lord's glory for the second time in the Temple.  In His infancy that glory had been revealed to the faithful souls who waited for the loving-kindness of the Lord in the midst of His Temple, and they had seen the Epiphany of that Sun of Righteousness whose Light was to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of God's people Israel.  Twelve years afterwards the childhood of the Holy Child Jesus was to reveal the same glory to all who had faith to behold it, during that visit to the Temple when He sat among the doctors and fulfilled the words,  "I have more understanding than My teachers."  Among those teachers may have been Nicodemus and Gamaliel, and the rays which were shed from the Light of the Divine understanding at which they marvelled, may have fallen on their minds with a vivifying power which afterwards made the one fit to receive the first full revelation of the truth respecting new birth into Christ, and the other to be the teacher of St. Paul, by whom the Light of Christ was so marvellously spread abroad among the Gentiles.