Today
we continue to celebrate the season of Epiphany, of Christ’s baptism in the
Jordan when He is identified as the Son of God by voice of the Father and the
descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. It is a festive time of holy
water and house blessings, of reveling in the good news that the Savior has
appeared and illumined our world of darkness.
In doing so, He restores us, and the creation itself, to the ancient
glory for which we were created. Unfortunately, our first parents turned away
from that glory and ushered in the realm of mortality and corruption that we
know all too well. The great feast of
Epiphany makes clear that Christ Himself is the path to healing from their and
our disease. He appears in order to
raise us up from the low estate to which we had fallen. Remember that God gave Adam and Eve
garments of skin when they left paradise after turning away from Him. Through their disobedience, they had become
aware that they were naked and were cast into the world as we know it. Their nakedness showed that they had
repudiated their calling to be in the image and likeness of God. Having stripped themselves of their original
glory, they were reduced to mortal flesh and destined for slavery to their
passions and the grave. Because of
them, the creation itself was “subjected to futility…” (Rom. 8:20)
As we prepared for Theophany last
Sunday, we heard this hymn: “Make ready, O Zebulon, and prepare, O Nephtali,
and you, River Jordan, cease your flow and receive with joy the Master coming
to be baptized. And you, Adam, rejoice with the first mother, and hide not
yourselves as you did of old in paradise; for having seen you naked, He
appeared to clothe you with the first robe. Yea, Christ has appeared desiring
to renew the whole creation.” If it
seems strange to think of Christ being baptized in order to clothe Adam and Eve,
remember St. Paul’s teaching that “as many of you as have been baptized into
Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal. 3:27) In
the Orthodox baptismal service, the priest puts a white garment on the newly
baptized person immediately after he or she comes out of the water with the
words “the servant of God is clothed with righteousness…” Then the chanter sings “Grant to me the robe of light, O Most Merciful Christ our
God, Who clothes Yourself with light as with a garment.”
In
baptism, Jesus Christ clothes us with a garment of light, restoring us to our
original vocation in the image and likeness of God. He saves us from the nakedness of being
reduced to mortality and the vulnerability of being enslaved to our own
passions. He is baptized in order to
save Adam and Eve, all of their descendants, and the entire creation, fulfilling
the glorious purposes for which He breathed life into us in the first
place. Through His and our baptism, He
makes us participants in His divinized humanity.
That does not mean,
however, that the rest of our lives after baptism will be perfect in every way
without pain, disease, sin, or death. Recall
that, in the aftermath of Christ’s birth, the wicked Herod had all the young
boys in the region of Bethlehem murdered. Today’s gospel text begins with a
reference to the arrest of St. John the Baptist for his prophetic denunciation
of the sins of the royal family. St.
Matthew tells us that the Lord’s going to “Galilee of the Gentiles” to begin
His public ministry fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy that “’the people who
sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region
and shadow of death light has dawned.’”
Those who suffered under the oppression of Herod and
the Roman Empire knew all too well about darkness and death. The countless victims of war, terrorism, persecution,
and other crimes around the world today certainly do also. We are not strangers to them either when we
mourn lost loved ones and broken relationships or struggle with illness and
pain. And if we will acknowledge the truth about our own dark thoughts, words,
and desires, and how our actions have harmed others, we will see that in many
ways we still prefer the darkness to a robe of light. When we do so, we prefer the ways of the old
Adam to those of the New Adam. We follow
our first parents in choosing nakedness and weakness over divine glory and
strength.
St. John the Forerunner called people to repent in
preparation for the coming of the Messiah.
Interestingly, Christ’s preaching after His baptism focused on
repentance also: “Repent for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand.” We usually do not
like being told to repent, perhaps because it offends our pride and we associate
it with punishment. True repentance is a very different undertaking, however, fundamentally
positive in nature, that focuses on reorienting ourselves toward truth and
reality, of walking out of the darkness and into the light, of leaving behind
the sorrow and anxiety of naked vulnerability for the joy of being fully
clothed as the sons and daughters of God.
True repentance requires offering every dimension of
our life to Christ for healing and transformation. That is one of the reasons that we bless
houses with holy water in the weeks following Theophany. By being baptized in the Jordan, Christ made
water holy by fulfilling its original intended purposes to give life, cleanse,
and satisfy our deepest thirst. Holy water
manifests Christ’s blessing of the entire creation, extending even to the small
details of our daily lives. In light of
our Lord’s baptism, we are always on holy ground; now nothing is intrinsically
profane, evil, or cut off from God. All
reality is called to shine forth with holiness.
Our
challenge, then, is to play our role in showing forth the holiness of our
bodies, our words, our relationships, our actions, and every aspect of the
creation for which we are responsible. Christ
calls each and every one of us uniquely to offer ourselves to Him and to play our
distinctive roles in fulfilling His purposes in the world. By baptism, we already participate in the divinized
humanity of Jesus Christ. We wear the
garment of light that He has given us, and now each of us must actually turn away from
sneaking around naked in the garden like Adam and embrace the glory of our
salvation personally and intentionally. That
is what repentance is all about, and no one else can do that for us. Others may pray for us and help us in so many
ways, but they cannot repent for us. Only
we ourselves may do that.
Epiphany is a great feast of our salvation in Jesus
Christ. The eternal Son of God has made
a way for us to participate in His divine glory by humbling Himself to be
baptized in the waters of the Jordan. He
does so to save Adam and Eve, all their descendants, and the entire
creation. He clothes us in a garment of
light in order to cover our nakedness, which had degraded us as slaves to our
mortal flesh in a world of death and decay.
So let us joyfully celebrate our Lord’s baptism by remembering that He
has already clothed and restored us to our ancient dignity in His image and
likeness. Let us drink and sprinkle holy
water as a sign that we must play our unique roles in making every dimension of
our lives an icon of God’s holiness. In
other words, let us behave each day as those who have put on Christ. Let us shine with the great glory that He has
given us both through His birth and His baptism. There is no better way to bear
witness that the prophecy really has been fulfilled: “[T]he people who sat in darkness have seen a
great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has
dawned.” Yes, the good news of this feast extends even to you and me. That is
surely cause for celebration.
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