Hebrews 13:7-16; Matthew 4:12-17
In this season we celebrate the great feast of Theophany, of Christ’s baptism by St. John the Forerunner when the voice of the Father identified Him as the Son of God and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove. Epiphany reveals that the Savior Who appears from the waters of the Jordan to illumine our world of darkness is truly the God-Man, a Person of the Holy Trinity. He is baptized to restore us, and the creation itself, to the ancient glory for which we were created.
By entering into
the water, the Lord made it holy, which means that He restored and fulfilled
its true nature. We need water in order
to live. The earth needs water in order
to become fertile, bearing fruit and giving life to animals of all kinds. We wash with water and use it to maintain
cleanliness and health. Without water,
we become weak and die, as would other creatures. And in the world as we know it, water kills many
through floods and storms. Since the creation has been subjected to futility
through our fall, the water through which God gives us life may become the
means of our death. But when water is blessed, God restores it to its natural
state of fulfilling God’s gracious purposes for the flourishing of the creation. And since our homes are where we and our
families live each day, we want His blessing on the physical space in which we
offer ourselves to Him. In opening our
homes to the Lord’s blessing, we find strength to make our daily lives a
liturgy, an entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Tragically, our
first parents refused their high calling to offer themselves and the world for
blessing and ushered in the unnatural realm of corruption that we know all too
well, both in the brokenness of our hearts and in our relationships with one
another. God gave Adam and Eve garments
of skin when they left paradise after disregarding 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 vocation to become like God in holiness. Having stripped themselves
of their original glory, they were reduced to mortal flesh and destined for
slavery to their passions and to the grave. Because of them, the
creation itself was “subjected to futility…” (Rom. 8:20)
As we prepared for
Theophany, 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 baptism,
Jesus Christ clothes us with a garment of light, restoring us to our original
vocation to become like
Him in holiness. He delivers us from the nakedness and vulnerability of slavery
to our own passions and to the fear of the grave. Through His and our
baptism, He makes us participants in His restoration and fulfillment of the
human person. He is baptized to save Adam and Eve, all their descendants, and
the entire creation, fulfilling the gracious purposes for which He brought us into
existence.
Life after baptism
is not, however, without pain, disease, death, sorrows, and temptations. In
contrast with the divine glory of the appearance of our Lord, the darkness of
sin within us and our world of corruption becomes all the more apparent. In the aftermath of Christ’s birth, Herod the
Great had all the young boys in the region of Bethlehem murdered. St. John the
Forerunner, who prepared the way for “the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin
of the world,” was arrested and ultimately beheaded by Herod Antipas for
prophetically denouncing the king’s immorality.
After the Baptist’s arrest, the Lord went to “Galilee of the Gentiles”
to begin His public ministry in fulfillment of 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.’” (Matt. 4:15-16)
We are baptized
into Christ’s death in order to rise up with Him into a life of holiness in
which we regain the robe of light rejected by our first parents. In every
aspect of our darkened lives, He call us to become radiant with the divine
glory He shares with us as the New Adam.
To do so, we must find healing for the passions that have taken root in
our hearts and have distorted our relationships even with those we love
most. In how we treat everyone from
those closest to us to complete strangers, we must find healing from the
corruptions of pride, hatred, anger, resentment, and the desire to dominate or
condemn others. It does not matter
whether we are at home, work, school, or other settings, or whether we think we
are in private or in public. If we have put on Christ in baptism, we must
become living epiphanies of Christ’s salvation and mercy to all we encounter.
We must also be on
guard for the ways in which we remain inhabitants of “the region and shadow of
death.” Because the Savior has hallowed
the water and the entire creation through His baptism, absolutely nothing is
intrinsically evil or profane. No
dimension of God’s good creation requires us to return to the nakedness of
passion in any way. We are without
excuse for doing so, for Theophany reveals that we are always on holy ground
and must speak, act, and think as those who wear a garment of light. Though we fall short of fulfilling the goal
each day, we must always strive to manifest our Lord’s healing of the human
person in every thought, word, and deed.
We must become like holy water restored to its natural place and blessing
the world as a sign of its salvation.
If
we are to do so in a world still enslaved to the fear of death, we must embrace
the full meaning of baptism. As St. Paul
wrote, “Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried
with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from
the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in
newness of life.” (Rom. 6:3-4) We must, then, be always vigilant against
allowing self-centered desire to distort our vision of ourselves, our
neighbors, and our world. We must turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and
treat others as we would have them treat us, especially when we are tempted to respond
in kind to those who have wronged us or whom we consider our enemies. We must take up the struggle to purify the
desires of our hearts and offer them for true fulfillment in God. The more
deeply attached we are to any source of temptation, the more mindful we must be
concerning it.
Like people of every generation, we
do not have to look very closely at ourselves or at the state of the world to
know that Isaiah’s prophecy still rings true: “[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.” “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and
forever,” and His Epiphany calls us to become radiant with His holy light. In the waters of the Jordan, “Christ has
appeared desiring to renew the whole creation.”
So let us now lift up our hearts to receive the great blessing that He is
baptized to share with every single one of us in every dimension of our lives
in the world as we know it.
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