From the Pulpit
The sermon from January 12, 2025 for The Baptism of the Lord
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen.
Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, comes on 6th January. Last Sunday, the closest Sunday before the 6th, we celebrated this feast. Our Epiphany liturgy, like that in most Western churches, focused on the visit of the magi, when Christ was manifested as King to the Gentiles. One week later, today, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord.
Our Orthodox brothers and sisters do things differently. They celebrate Epiphany on 6th January itself, which they call the Feast of Theophany – from the Greek phainein, to show forth, and theos, God. For them, this is the Feast of Christ’s baptism. When Jesus was baptised, the heavens opened, the Holy Spirit descended as a dove, and a voice, the Father’s voice, was heard saying, ‘You are my son …’ (Luke 3:22). Reflecting this, a hymn from one of the Orthodox Theophany services says, ‘When in Jordan thou wast baptized O Lord, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest.’ God was shown forth as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Interestingly, however, the prayer before this hymn opens with: ‘To-
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
day is creation illumined, to-day do all things heavenly and earthly rejoice.’ It turns out that creation is also an important motif in the Orthodox celebration of Theophany, especially that part of creation that loomed large in Christ’s baptism, water. In fact, the watery theme runs through from Grand Compline on the night before right through services during the next day, climaxing with the final office of 6th January, the ‘Great Blessing of Waters’, which sometimes takes place outdoors next to a lake or a river.
To understand why creation and water feature prominently in the Orthodox celebration of the Lord’s baptism, let’s look at an icon for this Feast. You have one with your service sheet. It is a modern one, but the motifs have remained the same for one and a half millennia.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Trinity occupies the central axis: the Son in the River
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Jordan, the descending dove-like Holy Spirit, and, right on top, an open heaven with a downward beam depicting the Father’s voice. As John baptises Jesus, he looks up to the source of the heavenly voice. The axe recalls his preaching, ‘Even now, the axe is lying at the root of the trees; therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down…’ (Matthew 3:10)
In this modern icon, Jesus is scantily clad, wearing only a loin cloth. In older Orthodox he is often completely unclothed. Especially in these older icons, we glimpse a connection between the Baptism of Jesus and creation. In the book of Genesis, where we read that when God created the heavens and the earth, “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” (Genesis 1:3) And the story ends with God saying, “Let us make humans in our own image,” (1:26) And so, “male and female God created them” (1:27) … “they were both naked… and were not ashamed.” (2:25)
In this world that the Creator pronounced as “very good” (Genesis 1:31), God intended water to function as a blessing and as a means of grace. The narrator depicts this by portraying a river flowing through the middle of Eden to water the Garden; then this river divides into four great branches to water the rest of the earth (Genesis 2:10-14). In more prosaic language, God reaches out to us through water as the giver of good gifts; the appropriate response is that of thanksgiving and praise.
However, ‘blessing’ was not how the people of God experienced water in their history. When they fled from their lives as slaves, the Red Sea blocked of them, with Pharaoh’s army in pursuit. Later, when they wanted to enter ‘the land owing with milk and honey’, the Jordan stood in their way. Such experiences of water as a curse rather than a blessing in Israel’s story lie behind the typical depiction of water in the Jewish Bible: not the quiet waters where the Good Shepherd leads the flock, but as places inhabited by monsters such as the famed Leviathan and beasts known as tanin in Hebrew, often translated as ‘dragons’ in English. Throughout the Jewish Bible, it is clear that to defeat such monsters and dragons requires acts of God. So, in Psalm 74, the poet says that it is God who “breaks the heads of the dragons in the waters … [and] the heads of leviathan in pieces …” (vv. 13-14)
Such monsters and dragons are represented by the two strange creatures with riders on the bottom of the icon that you have in front of you. Importantly, the monsters and dragons in Orthodox icons of Christ’s baptism are always depicted as fleeing from Christ. Or, to use the metaphor of Psalm 74, Christ is the act of God that crushes their heads. In Orthodox iconography, this act of God is represented by a hand gesture. In Western paintings of this scene, Jesus is invariably clasping his hands together in prayer. Not here: the fingers of his right hand make an unmistakable gesture of blessing. The middle of the icon and dragons flee. A prayer in the Orthodox “Great Blessing of Waters” services echoes Psalm 74 and says, ‘You did hallow… the streams of Jordan, in that you did send down from Heaven and Holy Spirit, and did crush the heads of the serpents which lurked there.”
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When it says that Christ hallowed the water, it means that he made it holy by blessing it. In doing so, Christ did not add something to the water that is alien to its nature – that would be a magical view of ‘holy water’. No, water was created ‘God-friendly’, able to mediate God’s grace to us and provoke thanksgiving from us to God. Monsters and dragons have polluted it and prevented it to fulfil this function. Jesus’ blessing reversed this curse.
What is true of water as enacted in the drama of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan is true of the whole of creation. That is the significance of the older icons depicting Jesus as naked. If you’ll permit a pun, this is a thinly-veiled reference to Jesus as second Adam. The presence of Christ as Second Adam, together with the artistic reference to the Spirit hovering over the waters, means that such an icon is meant to offer a cameo of the inauguration of the whole new creation, where not just the water of the Jordan, but all water everywhere, and not just all water everywhere but the whole of material creation, is restored to what God intended it to be – as blessings and as means of grace; good news indeed!
Of course, the baptism of Christ and the rest of his life and death and resurrection only inaugurated the New Creation. That is why at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, he commanded his small band of disciples to go into the world to preach the good news, to baptise those who believe, and to teach them to obey his teaching (Matthew 28:18-20).
To see what such obedience may mean today in the light of the Orthodox iconography of the baptism of Christ, just think back to the Jordan for a moment. In our icon, the Jordan that Jesus stepped into was no longer a source of life, but a death-trap because it was infested with monsters and dragons. Today’s Jordan is precisely such a death-trap. Inequitable sharing of its water has long been part of the cause of deadly friction between Jews and Palestinians. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the water – it is part of the good creation. What turns the water into an instrument of death are the actions of fallen men and women extrinsic to the water. What is true of water is true of the whole creation. It is humanity who has misused and abused creation, and turned that which is created ‘very good’ into instruments of death.
All of us have been baptised in the sacrament of baptism, in which the holy water was blessed by a priest by the authority and following the example of Christ blessing the Jordan. In the light of icons such as the one you hold in your hand now, our baptismal promise must mean that we are committed to propagating this chain of blessing throughout the whole of creation. By our actions, we must bless all things to caste out the polluting demons that turn them into death-traps, and, by doing so, join in the inauguration the New Creation. Then, when the New Creation is fully come, when sacramental symbols give way to Reality, we will hear Christ say, “Well done, good and faithful servants! Come into the joy of your master’s presence.” (Matthew 25?23)
Wilson Poon