The Lord's Baptism
Water doesn’t mean much to us today. It’s one of life’s essential comforts, accessible, automatic, cheap. You turn on the tap and there it is... However, for thousands of years water was a primary religious symbol, and to understand why this was so we must recover the almost completely extinguished feeling for the cosmos. To people of the ancient world, water was no less than the symbol of life itself, and of the world as life. ..Water is truly a precondition for life. One can go without food for a long time, but without water a person will die very quickly, so we can say that human beings are by nature thirsty beings. Without water, cleanliness is impossible, so water is also the symbol of cleansing and purity. Water as life and as purity, but also beauty, power and might, as we see it reflect and absorb, so to speak, the boundless blue sky. All of this describes the perception or experience of water that placed it at the center of religious symbolism.
Go
into a church on the eve of Epiphany while the "Great Blessing of
Water" is being celebrated. Listen to the words of the prayers and hymns,
pay attention to the rite, and you will feel that there is more here than
merely ancient ritual; it has something to say to us today, just as it did a
thousand years ago, about our life and our perpetual and unquenchable thirst
for purification, rebirth, renewal... In this celebration water becomes what it
was on the first day of Creation, when "the earth was without form and
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was
moving over the face of the waters "(Gen 1:2). The words of the service
echo this in praise and thanksgiving: "Great are You, 0 Lord, and
marvelous are Your works, and there are no words which suffice to hymn Your
wonders..." Once again, a beginning. Once again, humanity stands before
the mystery of existence. Once again, we experience the world joyfully and we
see its beauty and harmony as God’s gift. Once again, we give thanks. And in
this thanksgiving, praise, and joy, we once again become genuine human beings.
The joy of
Epiphany is in the recovery of a cosmic experience of the world, of recovering
faith that everything and everyone can always be washed, purified, renewed,
reborn, and that regardless how dirty and clouded with mud our life has become,
no matter what swamp we might have rolled in, we always have access to a
purifying stream of living water, because humanity’s thirst for heaven,
goodness, perfection and beauty is not dead, nor can it ever die. Indeed, this
thirst alone makes us human beings. "Great are You, 0 Lord, and marvelous
are Your works, and there are no words which suffice to hymn Your
wonders..." Who said that Christianity is depressing and grim, morbid and
sad, and pulls human beings away from life? Look at the faces of worshipers
that night, and see the light and joy that shines as they listen to the psalm
thundering its exultation, "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters"
(Ps 29:3), as they watch the priest sprinkling volleys of blessed water
throughout the church, and those glittering drops fly as if throughout the
whole world, making that world once again a possibility and a promise, the raw
material for a mysterious miracle of transformation and transfiguration.
God
himself entered this water in the form of a man; He united himself not only
with humanity, but with all matter, and made all of it a radiant, light-bearing
stream flowing toward life and joy. But none of this can be experienced or
sensed without repentance, without a deep change of consciousness, without the
conversion of mind and heart, without the ability to see everything in a new
light. This was precisely the repentance John the Baptist preached and which
made it possible to see Jesus approaching the river Jordan, and lovingly accept
him as God himself, who from the beginning of time loved the human race and
created the whole world for us as an image of his love, eternity and joy.
Archpriest Alexander Schmemann