Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Congratulations with the feast of Theophany or the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ!

Yesterday during Vespers, which was served after the Sunday Divine Liturgy, many Old Testament excerpts were read in which prophecies and foreshadowings of the baptism of the Lord were offered to us. Amongst them was a reading from the Book of Joshua about how the course of the River Jordan was miraculously stopped when the priests carried into it the Ark of the Covenant, and how the Jewish nation, which had wandered in the desert for forty years, crossed along the dry bottom of the river into the Promised Land. The author of the 113/114 psalm, narrating the events of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, elaborated on the excerpt from Joshua and said that the waters of Jordan did not simply stand still when the Jews passed, but were even driven back. Although the Gospels do not mention this, the liturgical texts of today’s feast state that this miracle was repeated when our Lord and God Jesus Christ entered into the streams of the Jordan to be baptized by His prophet and relative, John the Baptist.

It is not by accident that the hymnographers and those who composed our liturgical services accent the link between the passing of the Jewish people into Canaan through the Jordan and the baptism of the Saviour. Just as the procession along the dry bed of the river marked the end of the nomadic existence of the Jewish people after the Egyptian enslavement and the beginning of their settlement in the Promised Land which flowed with milk and honey, so the baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ indicated the beginning of His earthly ministry, which concluded on the Cross. The fullness of this ministry, all the words and actions of the Saviour and especially His crucifixion, show us the path away from sin and open to us the door into the eternal Heavenly Kingdom.

The events of today’s feast are closely connected to the feasts of last week, the Nativity and the Circumcision, that is, with the incarnation of God. Every person is born, spends time as a child, is comforted by his or her mother’s caresses, etc. Every Jewish boy was circumcised. Christ, being the incarnate God, had no need of this, but humbled Himself and accepted absolutely everything that was part of a normal human life so as to fully commune with our race. Another aspect of human life is repentance. None of us are without sin and therefore each of us is in need of repentance. Although Christ was sinless, He participated in the penitential rite of baptism so as to fully experience this aspect of human existence.

Today, on this wonderful and deeply theological feastday, let’s focus our spiritual attention on our Saviour, who entered the cold waters of the River Jordan so as to commune of our human nature, to open to us a smooth and dry path through the dangerous, deep, and raging streams of our earthly life, and to show us the way into the Heavenly Kingdom. Christ opened this path for us, and now it remains for us to set out along this way and join ourselves to Him.

priest Alexis