Yet More Theophany Thoughts

Benedicamus Domino!

It was pointed out to me today that if I were really going to deal correctly with Theophany in this blog, I should create a third entry in order to symbolize the Trinity which was manifested when Christ was baptized and John the Baptist saw the Spirit descending on Him like a dove and heard the Father's voice identifying Christ as His beloved Son. So, in order to fulfil this most important mathematical necessity, here is my third entry upon this subject.

In church today, the priest preached a sermon which made me think about many comments which I have heard just lately as to what people who have not seen Orthodox Christian worship believe that it seems to accomplish. These comments are not something I take lightly in the least, but they do force me to think about my own beliefs and to reaffirm them for myself if not for anyone else. First though, we'll deal with the sermon itself.

In it, the priest stated that the reason we consider Christ's baptism to be so significant is that through it, He began the work of sanctifying the whole world. By God coming down and touching the waters of the Jordan in a manner which foreshadowed His being buried in a tomb, the waters, and thus all that they fed were reclaimed from their fallen state and once again became sacred. This in itself was a type or a symbol of what God would later do for us by His death and resurrection. He allowed Himself to be baptized as though He needed repentance from sin, and He later allowed Himself to be crucified as though He were a lawless and sinful man, but in both these cases He was not what He seemed. He was God incarnate, and thus, His divinity being brought to these two extremities of humanity sanctified that humanity as well as the whole Christ-created world. Christ-created, did I say? Quite right! For it was Christ who spoke the Father's thought into being before ever the earth rose from the void, but before the earth, and before man himself, there were waters. Water, we believe, is the primal element out of which all life sprang, and as such, it has been considered both the most pure and the least pure of all elements. It is used for the purification of Baptism, but first, it must be blessed. Why is this? Why cannot water simply be considered sacred by its very nature? If Christ has sanctified it once, isn't that enough? Why must we use ritual to do this again and again?

The same may be asked of man. If Christ died for our sins and took away the sin of the world, then why do we continue to examine ourselves and to confess our sins? Why must we repent again and again? First, we have to consider just what Christ was accomplishing in these two connected acts of His baptism and His death and resurrection. Was He baptized simply to institute the rite of baptism for us? Did he do it just so it would get put into the gospels? Did he allow John to baptize Him so He would seem to be a man even though He was more than a man? Did He wish to appear to be a sinner only?

The answer from an Orthodox point of view is an emphatic no! He was and is truly human, but being also Divine, He recognized that the very nature of humanity needed to be sanctified. He endued baptism simply by undergoing it with a new significance. Not only was it a pledge of repentance, but now, it became a renewal of fallen man to his former state. It was also a type of the death He would later undergo.

Now, what about this death? Did He only seem to die? Did He die in order to turn God's wrath from us? Was He the Passover lamb who would cause the avenging angel to pass by some while killing others? Is Christ, in short, the same as the atonement offering which was offered for the entire Hebrew community every year in the Jerusalem temple? What exactly does "dying for our sins" mean?

In one sense, He did take our sin unto Himself, but this was accomplished by the fact that He took on our weakened and fallen condition, that He allowed Himself to become a man. Was His death then an act of stepping in front of God's loaded and already-fired gun? Did He simply take the bullets of God's anger for us? Without Him, would we have been punished by the big sky-thunderer up there?

Firstly, Christ truly died indeed. The manner of His death was ignominious, but this was His condescension, not a method of appeasing God on our behalf. No. He did not die to appease an angry sky-god! He died so that He could go into the land of the dead, (call it Hades if you like) as God just as He had come to earth as a living man. His dead humanity allowed Him to go that journey and thus to free all of the dead there by His own resurrection, so now, our task is to follow his path. We must die to our passions and sins so that we may rise anew in Christlike love and mercy. His death and resurrection was for our salvation, and we call Him our saviour, but He didn't save us from an angry and vicious God by being punished on our behalf! He saved us from ourselves and from the ease with which the devil can attack us in our vulnerable and broken state. He showed us the path to wholeness and to new life!

Here then is the answer to why we perform rituals such as the blessing of waters. We are asking His aid in reclaiming what has been broken just as we ask His mercy to reclaim ourselves from the bondage of sin and death. This is also why we confess to a priest. Someone recently said to me that they didn't understand why confessing to a priest (instead of directly to God or in a corporate way in a congregation) should make us feel anymore guilt-ridden or anymore forgiven. Of course, we're always able to confess our sins directly to God, and in some places I've been, a kind of corporate confession is done, but confessing to a priest or a bishop is something which was instituted just after the major influx of Christians once Christianity was no longer a crime in the Roman empire. Public confession (that is, everyone confessing their sins before the congregation) was common before that time, but it simply became unworkable once numbers of Christians grew, and also it was deemed that some sins of the newly-converted might be scandalous if repeated in public. So, this is where the sacrament or mystery of Confession began.

I know that for me, actually having to put my sin into words out loud is a very humbling experience. if I have to tell someone else that I yelled at a child in anger rather than in reproof or that I had angry thoughts about that child, it's a very humbling thing! It's sometimes rather easy to say to God that we've done these things, because it's harder for us to perceive His actual presence with us, but if we have to say them where another human being can hear us, that's a totally different thing. Do we need a priest to absolve us of our sins? No, but he is a witness of what we say, and the act of Confession is a very concrete and experiencial way in which we can begin to come to terms with our brokenness and can learn to repent and can be healed.

I think this is the key to all the ritual and pageantry in Orthodox worship. We are trying to incarnate, to make alive, a belief which we all hold in our hearts, but we are trying to incarnate that belief so that our bodies and our minds can receive it. Our bodies and minds are rather more sluggish about such things than our hearts and our souls, so they need help. We must be continually reminded of the path we're walking because so many things take our minds away from that path. Liturgical and sacramental ritual is what helps us, as one of our hymns states, to "lay aside all earthly cares" and to attend to Eternity in a more conscious and focused way. God is not some Deistic intellect who set everything going and now simply regards disinterestedly the watch that he has made ticking and turning! No! He is Life itself! His love is all-consuming! It is fire which intends to destroy everything in us which is not fit for His dwelling-place, and from this destruction will come something beautiful and true, something unalloyed and unmixed with impurities! He is the Philosopher's Stone and His love is the crucible which will give us true immortality! However, our brains and our scattered senses know not how to perceive this process going on in us without help: without outward reminders of His grace and mercy. Ritual is the way in which we can experience outwardly what we need to experience in our inner selves, and at the same time, it is the manifestation outward of the inner experiences of many holy (renewed to health) people who created the rituals over time.

So, we bless the waters every year at Theophany because we are both commemorating Christ's baptism in the Jordan and also reaffirming for ourselves that Christ has redeemed all of creation from its fallen state, but also letting ourselves know that this process is spread out for us in time so that we are not overwhelmed but are given the chance to cooperate in it. On one hand, all has been reclaimed by Christ's incarnation with His baptism, death and resurrection. This has happened as far as Eternity is concerned, but we who live in time must be given it in small doses, lest seeing our true brokenness we might utterly despair of healing. This, at least, is the wisdom of those who have walked this path before ever I set my smallest toe upon it, and it is wisdom that I trust because it has borne fruit in my life! So, glory to God for all things, and may He bless the steps of His little ones who have such a long journey still to make!

Deo Gratias!