Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church

There is a service, striking in its symbolism, that members of the Orthodox Church perform at the start or conclusion of any major task or period; on the first day of the month, for example, or at the blessing of a foundation stone, and equally at the commencement or ending of the academic year. It is the ceremony known as the Great Blessing of the Waters. Water is placed in a large bowl, prayers are said over it, the grace and power of the Holy Spirit is called down upon it, and finally the cross is plunged into the water.

This service of blessing is performed above all on January 6, the Feast of Theophany or Epiphany. On this day the Orthodox Church is commemorating, not the three wise men whose coming has already been remembered on December 25 but the Baptism of Christ in the Jordon. The blessing is often held in the open air, by a river or spring or on the seashore. I can vividly recall the occasions when I have taken part in the Epiphany Blessing of the Waters on the island of Patmos. The abbot of the Monastery of St. John the Theologian the monastery to which I myself belong comes down with the monks and parish clergy to the harbor and the service is performed at the quayside, with the fishing boats, some thirty or forty of them, drawn up in a great semicircle. At the culminating moment, when the abbot throws a wooden cross into the water, all the surrounding boats sound their sirens simultaneously, and the young men and boys dive from the boats, racing each other to see who will be the first to retrieve the cross and return it to the abbot.

In an unexpected way this ceremony of the Great Blessing of the Waters helps us to understand the purpose of the true meaning of Christian worship. Christ s Baptism is seen in the Orthodox tradition as possessing a cosmic significance, as embracing the whole created order. His Baptism is in a sense the reverse of our own. In our case, Baptism is a purification from sin. But Christ is sinless; why, then, should He be baptized? Such precisely is the query posed by St. John the Baptist: "I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me? " (Mt. 3:14). The Orthodox answer to this question can best be put in simple picture language. We are dirty; at Baptism we go down into clean water and we come out cleansed. At our Baptism, then, we are sanctified by the waters. But Christ is clean; at His Baptism He goes down into the dirty water and Himself cleanses the waters, making them pure. As we affirm in the liturgical texts for the feast of Epiphany, "Today the Master has come to sanctify the nature of the waters". At His Baptism it is not the waters that sanctify Christ, but Christ who imparts holiness to the waters, and so by extension to the entire material creation.

If we speak of the waters as "dirty", by this we mean that the world around us, while filled with meaning and beauty, is yet a fallen world, broken and shattered, marred by suffering and sinfulness. Into this fallen world God Himself enters, accepting a total solidarity with it, assuming into Himself the entirety of our human nature, body, soul and spirit. Through this act of assumption at His Incarnation and through all that follows after it through His Baptism in the streams of Jordan, His Transfiguration, Crucifixion and Resurrection Christ cleanses and heals the marred and fallen world, effecting the renewal not of humankind alone but of the whole creation.

What we are doing then, at each celebration of epiphany, at every Blessing of the Waters, is to reaffirm our sense of wonder before the essential goodness and beauty of the world, as originally created by God and as now recreated in Christ. Nothing is intrinsically ugly or despicable; it is solely our distorted vision that makes it seem so. Through the power of God incarnate shown in His Baptism in the Jordan, all persons and all things can be made holy, can be transfigured and rendered Spirit-bearing. All things are capable of acting as sacraments of God s presence. As we express it in one of our epiphany hymns:

At Thine appearing in the body,
The earth was sanctified,
The water blessed,
The heaven illuminated,
And humankind delivered From the bitter tyranny of the enemy

Water, earth, sky, the human body and the whole human person with its emotions and affections through Christ s Incarnation and Baptism these are reborn, transformed, hallowed. The Great Blessing of the Waters is in this way a proclamation that the universe around us is not a chaos but a cosmos. There is glory in everything; this is a world full of wonder!

Bishop Kalistos Ware,
The Inner Kingdom