Fr. Timothy Barkley
St. James Orthodox Church
(1/1) In the West, January 6 is celebrated as the Feast of Epiphany, commemorating the homage that the Persian sages (the "three wise men") paid the Son of God. Guided by an angel, as the Church has always taught, these seekers of truth worshipped the Truth who was also the Way and the Life, and offered to him gifts worthy of a king. The Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed himself, through his angelic messenger, to those who diligently sought him out, whether from among his ancestral people, the Jews, or any of those who bore his image.
In the East, January 6 is celebrated as the Feast of Theophany, the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan. Jesus lived quietly in his home in Galilee until he reached his thirtieth year. Then, impelled by his divine will submitted to the will of his Father, to initiate his mission to the world he had created, he walked to the Jordan and asked his cousin John for baptism.
John demurred: "I need to be baptized by you, and are you coming to me?" Jesus replied, "Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness." And as Jesus was coming up out of the water, the Spirit in the form of a dove alighted on him, and the voice of the Father proclaimed from heaven, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."
John, who had known Jesus from his mother Elizabeth’s womb, having recognized Jesus "in the Spirit" when he drew near in the womb of Mary, now identified him from the descent of the Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! … he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘Upon whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, this is he wo baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and testify that this is the Son of God."
Upon the descent of the Spirit in the form of a dove and the voice of the Father from heaven, the long-awaited revelation of the trinitarian nature of God was made manifest. The Jews had long pondered the number of persons who comprised the monotheistic godhead. Some said two (after all, Genesis 1:26 reads, "let us make man in our image" and Genesis 19:24 reads, "the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of heaven"), some hinted at maybe even three (in Isaiah 6:3, the Seraphim chant "Holy, Holy, Holy"), but the revelation of New Covenant between God and the chosen people identified three: the Son who was baptized, the Father who spoke, and the Spirit who alighted.
In Jesus’s baptism, the earth was sanctified; by the descent into the water of the one who needed no purification, indeed, of the One who was the source of all purity and holiness, the waters were purified and thereby the very stuff of the earth was made a source of sanctification. Matter can be holy and a source of holiness because the Holy God entered into it, both by his incarnation and his baptism, and thus transformed it. Matter is no longer merely matter; it is the stuff of God’s self-revelation. This is the source of the Christian understanding of "holy water" and other sanctified things: the matter of which they are made was sanctified by God in Jesus.
This is also the underpinning of Christian ecological and environmental action: God, who created and loves the earth and everything in and on it, made it holy. We must respect, even revere, the earth and all it contains, as sons of the God who sanctified it.
After Jesus sanctified the creation and was definitively revealed as the Son of God, a member of the trinitarian Godhead, he addressed the author of the dementedness of the creation, caused by sin. He was "led by the Spirit into the wilderness" to confront the devil. Having fasted forty days and forty nights, he was tempted first with what was apparently the simplest of things: "If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread."
Jesus, who had created the world ex nihilo and was soon to feed five thousand families with five loaves of ordinary bread, did not lack the power. But the devil wasn’t appealing to his hunger; he was trying use the hunger of the fasting-weakened human nature of Jesus to allure Jesus into exercising that power at his own whim, not in concord with the other members of the Trinity. Jesus refuted the devil and refused to do anything that he did not see his Father doing. By refusing to sate his legitimate, physical, human hunger outside the will of God, He subjected – and made is possible for us by grace to subject – even the most elemental parts of our human nature to the divine nature that we receive by grace at our baptism.
Jesus was likewise tempted with prestige and with power, and each time refused to pander to the passions – those disordered elements of our being – and allow his human nature to act outside the divine will. We likewise, by grace, by receiving the divine life at our baptism when we are resurrected with Jesus, are able to subject our human nature to the divine nature given us by God, and can thereby live as "little Christs" (which is what "Christian" means).
Returning from the wilderness temptation, Jesus proclaimed, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." His declaration was in a recognized genre of his day: a herald would ride into a town, and declare that a new king had come, by treaty or conquest; and then would explicate the laws of the new kingdom and the blessings that would be realized by following those laws … and the consequences of resistance or rebellion.
Jesus proclaimed that there was a new king – the True God – and his kingdom was imminent. The new laws were proclaimed: "blessed are the poor in spirit … love one another … forgive … do not judge." But this king isn’t seeking earthly subjects; he offered to adopt those who accepted his call, to make them members of the family, inheritors with Jesus. And more: when we enter into the adoption of the New Covenant in a ceremony called "baptism," we don’t just get a new name, we receive an infusion of new life. This new life isn’t just to make us better people. It’s to enable us to be perfect, as he is perfect, if we choose to be perfect.
The new life isn’t foisted on us; it’s for us to choose or refuse. But the choice has unending consequences. If we choose to allow the new life of our adopted family to grow in us by continually participating in God’s effulgence of life, the outpouring of the energies and life of the Trinity, we will continue to participate in the Trinitarian life beyond this life, ever growing in perfection, satiety and desire. If we refuse to allow the divine life to enter our own life, or if we stifle the life we have received at our baptism, if we turn from God to our own designs and desires, then beyond this life we will continually suffer the ever-growing deadness and despair of those who have despised the life, goodness and love offered by the God who is love, gnawing ourselves in futility and emptiness, unable to die but unable to live.
The choice is ours. God has come to us and continually comes to us and pours out his energy toward all. How we respond is entirely up to us. Choose you this day …
Read other homilies by Father Barkley
About St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown
The Holy Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ and described throughout the New Testament. All other Christian Churches and sects can be traced back historically to it. The word Orthodox literally means "straight teaching" or "straight worship," being derived from two Greek words: orthos, "straight," and doxa, "teaching" or "worship."
As the encroachments of false teaching and division multiplied in early Christian times, threatening to obscure the identity and purity of the Church, the term "Orthodox" quite logically came to be applied to it. The Orthodox Church carefully guards the truth against all error and schism, both to protect its flock and to glorify Christ, whose Body the Church is.
St. James the Apostle Orthodox Church of Taneytown is a congregation of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. We are the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Christian Church whose roots trace directly back to first century Antioch, the city in which the disciples of Jesus Christ were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). The
Orthodox Church is the oldest and second largest Christian group in the world. We are called by God our creator to worship and follow Him, and to proclaim to the world His message of love, peace, and salvation.
God loves all mankind and desires that all human beings should believe in Him, know Him, abide in Him, and receive eternal life from Him. To accomplish this, God Himself came into the world as a man, Jesus Christ, becoming man that we might become like God.
The Antiochian Archdiocese, under the leadership of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, sees itself on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian Faith. We join our brothers and sisters in the various Orthodox Christian jurisdictions — Greek, Orthodox Church in America, Romanian, Ukrainian, and more — in this endeavor. In less than 20
years the Archdiocese has doubled in size to well over 200 churches and missions throughout the United States and Canada.
