1 Corinthians 9.19 – 27

Mark 1.1 – 8

Theophany is second in importance only to Pascha. It’s not at all hard to see why.

Christ coming down from heaven to take up His abode in the sacred womb of the Holy Virgin to come forth from Her as Her first-born Son, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger on Christmas Day, corresponds to Great and Holy Friday when His body is taken down from the Cross and wrapped in fine linen and placed in a New Tomb.

Christ rising from the Jordan at Theophany, after defeating the devil in the wilderness, and the heavens opening to reveal the Holy Trinity, and Christ as the Only-Begotten God, He Who Is in the bosom of the Father (Jn 1.18, Ex 3.14), who alone makes the Father known to those whom He wills to reveal Him (Mt 11.27), corresponds to His Resurrection from the dead on Holy Pascha Night after destroying by His death the devil who held us in the power of death – and, in His Resurrection, making the Father known only to those who believe in Him as the Son of God.

In the waters of Theophany, Christ descends into the waters of creation. In the curse of the ancestral sin, they had become the waters of death, filled with the toxin of the serpent’s soul-destroying venom. In the dread and fearsome mystery of Christ’s Holy Pascha, the devil swallows the LORD whole as the whale swallowed Jonah. Christ God descends with His human soul into hell and into the heart of the devil’s kingdom; and hell discovers to its dismay that it has swallowed God; it has received the True Light its darkness cannot put out; it has swallowed into its belly the uncreated Fire of the only-begotten God, He Who Is the Resurrection and the Life, and hell bursts like an old wine skin receiving New Wine. Disobedience and pride receive perfect obedience and extreme humility, and death is exploded from within. Christ the God-Man shatters hell’s gates of brass. He cuts in sunder death’s bars of iron. (Isa 45.2) He delivers those that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, fettered in poverty and iron. He breaks their bonds asunder, and saves them out of their distresses. He heals them, and delivers them from their destruction; He makes the darkness light before them. The crooked things He makes straight. He makes a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters. He makes a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the dry land. He brings them out of darkness and out of the shadow of death. He brings the blind by a way that they knew not, He leads them on paths they have not known. (Ps 106/107.8-21, Isa 42.13-15; 43.16, 19) Rising from the dead, He destroys death by His death, raising Adam with Himself. He comes forth from the Tomb as a Bridegroom in procession, as the First-born of the dead, having found and gathered to Himself all the lost sheep, every single one of them (whom the philosophers have never found because they do not see them; they even dismiss them, every single one of them, as nothing worth knowing)!

It's the Psalmist who proclaims to us that the Gospel of Jesus Christ uncovers the foundations of the earth in the Great Feasts of His ineffable Incarnation: the Feasts of Christmas and Theophany and Holy Pascha:

‘The pangs of death surrounded me; the waters of ungodliness flooded me with fear. The sorrows of Sheol surrounded me. The snares of death confronted me. In my distress, I called upon the LORD my God. He heard my voice. Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of the hills quaked and were shaken [the moment the LORD died on the Cross]. He bowed the heavens and came down [Christmas] with darkness under His feet [the head of the serpent, the darkness of Sheol]. He made darkness His secret place [the womb of the Virgin, the Tomb, the impenetrable depths of divine Wisdom]. The LORD thundered from heaven, the Most High uttered His voice [It is finished!]. He sent out His arrows and scattered the foe. Lightnings in abundance [Lk 23.54], and He vanquished them. Then the bottom of the sea was seen, the foundations of the world were uncovered.’ [Ps 17/18.4-15.]

 What are these foundations of the world uncovered at the LORD’s Theophany and His Holy Pascha? Dear faithful, they are the ‘dark night’ of the Holy Trinity – i.e., the unfathomable and impenetrable depths of God! The worship of the Trinity revealed in the Savior’s baptism in the Jordan [Himself the Foundation of the world, for He is the ‘Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev 13.8)] reveals that the foundation of the world is ‘personal;’ we did not come out of ‘that which is,’ as the philosophers teach; we in the ‘primary substance’ of our heart (Jer 17.9 LXX) are not a ‘what;’ we are not so many particles of ‘The One Essence’ that everything is, like drops of water drawn from the ocean, destined to dissolve back into the ocean. The foundation of the world is the Person, the Who, of the Father, Who is made known only by the only-begotten God, He Who is in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ, by sending down upon us His Holy Spirit Who [not That] proceeds from the Father. The Person, the ‘Who’ of the Father, not some impersonal essence, is the ‘Hypostasis’ Who ‘stands underneath’ reality as its foundation. He creates the world through His Son, begotten before all ages, He Who Is not some impersonal instrument of the Father’s creative activity, but Who is Himself the Lamb of God Who was slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13.8), whose Holy Spirit – the uncreated Light  Who (not that) is the Life of men (Jn 1.5) – broods over the creation like a mother hen, and gives birth to those who receive Him (Jn 1.13) as children of God, each one a ’who’ born from above, each one a ‘who’ whose primary substance is having been created in the Image of God, Jesus Christ, i.e., whose primary substance is having been created in the Personal Communion of the Holy Trinity. Each of us, therefore, because our primary substance is ‘who’ we are and not an impersonal particle of the One Essence, each one of us is known by God the Holy Trinity even before we were fashioned in our mother’s womb (Ps 139).

That is, the foundation of the world that is uncovered, that is revealed, in the LORD Jesus Christ’s baptism and in His Holy Pascha is that each one of us is known by God as a ‘child of God,’ a ‘who,’ a ‘person,’ of eternal value, each with our own ‘name’ known by God from eternity.

That means that each one of you is the reason the LORD descended into the womb of the Holy Virgin and became through Her the Son of Man, clothed in our flesh and blood as our ‘brother,’ our ‘kinsman.’ Each one of you is the reason He descended into the waters of the Jordan, commanding the Baptist to baptize Him. Each one of you is the reason that, as Man, He was obedient to the Father even to the point of death on the Cross! It was so He could descend into the darkness of hell to find you – each one of you who is a lost sheep that no worldly knowledge, whether religious or philosophical or scientific, has ever found! – to take each of you upon His shoulders and raise each one of you from out of the darkness and into the Light with Himself, to bring each one of you back by a way you did not know: it is the path that leads to ’who’ you are, the path that the world does not know (because the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the world knows only ‘what’ you are, and so it loses each one of you because it has no interest in any of you and no desire to find any of you. It is the path He made known to Moses and the sons of Israel (Ps 102/103.7). It is the path that He Himself is, the Path that He illumines with the uncreated Light of His eternal love for mankind, love that is personal because it is the love of God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, love that alone knows who you are because it is the Love of the Icon of God in whom you were created. It is the better and changeless Path that ascends to God, found in the depths of the Jordan and now, even in the depths of hell! It is the heavenly path that is the Grace of Our LORD Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. And it is in this communion of love, which is the manifestation of the Holy Trinity and in which we come truly to know God – and ourselves – that we find, each one of us, the foundation, the ‘substance’ of our being, the ‘who’ who we are.

To follow the LORD Jesus Christ is to follow Him on the Path of repentance into the depths of our soul and into our heart, into who we are where we are deep, beyond all things! It is the revelation of each one of us as a loving-beloved, a beloved-lover, brought into being out of the superabundance of the divine love of the Holy Trinity because He desired, He even longed to share with each one of us the super-abundant riches of His love for each one of us.

Illumined by this divine Light of Theophany, we see what it means to follow the LORD in repentance: it means to turn away from everything that destroys our capacity for personal communion, for personal, loving intimacy – everything that loses who we are to nothing more than what we are: everything that loses the who of theology to the what of philosophy and science! To crucify our flesh with its desires is to put to death everything in us that destroys our capacity to receive the love of God and to become who we truly are – partakers of His divine nature, the uncreated nature of the Holy Trinity, a nature of personal communion in loving intimacy.

To rise with Christ from the font of our baptism as from the Jordan and to follow Him is to follow Him to His Resurrection – through the wilderness of our soul and into the tomb of our heart, for the purpose of triumphing over the devil in the power of Our Savior’s Cross; and to be united to Him in the spiritual marriage of the Church’s Holy Baptism so that we become one Spirit with Him who has become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bones; and in our union with Him, to be filled with the life-giving Seed of His Holy Spirit, the Seed of His Love for mankind, and to be raised from death to Life – not the biological life of the flesh, but the eternal, uncreated, divine life of His Holy Spirit.

To celebrate the Feast of Theophany, then, is step onto this Path of the inner Exodus of the Gospel to follow Our Savior into Great Lent, to the tomb of Lazarus, into His Tomb on Golgotha and into the Garden of His Resurrection in the Joy of His Holy Pascha! Amen!